SKULL WARS THE MISSING LINK

The Piltdown Man skull was a fake! This fossil forgery blocked understanding of human evolution for half a century; Skull Wars traces the story of two scientific underdogs and their long-unrecognized discovery of Australopithicus skulls in South Africa. When young Raymond Dart is sent to teach at a fledgling university in South Africa, he is discouraged--after all, British anthropology had never made any important discoveries into human evolution in Africa.

In 1924, Dart is cheered by the discovery of a child's skull from the edge of the Kalahari (the Taung skull), believing he has found the "missing link" in the evolution of apes to humans. It took the rest of paleoanthropology until 1946 to share Dart's belief.

The small-brained Taung skull set off one of the great arguments of human evolution--challenging the popular belief that humans descended from large-brained predecessors such as Peking Man and the Piltdown Man forgery. Dart and ally Dr. Robert Broom had discovered the smaller-brained Australopithicus, an earlier branch of the human evolutionary tree than the larger-brained Neanderthals like Peking Man.

Rare interview footage with Dart, archival photographs, dramatic reenactments, and excerpts from scientific and popular journals and newspapers make this a thrilling chronological play-by-play of the struggle of two scientific underdogs who knew they had stumbled onto something remarkable, and their long road toward recognition by the paleoanthropology community. --Tara Chace

In the early 1920's, Professor Raymond Dart uncovers a tiny skull in a South African quarry that ignites one of the greatest controversies of 20th Century science. Believing he has found the Missing Link in the evolution from ape to man, Dart's theory directly challenges the prevailing wisdom of British Anthropology and Dart is soon pitted against his former mentor in a bitter battle over whose theory of evolution is correct.

From struggle and heartbreak to triumph and the discovery of an astonishing scientific fraud, Skull Wars chronicles an epic tale from the Golden Age of Exploration--a tale that changed the very story of mankind.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417113/