All right, Ella, where are we going today?

Today we are going to the south of England, about an hour south of London, to a private

estate in a tiny rural area called Piltdown.

So on this estate, there is probably, we'll get back to that, a stone monument.

Picture a quiet rural England.

There's farmland.

There are these tree-lined winding roads and old red brick houses.

Very picturesque.

And not much going on.

But back in 1912, Piltdown was catapulted to international fame

because of something that was found in a local

gravel pit. It was a skull, and the skull was neither man nor ape, but something in between.

And of course, I should just like a caveat, people are technically apes, but you know what I mean, right? You're with me? Yeah, I got it. I got it. Neither man nor ape, how so? So most of it, like the cranium, the part that holds the brain, the eyes, that part is exactly like a modern human. But the jaw is much more like a chimp or some other ape. Huh. This finding is announced in 1912 and very quickly became known as the Piltdown Man.

Everyone is talking about this thing.

One of the things that some people think it means is that humans had evolved not in Africa,

like Darwin had proposed, but in England.

So the earliest humans. Yeah, yeah, you're right to be

suspicious. So reporters started, you know, quaintly calling this Piltdown man the earliest Englishman,

the oldest British gent. But, you know, setting aside everything that we know today,

this was very exciting at the time, very exciting for Little Piltdown, which was now a candidate for the birthplace of humanity.

The local pub, of course, renamed itself the Piltdown Man.

Okay, that's cute. I would go there. I would grab a pint at the Piltdown Man.

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