Posted on 02/21/2005 9:44:35 AM PST by FNU LNU
History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud
Flamboyant anthropologist falsified dating of key discoveries
Luke Harding in Berlin Saturday February 19, 2005 The Guardian
It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals.
This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull.
However, the professor's 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other "stone age" relics.
Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous "falsehoods and manipulations". According to experts, his deceptions may mean an entire tranche of the history of man's development will have to be rewritten.
"Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago," said Thomas Terberger, the archaeologist who discovered the hoax. "Prof Protsch's work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had co-existed, and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish."
The scandal only came to light when Prof Protsch was caught trying to sell his department's entire chimpanzee skull collection to the United States. An inquiry later established that he had also passed off fake fossils as real ones and had plagiarised other scientists' work.
His discovery appeared to show that Neanderthals had spread much further north than was previously known. But his university inquiry was told that a crucial Hamburg skull fragment, which was believed to have come from the world's oldest German, a Neanderthal known as Hahnhöfersand Man, was actually a mere 7,500 years old, according to Oxford University's radiocarbon dating unit. The unit established that other skulls had been wrongly dated too.
Another of the professor's sensational finds, "Binshof-Speyer" woman, lived in 1,300 BC and not 21,300 years ago, as he had claimed, while "Paderborn-Sande man" (dated at 27,400 BC) only died a couple of hundred years ago, in 1750.
"It's deeply embarrassing. Of course the university feels very bad about this," Professor Ulrich Brandt, who led the investigation into Prof Protsch's activities, said yesterday. "Prof Protsch refused to meet us. But we had 10 sittings with 12 witnesses.
"Their stories about him were increasingly bizarre. After a while it was hard to take it seriously. You had to laugh. It was just unbelievable. At the end of the day what he did was incredible."
During their investigation, the university discovered that Prof Protsch, 65, a flamboyant figure with a fondness for gold watches, Porsches and Cuban cigars, was unable to work his own carbon-dating machine. Instead, after returning from Germany to America, where he did his doctorate, and taking up a professorship, he had simply made things up. In one case he had claimed that a 50 million-year-old "half-ape" called Adapis had been found in Switzerland, an archaeological sensation. In reality, the ape had been dug up in France, where several other examples had already been found.
Prof Terberger said that he grew suspicious about the professor's work in 2001 after sending off the skull fragment to Oxford for tests.
Further tests revealed that all of the skulls dated by Prof Protsch were in reality far younger than he had claimed, prompting Prof Terberger and a British colleague, Martin Street, to write a scientific paper last year.
At the same time, German police began investigating the professor for fraud, following allegations that he had tried to sell the university's 278 chimpanzee skulls for $70,000 to a US dealer.
Why, though, had he done it?
"If you find a skull that's more than 30,000 years old it's a sensation. If you find three of them people notice you. It's good for your career," Prof Terberger said. "At the end of the day it was about ambition."
Other details of the professor's life also appeared to crumble under scrutiny. Before he disappeared from the university's campus last year, Prof Protsch told his students he had examined Hitler's and Eva Braun's bones.
He also boasted of having flats in New York, Florida and California, where, he claimed, he hung out with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steffi Graf. Even the professor's aristocratic title, "von Zieten", appears to be bogus.
Far from being the descendant of a dashing general in the hussars, the professor was the son of a Nazi MP, Wilhelm Protsch, Der Spiegel magazine revealed last October.
The university is investigating how thousands of documents lodged in the anthropology department relating to the Nazis' gruesome scientific experiments in the 1930s were mysteriously shredded, allegedly under the professor's instructions. They also discovered that some of the 12,000 skeletons stored in the department's "bone cellar" were missing their heads, apparently sold to friends of the professor in the US and sympathetic dentists. Yesterday the university admitted that it should have discovered the professor's fabrications far earlier. But it pointed out that, like all public servants in Germany, the high-profile anthropologist was virtually impossible to sack, and had also proved difficult to pin down.
"He was perfect at being evasive," Prof Brandt said yesterday. "He would switch from saying 'it isn't really clear' to giving diffuse statements. "I'm not a psychologist so I can't say why he did it. But my guess is that when he came back from the States 30 years ago he realised he wasn't up to the job of being a professor. So he started inventing things. It rapidly became a habit.'
Yesterday the professor, who lives in Mainz with his wife Angelina, didn't respond to emails from the Guardian asking him to comment on the affair. But in earlier remarks to Der Spiegel he insisted that he was the victim of an "intrigue".
"All the disputed fossils are my personal property," he told the magazine.
Missing links and planted stone age finds
Piltdown Man
The most infamous of all scientific frauds was unearthed in 1912 in a Sussex gravel pit. With its huge human-like braincase and ape-like jaw, the Piltdown Man "fossil" was named Eoanthropus dawsoni after Charles Dawson, the solicitor and amateur archaeologist who discovered it. For 40 years Piltdown Man was heralded as the missing link between humans and their primate ancestors. But in 1953 scientists concluded it was a forgery. Radiocarbon dating showed the human skull was just 600 years old, while the jawbone was that of an orang-utan. The entire package of fossil fragments found at Piltdown - which included a prehistoric cricket bat - had been planted.
The devil's archaeologist
Japanese archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura was so prolific at uncovering prehistoric artefacts he earned the nickname "God's hands". At site after site, Fujimura discovered stoneware and relics that pushed back the limits of Japan's known history. The researcher and his stone age finds drew international attention and rewrote text books. In November 2000 the spell was broken when a newspaper printed pictures of Fujimura digging holes and burying objects that he later dug up and announced as major finds. "I was tempted by the devil. I don't know how I can apologise for what I did," he said.
Piltdown Turkey
The supposed fossil of Archaeoraptor, which was to become known as the "Piltdown turkey", came to light in 1999 when National Geographic magazine published an account of its discovery. It seemed to show another missing link - this time between birds and dinosaurs. Archaeoraptor appeared to be the remains of a large feathered bird with the tail of a dinosaur. The fossil was smuggled out of China and sold to a private collector in the US for £51,000. Experts were suspicious and closer examination showed the specimen to be a "composite" - two fossils stuck together with strong glue.
David Adam
I have yet gone to church that supports one. When I do I will let you know.
> So far this field of "science" has needed more faith to believe in it than Scientology.
Interesting. Then what do you make of posts such as this...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1347824/posts?page=76#56
... which purport to use the science of archaeology to support the Bible?
Can't have it both ways.
That's nice. But obviously a boatload of Christians *DO* support televangelists and similar fraudsters, otherwise they wouldn't be slopping over in cash and bling.
What exactly is the whole theory of humanity in Europe?
"...otherwise they wouldn't be slopping over in cash and bling."
Somewhat akin to "...Prof Protsch, 65, a flamboyant figure with a fondness for gold watches, Porsches and Cuban cigars, was unable to work his own carbon-dating machine."?
Hmmmmmmmmm?
I can't tell now if the opulent 'televangelists' are emulating the anthropologists, or the other way around. Funny isn't it?
Your LOGIC is overwhelming! Agreed!
Schadenfreude is one of my favorite words. :)
Bump for later reading.
> I can't tell now if the opulent 'televangelists' are emulating the anthropologists, or the other way around. Funny isn't it?
The equivalent of televangelists have been around forever. Churches didn't collect gold for the greater glory of God... God doesn't need gold. And they sure as hell didn't do it to materially improve the lives of those forced to tithe.
Now if I could only figure out how to make rocket engineering as lucrative as Oral Roberts scam...
Can't have it both ways.
See, this is where you are wrong. I very much support science and archeology. There has never been anything in Science to disprove the Bible, unlike the koran or several other "holy" books.
Fraud in the name of science I will never support. Science must be provable with facts, not conjecture like some pigs tooth we are told is "Nevada Man", or the dating practices that are a huge joke.
I like facts very much.....the theory takes a true believer willing to put his faith in man, that is the place I can not go.
> There has never been anything in Science to disprove the Bible
Nor has there ever been any science that supports the more relevant portions of the Bible. Finding a lost city? Not proof. Showing that the Red Sea was parted? Finding the Ark of the Covenant? Proving that not only Jesus existed, but he could walk on water, raise the dead, ressurect himself? Finding Noah's ark? Proving Creationism? Finding evidence of hundreds of thousands of Hebrew slaves suddenly bailing from Egypt and wandering lost for 40 years? None of this has happened. So far, the support for the Bible is interesting, but of no greater value than an episode of "Charmed." The show is set in a city called "San Francisco," but the fac thtat there really is a city called San Francisco does not prove the show is true.
> Science must be provable with facts, not ... the dating practices that are a huge joke.
Another EHarmony.com success story...
The difference between you and me....honesty and willingness to look for truth, not defend blindly.
Look!
Evidently you didn't go to ORU. Or maybe.... you did, and that's why!?! No, I know you're a Cyclone.
"...Churches didn't collect gold for the greater glory of God... ", and "...they sure as hell didn't do it to materially improve the lives of those forced to tithe."
Where do you think the first hospitals came from? Where do you read that the first Christians DIDN'T make all their possessions available to anyone in their community who was poor? Was it the Greeks or the Romans who gave Western civ it's propensity towards taking care of the poor, or saving the lives of babies born and previously left outside the city walls to die? Modern day anti-religious Caligulas (religion is the opiate of the people) have brought us the Pol Pots and the Maos, as much as the pseudo-Christian emperors, and 'religious' zealots brought us the Crusades, and the Inquisition.
If you're thinking about arguing from the past excesses of different groups, forget it. Your poster boy for the day is Prof. Patsch. And this precious Prof. Patsch is simply the latest evidence that frauds infect all ideologies, even the supposed 'truth' oriented ones.
> I do not know what they preach nor if it is based not the Bible or not
Doesn't matter if what they preach is Bible-based or not. They are preaching to grab money.
> looks like there is the same problem in the anthropology field
In all fields. Here's the difference, though: in the sciences, when one guy is a fraud... objective tests can determine that. A few carbon dating tests showed that this knucklehead was a fraud. There are no such tests for religious figures.
> The difference between you and me....honesty and willingness to look for truth, not defend blindly.
You of course realize that that can be taken *both* ways. You should be careful with your ad hominems, especially when they are vaguely worded.
Oh, and by the way, Prof. Patsch liked his boatloads of science cash and science bling.
> Where do you think the first hospitals came from?
Well, lessee:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital
"In ancient cultures religion and medicine were linked. The earliest known institutions aiming to provide cure were Egyptian temples. Greek temples dedicated to the healer-god Asclepius might admit the sick, who would wait for guidance from the god in a dream. The Romans adopted his worship. Under his Roman name Æsculapius, he was proved with a temple (291 B.C.) on a island in the Tiber in Rome, where similar rites were performed.
"The first institutions created specifically to care for the sick appeared in India. Brahmantic hospitals were established in Sri Lanka by 431 B.C., and King Ashoka founded 18 hospitals in Hindustan c.230 B.C. The latter were provided with physicians and nurses, and supported from royal funds.
"The first teaching hospital, however, where students were authorized to methodically practice on patients under the supervision of physicians as part of their education, was the Academy of Gundishapur in the Persian Empire."
> frauds infect all ideologies
Well, DUH.
Yeah, There's been several articles on this over the last four or five days.
I think the definition for primitive man, should be how gullible he is with "evidence" like this.
Or, say, a Christian and an atheist?
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