Michelle Price, age 13, of Vancouver, Wash., for her question:

WHO WAS THE PILTDOWN MAN?

Piltdown man was a great hoax in the study of prehistoric man.

About 1911, parts of a skull and a jawbone were found in a gravel pit at Piltdown in Sussex, England. Some scientists said that the bones came from a man who lived 250,000 years ago. Others disagreed.

Soon the Piltdown man became famous as a so called missing link, or a connection between modern man and the ape.

After years of controversy, scientists used newly developed chemcial tests on the bones. They learned that the jaw came from a modern ape and that the human skull was much younger than the gravel in which it had been found.

In 1955, radiocarbon tests dated the skull at A.D. 1230. Apparently a prankster had buried an orangutan's jaw and a skull from a medieval cemetery. The prankster had stained the jaw to make it look old and had filed the teeth to make them look human.