Sherborne bone

The Sherborne bone is a fragment of animal rib with a horse's head engraved on it, once dated to the Palaeolithic period, but now generally viewed as a modern forgery. The bone was found in 1911 in the rubble of a quarry near Sherborne in Dorset, by two schoolboys from the nearby Sherborne School. They presented it to their science master, Eliot Steel, who in turn sent it to Arthur Smith Woodward at the Natural History Museum, London. After Woodward published the discovery in 1914, its authenticity was the subject of dispute until radiocarbon dating proved that it could not be a genuine piece of Paleolithic art.

In 1994, radiocarbon dating showed that the bone was only about 700 years old. The engraving on it seems to have been inspired by the Robin Hood Cave Horse, a Paleolithic engraving from Derbyshire first published in 1877, and thus was presumably made at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century.

Discovery

In October 1911, Philip Grove and Arnaldo Cortesi, two boys at Sherborne School, presented a bone to their science master, Eliot Steel. Steel said that Cortesi had found it in a quarry near the school, where he had advised the boys that they could find fossils. Ross Jefferson, who had been a student at the Sherborne School a year ahead of Grove and Cortesi, later reported that Cortesi had been about to throw the bone into a fire when he had stopped him and advised him to show it to Steel.

Steel sent the bone to Arthur Smith Woodward at the Natural History Museum, who published it as "an apparent Palaeolithic engraving" of an ancient wild horse (equus przewalski), and observed that it was very similar to the Robin Hood Cave Horse.