On November 20, 1953, they reported their findings in the bulletin of the Natural History Museum. The scientists of 40 years before, they explained, had been victims of "a most elaborate and carefully prepared hoax. The faking of the mandible [jawbone]," they wrote, "is so extraordinarily skillful and the perpetration of the hoax appears to have been so entirely unscrupulous and inexplicable as to find no parallel in the history of paleontological discovery."
The newspaper headlines the following day shared the story with the world. At that time, the skullcap was still believed to be about 50,000 years old. In 1959, however, the recently discovered carbon-14 dating technique was used to show that it was between 520 and 720 years old, the jawbone slightly younger! While different individuals have been accused of being the perpetrator of the hoax, there is no agreement upon who it might have been.