Piltdown Man was claimed to be at least 500,000 years old. But its modern-looking braincase and ape-like jaws were at odds with subsequent finds of real hominid fossils in Africa and Asia.

These showed that human evolution had progressed along a different route with cranium size following behind teeth and jaw development. As the years went by, E. dawsoni was pushed to the margins in the story of where humans came from � it was an anomaly.

Even so, for many years, true fossils were received with more scepticism simply because they did not fit with Piltdown.