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Piltdown Man
A highly topical subject of public and scientific interest in the 1930's was the "missing link" concept, the fossil evidence that would indisputably tie human evolution to that of our "cousins," the ape family.
In Bain et al., "The Science Content of The Urantia Book" (1991), we drew attention to the fact that in their discussion of our evolution, the Urantia Papers mention Java man, Peking man, Heidelberg man, Cromagnon man, and Neanderthal man but fail to mention the one that was the most topical of them all in the mid 1930's--the Piltdown man. Of him, the famed Louis Leakey wrote in his 1934 book, Adam's Ancestors, "the Piltdown skull is probably very much more nearly related to Homo sapiens than to any other known type. We also quoted from Martin J. Reader's 1981 book, Missing Links that Piltdown man was not debunked as a fake until the 1950's period.
Our references were not enough to prevent Martin Gardner from indicating that the omission of a reference to Piltdown man in The Urantia Papers is of no consequence because everyone knew the Piltdown thing was a fake.
In A Scientific Forgery (1990), which was not available to us for our paper, Frank Spencer elaborated on earlier work by the Australian historian Ian Langham, voicing his opinion that the Piltdown forgery "had been tailored to withstand scientific scrutiny and thereby promote a particular interpretation of the human fossil record." It remained controversial and hotly disputed until fluorine dating and other tests had shown in 1953 and 1954, that the skull was a skillfully disguised fragment of a modern human cranium about 50,000 years of age. Which makes the omission of a reference to it in the Urantia Papers somewhat remarkable after all--and Gardner once again wrong on all counts.
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