* 1912 – The Piltdown Man, later discovered to be a hoax, is announced by Charles Dawson.

* 1953 – The British Natural History Museum announces that the " Piltdown Man " skull, initially believed to be one of the most important fossilized hominid skulls ever found, is a hoax.

* December 18 – Piltdown Man, thought to be the fossilized skull of a hitherto unknown form of early human, presented to the Geological Society of London.

** Authorities at the British Natural History Museum announce that the skull of the Piltdown Man, one of the most famous fossil skulls in the world, is a hoax.

* Anthropologists were taken in by the " Piltdown Man " discovery that was widely believed from 1913 to 1953.

This phrase, intended to evoke the ' primitive throwback ' qualities of anthropological discoveries such as Piltdown Man and Swanscombe Man, was part of a British political tradition of referring to political trends by suffixing ' man '.

The Piltdown Man was a hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human.

Piltdown Man skull The skull unearthed in 1908 was the only find discovered in situ, with most of the other pieces found in the gravel pits ' spoil heaps.

The Sheffield Park finds were taken as proof of the authenticity of the Piltdown Man ; it may have been chance that brought an ape's jaw and a human skull together, but the odds of it happening twice were slim.

On 23 July 1938, at Barkham Manor, Piltdown, Sir Arthur Keith unveiled a memorial to mark the site where Piltdown Man was discovered by Charles Dawson.

In November 1953, Time published evidence gathered variously by Kenneth Page Oakley, Sir Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark and Joseph Weiner proving that the Piltdown Man was a forgery and demonstrating that the fossil was a composite of three distinct species.

However, over time the Piltdown man lost its validity, as other discoveries such as Taung Child and Peking Man were found.

Darrow died during 1938, fifteen years before Piltdown Man was exposed as a fraud.

* Roberts, Noel Keith ( 2000 ), From Piltdown Man to Point Omega: the evolutionary theory of Teilhard de Chardin ( New York: Peter Lang )

* " Piltdown Man: Case Closed " at Bournemouth University

* Piltdown Man documentary Discovery Channel

* Piltdown Man at the Natural History Museum, London

* The Unmasking of Piltdown Man BBC

* The Boldest Hoax ( about Piltdown Man case ) PBS NOVA

* Sarah Lyell, " Piltdown Man Hoaxer: Missing Link is Found ", The New York Times, 25 May 1996.

* An annotated bibliography of the Piltdown Man forgery, 1953 – 2005 by Tom Turrittin.

simple: Piltdown Man

Among these were the teeth of a reptile / mammal hybrid, Plagiaulax dawsoni, " found " in 1891 ( and whose teeth had been filed down in the same way that the teeth of Piltdown man would be some 20 years later ), the so-called " shadow figures " on the walls of Hastings Castle, a unique hafted stone axe, the Bexhill boat ( a hybrid seafaring vessel ), the Pevensey bricks ( allegedly the latest datable " finds " from Roman Britain ), the contents of the Lavant Caves ( a fraudulent " flint mine "), the Beauport Park " Roman " statuette ( a hybrid iron object ), the Bulverhythe Hammer ( shaped with an iron knife in the same way as the Piltdown elephant bone implement would later be ), a fraudulent " Chinese " bronze vase, the Brighton " Toad in the Hole " ( a toad entombed within a flint nodule ), the English Channel sea serpent, the Uckfield Horseshoe ( another hybrid iron object ) and the Lewes Prick Spur.

The prime minister, Harold Wilson, thought the document a vote-loser and dubbed it the product of Selsdon Man-after the supposedly prehistoric Piltdown Man-in order to portray it as reactionary.

These fragments consisted of parts of a skull and jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England.

The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous palaeontological hoax ever to have been perpetrated.

At a meeting of the Geological Society of London on 18 December 1912, Charles Dawson claimed that a workman at the Piltdown gravel pit had given him a fragment of the skull four years earlier.

From the British Museum's reconstruction of the skull, Woodward proposed that Piltdown man represented an evolutionary missing link between apes and humans, since the combination of a human-like cranium with an ape-like jaw tended to support the notion then prevailing in England that human evolution began with the brain.

Almost from the outset, Woodward's reconstruction of the Piltdown fragments was strongly challenged.

The canine in the Piltdown jaw was impossible as it prevented side to side movement.

In 1915, Dawson claimed to have found three fragments of a second skull ( Piltdown II ) at a new site about two miles away from the original finds.

In 1921, Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum of Natural History, examined the Piltdown and Sheffield Park finds and declared that the jaw and skull belonged together " without question " and that the Sheffield Park fragments " were exactly those which we should have selected to confirm the comparison with the original type.

" In the decades prior to its exposure as a forgery in 1953, scientists increasingly regarded Piltdown as an enigmatic aberration inconsistent with the path of hominid evolution as demonstrated by fossils found elsewhere.

The Piltdown man hoax succeeded so well because, at the time of its discovery, the scientific establishment believed that the large modern brain preceded the modern omnivorous diet, and the forgery provided exactly that evidence.

The identity of the Piltdown forger remains unknown, but suspects have included Dawson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur Keith, Martin A. C. Hinton, Horace de Vere Cole and Arthur Conan Doyle.

To commemorate the seventieth anniversary of her sinking, the starboard anchor of Mona's Queen, an Isle of Man Steam Packet Company vessel lost off Dunkirk during Operation Dynamo on which many seamen from the Port St Mary area served, was raised on 29 May 2010 and subsequently returned to the Isle of Man to form the centrepiece of a permanent memorial.

On 29 May 2012, a memorial featuring the restored anchor from Mona's Queen, to commemorate the losses 72 years earlier on Mona's Queen, King Orry and Fenella was opened in a ceremony at Kallow Point in Port St Mary attended by representatives of local and national government, the Lieutenant Governor, the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company and the French Navy.

A memorial to him was erected in Westminster Abbey, depicting the figure of a kneeling slave with the motto ‘ Am I not a Man and a Brother?

With regard to the memorial service held on board the current HMS DASHER in October 2004, it should be stressed that, despite media emphasis on a possible ' Man Who Never Was ' connection, this was a perfectly proper memorial for those lost in the previous ship of that name.

* City Council unveil Xylophone Man memorial

During actor Heath Ledger's Hollywood memorial service, " Old Man " was chosen to be played with a slideshow of pictures from Ledger's life.

He appears at the memorial for the deceased Giant Man.

* Broken Hill Man memorial at Kabwe municipal offices