History Book: Too good to be true

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JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Today is Monday, November 17th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next, the WORLD History Book. Today, how two discoveries rocked the scientific community.

Here’s WORLD’s Emma Eicher.

EMMA EICHER: In 1908, archaeologist Charles Dawson is walking down a gravel road on his farm when he sees some brown shards sticking out of the pebbles. They look like fragments of a fossilized coconut and it takes Dawson four years to find and assemble what looks like an ancient human skull.

JOSEPH WEINER: It was an ape man of a unique kind, with a rather thick boned skull and a rather ape-like jaw.

This audio is from a 1980 lecture about the discovery at the Geological Society of London. Joseph Weiner was a professor of human biology at Oxford University.

WEINER: Charles Dawson wrote to his old friend at the British Museum to say that he had come across a remarkable new fossil.

In the early 20th century evolutionary theory is gaining a foothold in Europe and the United States. And there’s a hunger in the scientific community to find evidence to support it.

WEINER: At that time, we have various specimens of Neanderthal man were known. The feeling was that early man had not yet been discovered. The real missing link had not yet appeared.

Dawson is sure that his discovery is the missing link, proving that humans evolved from apes. So in the winter of 1912, he reveals it to the world in a presentation at the Geological Society of London.

But scientists are skeptical.

WEINER: There was a great argument when all this was shown, because some of the people there, some of the anatomists, found it difficult to believe—at that time—that the jaw, which looked rather ape-like, really belonged to the bits of the skull which looked much more modern, much more human.

Still, the appetite for evidence of evolution wins out. The ape-slash-human skull becomes known as the Piltdown Man, named for where he was dug up.

In 1915, Dawson manages to find another Piltdown jawbone in the same gravel area. He dies a year later, but interest in his findings continue. Other archaeologists carry out excavations in the same place. But they don’t find any other fossils. And as time goes on, researchers are unsuccessful in verifying the Piltdown Man’s authenticity.

In the 1950s, Professor Weiner and a few colleagues finally decide to dig into the mystery. With a little more investigation, the towering success of the Piltdown Man crumbles to the ground.

WEINER: So I began to think, well, there is something rather odd about this whole business …

Because it’s not real. It’s all a very carefully crafted hoax.

WEINER: I was driven to the conclusion that the only way they could have come together was if somebody deliberately put the things together.

Weiner discovers that the jawbone of the Piltdown Man is just an orangutan mandible. The teeth belong to a chimpanzee. And the human skull is only about 600 years old. Dawson used dental putty to put it all together, and artificially colored the skull to make it look old.

According to Weiner and his team, the whole scheme was probably Dawson’s bid for power and influence.

WEINER: I have very little doubt in my own mind that he had all the necessary ability and experience and interest for him to conceive of this astonishing forgery … But he was really very ambitious.

So the Earliest Englishman was not so early after all.

The Piltdown Man may be one of the most effective hoaxes in scientific history. But men like Dawson have been deceiving the public in all sorts of ways for years and Dawson may have taken a leaf out of the book of another trickster named George Hull.

Hull also wanted to find a so-called “missing link” but this time for scripture.

This audio is from Eyewitness News.

NEWS: On October 16th, 1869, a ten foot tall petrified man was found buried in the ground on a farm in Cardiff, New York.

Hull paid for sculptors to carve a 3,000 pound giant out of gypsum, a light-colored type of mineral. He was inspired by the Genesis account of Nephilim, the “giants of the earth.” He himself was an atheist, but he was pretty sure that Bible believers wouldn’t question the authenticity of the statue.

He buried the giant on a farm, where unsuspecting workers would eventually dig it up.

Michael Tamburrino manages the museum where the Cardiff giant is now displayed.

NEWS: It didn’t just fool the most religious Americans that it was intended to fool. It also fooled scientists, archaeologists, because it is so detailed. He even went through and created pores on its skin with hammers, and poured acid over his skin to make it look like it was older than it actually was.

American showman P.T. Barnum offered to pay for the petrified man for his circus, but Hull was still cashing in on his creation.

NEWS: People came from all over the country, all over the Northeast to see this. He charged admission of 50 cents, he pitched a big tent, he sold them food. He even had his own taxi service, he was running people from the train station to his own farm, paying them to get there. So he was making quite a lot of money from this.

The giant inspired copycats, and about half a dozen petrified Nephilim cropped up around the country. Barnum even made his own statue to show off. But eventually, the jig was up. In early 1870, newspapers finagled the truth out of the sculptors who had created Hull’s original giant.

Still, Hull made about $20,000 dollars from the hoax. And in today’s world, fraudsters continue to make money this way. Of course, there aren’t many fake giants or fossils, instead it’s internet disinformation, clickbait and scam calls.

Carolyn Schindler is a member of the Geological Society of London, and she says you can never be too careful.

ORIGINS: It’s an enormous object lesson for people today not to be too credulous, to examine the evidence, not just to see what you want to see. If something is too good to be true, it probably is.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Emma Eicher.

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