Re: Book on Piltdown Hoax?

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In article <4t3ea7$si9@newnews.iafrica.com>,
Ros Brodie <tcb@iafrica.com> wrote:
>Hi all
>
>My sister is looking for a good, *recent* book on the Piltdown Hoax. Can
>anyone help??

Charles Blinderman, _The Piltdown Inquest_, Prometheus 1986.
Frank Spencer, _Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery_, Oxford 1990.

The two books are complementary and I recommend both to anyone
interested in the case. Blinderman is easier to read, Spencer is
more scholarly and is loaded with references to primary literature.
Blinderman concentrates on the "whodunnit" aspect; he spends more
than half of the book analyzing various hypotheses about the
identity of the forger. Spencer is more concerned with telling
the full story of the discovery, the controversy, and the exposure,
although he does devote two chapters to "whodunnit" speculations.

It should be pointed out that there was a major breakthrough in
the search for the identity of the forger(s) a couple of months
ago. It now appears almost certain that Martin Hinton was at least
involved, and may well have been the sole culprit. (See _Nature_
May 26 1996.) I expect we'll see another book within a year.

I also recommend Richard Harter's web page on Piltdown Man,
at http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/piltdown.html

>Please please send replies direct to my email address tcb@iafrica.com

(Done, but posted also.)

------
Robert

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