The Boldest Hoax [ so-called Piltdown Man ]

PBS ^ | Original Broadcast Date, January 11, 2005 | NOVA

[SunkenCiv]

NARRATOR:For 40 years, a fossil skull discovered in Piltdown, a quaint village in England, was hailed as the missing link between apes and humans. It was named Piltdown Man. Later it would be called a forgery and set off a storm of scandal...

ANDY CURRANT (Natural History Museum, London):It's a vicious hoax. It was a terrible thing to do. It really was a horrible, nasty, vicious piece of work.

NARRATOR:....the identity of the Piltdown hoaxer has remained a mystery. With special access to Britain's Natural History Museum archives, NOVA reopens the case and reveals hints of a cover up at the heart of one of England's most revered scientific institutions.

ANDY CURRANT:Maybe somebody in the museum could have been involved in this, and that, that wouldn't be good...

JAMES MOORE:...in Germany, quarrymen working in the Neander Valley, made a remarkable find... named "Neanderthal" and Germany the birthplace of early man. But soon evidence of early man was being found in France and Spain as well. To their annoyance, the British had none.

RICHARD MILNER:The British had no early man. The French had lots of them; the Germans had lots of them. They had Neanderthals all over the place. They had caves full of beautiful pictures. And where was the earliest Englishman? There wasn't any...

NARRATOR:...On the 14th of February, 1912, Dawson wrote with his exciting news.

CHARLES DAWSON (Amateur Scientist, Dramatization):I have come across a very old Pleistocene bed which I think is going to be interesting. I think I have a portion of a human skull which will rival the Germans' ape man...

[the invisib1e hand]

Sorry. President Barack Hussein Obama is history’s boldest hoax.

[martin_fierro]

Ping.

[JoeProBono]

[SunkenCiv]

And, worst of all, they’re still in their jobs.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks. :’)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2733540/posts?page=4#4

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2733540/posts?page=15#15

[colorado tanker]

JAMES MOORE:...in Germany, quarrymen working in the Neander Valley, made a remarkable find... named "Neanderthal" and Germany the birthplace of early man. But soon evidence of early man was being found in France and Spain as well. To their annoyance, the British had none.

I would have been kind of hard for the Neanderthals to wander over there considering almost all of the British Isles were under ice.

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2641576/posts

[colorado tanker]

Thanks for the link. Looks like a few Neanderthals made it to Britain. The dates are confusing, though. The article says the specimen was 400,000 years old, “before” the end of the last ice age. Actually, that would have been several climate cycles ago.

[SunkenCiv]

I couldn’t find the topic (didn’t look tremendously hard), but another Neandertal skull was plucked from the seabed of the North Sea. Areas which used to be dry land during glaciation were also habitations.

[colorado tanker]

I read someplace that every time the ice retreated man or our ancestors tried to colonize Britain but every attempt fails when the ice comes back south. I think he said he found evidence of seven attempts.

Of course, AGW has defeated the climate cycle, so it couldn't possibly happen again . . . .