Piltdown man: Meaning and Definition of

Pilt'down man"

Pronunciation: (pilt'doun"), [key]
  1. a hypothetical early modern human, assigned to the genus Eoanthropus, whose existence was inferred from skull fragments that were allegedly found at Piltdown, England, in 1912 but were exposed as fraudulent through chemical analysis in 1953.
Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1997, by Random House, Inc., on Infoplease.