EndWelfareToday happens to be correct and you are wrong. Osborn misidentified the tooth as belonging to a primate. Based on this one tooth, Elliot Smith (the Piltdown guy) had an illustration of two knuckle-dragging Nebraska Men published in The Illustrated News of London in 1922 and claimed Nebraska Man was an ancestor of humans. That was a total fraud and hoax.
How am I wrong when I pointed out the Illustrated News piece myself, way up thread, in #55?
That's why I said that Hesperopithecus was never presented as human, or a presumptive human ancestor, "by the scientists working on it," i.e. the principle investigators at the American Museum, by any scientist publishing on it or reponding in professional venues.
That statement is completely correct. Smith, although (I believe) he saw a cast, cannot reasonably said to have been "working on" the fossil. And he weighed in via a popular venue. Osborn, speaking for the American Museum gave the appropriate response, as I quoted in #55, and here again:
"such a drawing or 'reconstruction' would doubtless be only a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate."
Nevertheless Smith's "reconstruction" was not a "fraud" or a "hoax". It was indeed foolish and gratuitous and worthless. But none of those things, or even all in combination, are fraudulent. To perpetrate a fraud or hoax you must be engaging in knowing deception, not just foolishness.
If you'll click the "reply to" links and go back through the thread, you'll find that his/her claim was that "Nebraska Man" was a "hoax" (as opposed to, say, an honest mistake in interpretation).
EndWelfareToday has explicitly refused to elaborate on this assertion: to explain how it was a "hoax" or what exactly is supposed to be fraudulent. Of course he/she won't do so because there's no "there" there. It clearly wasn't a "hoax". The fossil was undoubtedly genuine, and so was the (mistaken, but later self-corrected) belief of the principle advocates at the American Museum that they'd stumbled on the fossil tooth of an American ape. Osborn and King never misrepresented anything about the fossil, whether regarding the circumstances of its discovery or its physical characteristics and condition.