 The Piltdown Man fraud significantly affected early research on human evolution.Notably, it led scientists down a blind alley in the belief that the human brain expanded in size before the jaw adapted to new types of food.Discoveries of Australopithecine fossils such as the Taung child found by Raymond Dart during the 1920s in South Africa were ignored due to the support for Piltdown Man as "the missing link," and the reconstruction of human evolution was confused for decades.