# Homo deceptus: Science's Dirty Little Secret

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 28 Nov 2025, 39 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/ab244473-cdd4-42f0-b1b2-b3a1016d8f59/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

In 1912, a fossil discovery shakes the scientific world. Piltdown Man is the elusive missing link between humans and their ape-like ancestors. Forty years later, a researcher at the Natural History Museum gets a chance to see the relic for himself and notices something isn't quite right. For a full list of sources see timharford.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin. In his office under the Great Gothic vaults of
[0:29] Speaker 1: London's Natural History Museum, Arthur Woodward was opening the mail
[0:34] Speaker 1: and found a note from his friend Charles Dawson, postmarked
[0:38] Speaker 1: the previous day Valentine's Day, nineteen twelve. Woodward was the
[0:44] Speaker 1: keeper of the museum's geology department and a notable figure
[0:49] Speaker 1: in British science. Dawson, a country lawyer, was an amateur
[0:54] Speaker 1: geologist with a growing reputation of his own. His letter
[0:57] Speaker 1: began with small talk the latest news on Sir Arthur
[1:01] Speaker 1: Conan Doyle's new book Idea. Dawson knew Conan Doyle personally,
[1:06] Speaker 1: but then Dawson turned to Moore magnificant matters. Some workmen
[1:12] Speaker 1: had been digging in the soils of Piltdown, a few
[1:16] Speaker 1: miles away from Dawson's home on the South Coast, and
[1:20] Speaker 1: they found a fossilized fragment of a human skull. It
[1:24] Speaker 1: might be something pretty special, so would Arthur Woodward care
[1:29] Speaker 1: to visit the site and take a look. He would.
[1:34] Speaker 1: Over the months that followed, Dawson and Woodward would supervise
[1:38] Speaker 1: digs in the flint beds of Piltdown, piecing together bone
[1:42] Speaker 1: fragments that would change our understanding of the world and
[1:47] Speaker 1: how humans took their place in it. The discovery became
[1:51] Speaker 1: known as Piltdown Man, the most famous, most earth shaking
[1:57] Speaker 1: missing link in the evolutionary chain connecting modern humans and
[2:01] Speaker 1: their ape like ancestors. Piltdown Man had a thick, but
[2:06] Speaker 1: otherwise human seeming skull, big cranium, steep forehead. The lower
[2:13] Speaker 1: jaw was more like that of an ape. A tooth
[2:16] Speaker 1: was found two halfway between ape and human. It was
[2:22] Speaker 1: truly an astonishing discovery. There were some doubters at the time.
[2:28] Speaker 1: Were these fragments really from the same primate or might
[2:32] Speaker 1: there somehow be a human skull and an ape jaw
[2:36] Speaker 1: in the same flinty gravel, because apart from that tooth,
[2:41] Speaker 1: it did look a bit like a human skull and
[2:42] Speaker 1: an ape jaw. But a few years later Dawson found
[2:47] Speaker 1: similar fossils a couple of miles away. They became known
[2:51] Speaker 1: as pilt Down two. Their discovery surely proved that pilt
[2:56] Speaker 1: Down one couldn't possibly be an accidental jumble of ape
[3:01] Speaker 1: and human, because how could the same accidental jumble occur
[3:06] Speaker 1: twice on two different sites. Although the amateur paleontologist Charles
[3:13] Speaker 1: Dawson had been the one to find the fossils that
[3:16] Speaker 1: pilt Down two. He died before he had a chance
[3:19] Speaker 1: to join Arthur Woodward in announcing that discovery, so Woodward
[3:25] Speaker 1: was left to carry the scientific torch and receive the
[3:29] Speaker 1: glory and glory there was. Woodward would become Sir Arthur Woodward,
[3:37] Speaker 1: a Knight Commander of the British Empire, a recipient of
[3:41] Speaker 1: the Royal Society's Gold Medal, the Liel Medal, the Lynneian Medal,
[3:46] Speaker 1: the Thompson Medal, and many other honors beside, all just
[3:52] Speaker 1: rewards for his skill, dedication, and prodigious scientific output, but
[3:59] Speaker 1: also surely rewards for his role in discovering evolution's first
[4:04] Speaker 1: true missing link, pilt Down Man. After he retired, so
[4:11] Speaker 1: Arthur Woodward mused that the discovery at Piltdown had been
[4:16] Speaker 1: the most important thing that ever happened in my life.
[4:21] Speaker 1: A lovely thought, but it wasn't a discovery, and it
[4:27] Speaker 1: didn't just happen. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to
[4:33] Speaker 1: cautionary tales. It was July nineteen fifty three when Joseph
[5:03] Speaker 1: Weiner first had a chance to handle the Piltdown Man
[5:07] Speaker 1: relics deep insid side London's Natural History Museum. It was
[5:12] Speaker 1: a breathtaking moment. Weiner was a young high flier professor
[5:18] Speaker 1: of physical anthropology at Oxford at the age of just
[5:21] Speaker 1: thirty eight, which meant that when the discovery of Piltdown
[5:26] Speaker 1: Man had been announced forty one years earlier, Weiner hadn't
[5:30] Speaker 1: even been born. But of course he knew all about
[5:34] Speaker 1: Piltdown Man. Everybody did. This was the most famous human
[5:39] Speaker 1: fossil ever found, even if it was proving ever more
[5:43] Speaker 1: of a headache to scientists. The problem was this, Dawson
[5:51] Speaker 1: and Woodward had pieced together the fragments from the Piltdown
[5:55] Speaker 1: flints to reveal a creature with a primitive jaw but
[5:59] Speaker 1: a modern skull and therefore an advanced brain. This supported
[6:04] Speaker 1: the so called brain first hypothesis that are crimate ancestors
[6:10] Speaker 1: had evolved into humans by developing large brains, other changes
[6:15] Speaker 1: such as a smaller jaw, had come later. Why was
[6:19] Speaker 1: that a problem, because every time a subsequent fossil was discovered,
[6:25] Speaker 1: it suggested the opposite pattern that proto humans had first
[6:29] Speaker 1: developed a human jaw and a human diet, and only
[6:33] Speaker 1: later had developed a human skull and a human brain.
[6:38] Speaker 1: Piltdown Man didn't fit. Young anthropologists, paleontologists, and biologists had
[6:45] Speaker 1: devoted their careers to trying to figure it out. Later
[6:53] Speaker 1: that day, at a grand summer banquet near the museum,
[6:58] Speaker 1: Weiner had the chance to sit next to Kenneth Oakley,
[7:02] Speaker 1: the man who was now the guardian of the Piltdown
[7:05] Speaker 1: Bones at the museum. There was such a mystery, mused,
[7:10] Speaker 1: and such a shame that the Piltdown bones were an
[7:13] Speaker 1: isolated discovery. In year upon year of looking, researchers had
[7:19] Speaker 1: never found another bone of interest at the Piltdown site.
[7:23] Speaker 1: Then Winer wandered out loud to Oakley, what about Piltdown two?
[7:29] Speaker 1: Why hadn't that site been more fully explored? Funny thing,
[7:34] Speaker 1: replied Oakley, nobody actually knows exactly where the pilt Down
[7:38] Speaker 1: two site is. It was common enough to keep such
[7:42] Speaker 1: matters confidential so that tourists and scavengers didn't descend on
[7:47] Speaker 1: the site and ruin it. But in this case the
[7:50] Speaker 1: details were more than confidential. They were lost to history.
[7:56] Speaker 1: Well how could that be, asked Winer? Above the hubbub
[7:59] Speaker 1: of conversation and the clinking of cutlery. Oakley explained that
[8:03] Speaker 1: Woodward presented the pilt Down two discoveries after Dawson was dead.
[8:09] Speaker 1: The precise location was never mentioned in correspondence between them.
[8:14] Speaker 1: Maybe Dawson had died without telling him. Woodward had certainly
[8:18] Speaker 1: never recorded the site's location. Strange, yes, thought Weiner, very strange.
[8:30] Speaker 1: The Piltdown discovery had been viewed with some skepticism until
[8:34] Speaker 1: pilt Down Two seemed to provide confirmation. Now it turns
[8:39] Speaker 1: out that the pilt Down two fossils simply appeared at
[8:42] Speaker 1: the Natural History Museum from well, from out of nowhere.
[8:48] Speaker 1: Convenient that that hot summer night, Weiner drove back to Oxford.
[8:56] Speaker 1: It was after midnight when he got home. He couldn't sleep.
[9:00] Speaker 1: His mind just kept turning and turning over and over.
[9:05] Speaker 1: The next morning, Winer was examining casts of built down
[9:09] Speaker 1: man in his lab. Freed from preconceptions, he tried to
[9:14] Speaker 1: look directly at what was in front of him. It
[9:17] Speaker 1: looked like a human skull and an ape jaw, and
[9:22] Speaker 1: these strange molar teeth, part ape and part human. In fact,
[9:28] Speaker 1: it was really only the teeth that suggested any link
[9:31] Speaker 1: between the jaw and skull. Under a powerful magnifying lens,
[9:37] Speaker 1: Winer examined a tooth, the pattern of where was a
[9:43] Speaker 1: bit odd. Before long he had obtained an ape tooth
[9:49] Speaker 1: from Oxford's anatomy department, grabbed a file and a clamp,
[9:54] Speaker 1: and began experimenting. It was astonishing how easy it was
[10:01] Speaker 1: to file the ape tooth down to look exactly like
[10:06] Speaker 1: the piltdown fossil. Discussed his doubts with a colleague. There's
[10:12] Speaker 1: another funny thing. The bones with a deep rich color
[10:17] Speaker 1: of dark chocolate, stained with rust from the iron rich flints.
[10:23] Speaker 1: But a few years before Oakley himself had drilled into
[10:27] Speaker 1: the bones to get a chemical sample, and had noted
[10:31] Speaker 1: in his write up that the brown stain was completely superficial.
[10:37] Speaker 1: The bones were bright white underneath. To an already suspicious Whiner,
[10:44] Speaker 1: that was odd too. No, they decided to pick up
[10:49] Speaker 1: the phone and call Kenneth Oakley in his office under
[10:57] Speaker 1: the great Gothic vaults of London's Natural History Museum. Kenneth
[11:02] Speaker 1: Oakley picked up the telephone. He was sitting not far
[11:06] Speaker 1: from where his predecessor, Arthur Woodward had opened the letter
[11:10] Speaker 1: from Charles Dawson. Dawson's letter to Woodward had begun the
[11:15] Speaker 1: remarkable story of Piltdown Man. The phone call from Oxford
[11:20] Speaker 1: to Oakley would end that story as we know it.
[11:25] Speaker 1: Winer and his colleague told Oakley that Piltdown Man was
[11:29] Speaker 1: nothing more than a fake. Oakley was stunned. Then Winer's
[11:36] Speaker 1: colleague asked him to drop everything, go down to the
[11:39] Speaker 1: museum's storerooms with a microscope and examine the Piltdown moler
[11:44] Speaker 1: for signs of artificial abrasion had it been filed down.
[11:51] Speaker 1: An hour later he called them back. They were right,
[11:57] Speaker 1: There was absolutely no doubt about it. Over the following
[12:01] Speaker 1: weeks and then months, further tests established unnatural patterns of
[12:07] Speaker 1: wear on the fossils. The latest most accurate chemical dating
[12:11] Speaker 1: test was used, demonstrating that the Piltdown skull, the Piltdown
[12:16] Speaker 1: jaw fossils from the Piltdown two site, all of them
[12:20] Speaker 1: were modern, a few hundred years old at best, and
[12:23] Speaker 1: the chocolate brown iron staining wasn't iron, It was an
[12:28] Speaker 1: artificial stain, or, in the case of the tooth, was
[12:32] Speaker 1: a layer of paint Van Dyke brown. Over the following year,
[12:41] Speaker 1: a thorough investigation scrutinized every single discovery associated with piltdown
[12:47] Speaker 1: the fossils various tools, a total of forty different specimens
[12:52] Speaker 1: from three different sites in the area, and concluded that
[12:56] Speaker 1: every single one of them was a fake. Each individual
[13:01] Speaker 1: forgery had been bold and simple. Collectively, they had been
[13:07] Speaker 1: devastatingly convincing, and the deception had been more ambitious and
[13:12] Speaker 1: elaborate than Joseph Weiner had dreamed. But who was the fraudster?
[13:19] Speaker 1: Weiner's astonishing discovery set off a frenzied cottage industry of speculation.
[13:26] Speaker 1: Had it been Dawsome, the man who claimed to find
[13:29] Speaker 1: the fossils, or Woodward, who did so much to promote
[13:33] Speaker 1: them and in doing so, reaped the glory. Or were
[13:37] Speaker 1: they both the victims of a cruel hoax by some
[13:40] Speaker 1: third party Cautionary tales will be back after the break
[13:58] Speaker 1: ten years ago, I kept bumping into policy wonks discussing
[14:02] Speaker 1: an exciting new idea. Exciting to policy wonks anyway. A
[14:07] Speaker 1: recent peer reviewed article five behavioral scientists reporting the results
[14:12] Speaker 1: of several different experiments had found that if you want
[14:15] Speaker 1: somebody to truthfully fill in a form such as a
[14:19] Speaker 1: tax return or an insurance claim. Then don't get them
[14:22] Speaker 1: to sign the form at the end saying they were honest.
[14:26] Speaker 1: Get them to sign at the beginning promising that they
[14:29] Speaker 1: will be honest, clever, and that could save real money.
[14:35] Speaker 1: Imagine collecting more taxes simply by getting people to sign
[14:39] Speaker 1: at the top of their tax return, nudging them into
[14:42] Speaker 1: telling the truth about their income. The UK's Behavioral Insights Team,
[14:48] Speaker 1: better known as the Nudge Unit, leapt into action, designing
[14:52] Speaker 1: a controlled experiment on behalf of the government of Guatemala.
[14:56] Speaker 1: Three million tax returns. Later, the idea didn't work. Researchers
[15:02] Speaker 1: at the Nudge Unit were left scratching their heads, much
[15:05] Speaker 1: like the paleontologists who kept finding fossils that would die
[15:09] Speaker 1: at first, not brain first. What had they got wrong?
[15:15] Speaker 1: And then came the Joseph Weiner moment. Three psychologists Joe Simmons,
[15:22] Speaker 1: Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonson wrote a website together under
[15:27] Speaker 1: the jokey name data Colada. Usually, they poked fun at
[15:31] Speaker 1: sloppy research methods in social science, for example, using some
[15:36] Speaker 1: dubious statistical techniques that were all too common in the field.
[15:40] Speaker 1: That data Klada team demonstrated that listening to the song
[15:45] Speaker 1: when I'm sixty four by the Beatles makes you a
[15:49] Speaker 1: year and a half younger unbelievable. Clearly, not even the
[15:54] Speaker 1: Beatles are quite that brilliant, but the point was well made.
[15:58] Speaker 1: If the standard techniques in psychology and marketing research could
[16:03] Speaker 1: produce that sort of nonsense, the standard techniques needed to
[16:07] Speaker 1: be drastically improved. Sometimes, however, the Data Colada team found
[16:14] Speaker 1: themselves dealing not with sloppy practice, but with fraud. When Simmons, Nelson,
[16:20] Speaker 1: and Simonson looked into that sign at the top academic paper,
[16:26] Speaker 1: they realized that the data behind one of the experimental
[16:29] Speaker 1: studies made no sense. The data apparently described the behavior
[16:34] Speaker 1: of insurance company customers reporting their vehicle mileage. On closer inspection,
[16:40] Speaker 1: it didn't look anything like real mileage data, and it
[16:43] Speaker 1: looked exactly like what you'd get if you used Microsoft
[16:47] Speaker 1: ex Cells randomization function. But things got weirder than that,
[16:53] Speaker 1: because the investigators also found evidence that another study conducted
[16:58] Speaker 1: by different researchers and then published in the same article,
[17:03] Speaker 1: also contained manipulated data. The Data Colada team wrote a
[17:08] Speaker 1: blog post titled Cluster Fake, exclaiming that's right, two different
[17:15] Speaker 1: people independently faked data for two different studies in a
[17:20] Speaker 1: paper about dishonesty. To make matters even more interesting, two
[17:27] Speaker 1: of the academics involved, the ones most closely associated with
[17:32] Speaker 1: the manipulated data were superstars of behavioral science Dan Arielli
[17:39] Speaker 1: and Francesca Gino. If they had committed the fraud, this
[17:44] Speaker 1: was big news. As with pilt Down Man in the
[17:48] Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, there was no doubt that somebody had faked
[17:53] Speaker 1: the evidence, or in this case, two different people. The
[17:58] Speaker 1: question was who. By nineteen fifty three, when Joseph Weiner
[18:05] Speaker 1: and his colleagues comprehensively demonstrated that piltdown Man was a fake,
[18:11] Speaker 1: Sir Arthur Woodward was dead. Charles Dawson had died decades before,
[18:16] Speaker 1: before the pilt Down two find had even been announced.
[18:20] Speaker 1: One or both of those men were the obvious people
[18:24] Speaker 1: to blame for the lie, but there were others. Over
[18:29] Speaker 1: the years, a variety of books and essays have accused
[18:33] Speaker 1: twenty different suspects of the fraud. Some of them were
[18:38] Speaker 1: acquaintances of Dawson. In Hastings, he had been feuding with
[18:42] Speaker 1: the local antiquarian society, and several knowledgeable locals had good
[18:48] Speaker 1: reason to dislike him. Perhaps one of them had faked
[18:51] Speaker 1: the bones and planted them at the Piltdown site, where
[18:55] Speaker 1: Dawson would find them and embarrass himself. Then there were
[19:00] Speaker 1: people from Woodward's world of academic paleontology, friends, rivals, subordinates.
[19:07] Speaker 1: One of them was a huge champion of Piltdown man,
[19:11] Speaker 1: had he colluded with Dawson. Perhaps another was a zoologist.
[19:17] Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy, after his death, a trunk had left
[19:20] Speaker 1: in storage at the Natural History Museum was opened. It
[19:25] Speaker 1: contained animal bones stained chocolate brown like the Piltdown's skull
[19:31] Speaker 1: and jaw. A fraudster, or perhaps a skeptic trying to
[19:37] Speaker 1: understand a fraud, just as Winer had filed down, an
[19:41] Speaker 1: aped to understand the forger's methods. The most spectacular theory
[19:48] Speaker 1: about the Piltdown fraudster was published in the magazine's Science
[19:51] Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty three. The forger was none other than
[19:55] Speaker 1: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dawson's neighbor. Doyle might have
[20:01] Speaker 1: had the opportunity to plant fakes, and as a doctor,
[20:04] Speaker 1: he had the expertise to make them, But the case
[20:07] Speaker 1: against Conan Doyle a pro pritty enough for such a
[20:10] Speaker 1: gripping storyteller is nothing more than a good story. Not
[20:15] Speaker 1: only is there no evidence that he was involved, there's
[20:18] Speaker 1: no plausible motive either. The theory rests on little more
[20:22] Speaker 1: than a famous man's proximity to the piltdown site. No,
[20:28] Speaker 1: it's far more likely that the fraud was not perpetrated
[20:32] Speaker 1: on the discoverers of Piltdown Man, but by one of them.
[20:37] Speaker 1: The forgery was masterminded, either by Sir Arthur Woodward or
[20:41] Speaker 1: by Charles Dawson, or by them both faced with the
[20:49] Speaker 1: two fraudulent studies on dishonesty, both published in the same article,
[20:54] Speaker 1: the academic community faced a similar question. Some of the
[20:59] Speaker 1: fraudulent data was managed by dan Arielli and definitely not
[21:04] Speaker 1: his named co authors. Does that prove he faked the data?
[21:08] Speaker 1: He says he didn't, and it must have been faked
[21:11] Speaker 1: by the insurance company he collaborated with. But the insurance
[21:15] Speaker 1: company had no reason to make up data to support
[21:18] Speaker 1: dan Arielli's theory, and they've also denied Ariel's claim. Or
[21:24] Speaker 1: maybe there was some third party involved, an eager, unnamed
[21:28] Speaker 1: research assistant, a disgruntled insurance company analyst. It doesn't seem likely,
[21:35] Speaker 1: but there's no way to be sure. As for the
[21:39] Speaker 1: other study with fake data that was conducted by Francesca Gino,
[21:44] Speaker 1: did she fake the data or was it faked by
[21:47] Speaker 1: some other unknown party. She says she did nothing wrong.
[21:53] Speaker 1: Data Kalada sent a concise dossier of evidence to Gino's employer,
[21:58] Speaker 1: Harvard University, knowing that they would have access to detailed
[22:02] Speaker 1: data logs that might prove her guilt or her innocence.
[22:08] Speaker 1: Harvard spent eighteen months investigating, then suspended Gino without pay,
[22:15] Speaker 1: stripped her of her named professorship, and began proceedings to
[22:19] Speaker 1: evoke her tenure. There had been quiet mutterings about Arielli
[22:28] Speaker 1: and Gino long before Data Callada published their forensic expose.
[22:33] Speaker 1: As then again, there were mutterings about Charles Dawson, the
[22:38] Speaker 1: discoverer of the first Piltdown bone fragments, long before Joseph
[22:43] Speaker 1: Weiner's bombshell. Among the most intriguing was the Mayor's Field Map,
[22:50] Speaker 1: an old map showing the area near Piltdown. It was
[22:55] Speaker 1: published in a local archaeological journal in nineteen twelve, the
[23:00] Speaker 1: year of the Piltdown discovery. It's a strange thing, a
[23:05] Speaker 1: crude forgery claiming to be from seventeen twenty five, or
[23:09] Speaker 1: but full of anachronisms, the wrong spellings, the wrong typefaces,
[23:14] Speaker 1: roads that didn't exist until a century later, and many
[23:17] Speaker 1: other errors. And make of this what you will. On
[23:23] Speaker 1: the map, the word one hundred is misspelled as hundred.
[23:29] Speaker 1: The O of hundred has a tiny arrow pointing to it,
[23:34] Speaker 1: and that O. Maybe this is mere coincidence, but the
[23:38] Speaker 1: O just happens to be on the spot where the
[23:41] Speaker 1: first pilt Down fossils were found. Near the O on
[23:46] Speaker 1: one side are the words pilt down near the O.
[23:51] Speaker 1: On the other side, the map notes the location of
[23:55] Speaker 1: Forge Pits. Strange. The map was published without explanation and
[24:04] Speaker 1: with the label made by C. Dawson FSA. It's a
[24:10] Speaker 1: kind of treasure map. Either Dawson was publishing a prank confession,
[24:16] Speaker 1: or more likely, it's an anonymous accusation in code by
[24:21] Speaker 1: a local antiquarian who dislike Dawson and suspected foul play
[24:27] Speaker 1: at Piltdown. Dawson never protested about the map's publication. That
[24:33] Speaker 1: was wise at the time. The veiled accusation in a
[24:37] Speaker 1: niche local journal passed unnoticed by the wider world. Complaining
[24:43] Speaker 1: would only have drawn attention to it. But why didn't
[24:49] Speaker 1: the whistleblower say something more direct about their suspicions. That's unclear,
[24:55] Speaker 1: but it's no mystery why they preferred to remain anonymous.
[25:00] Speaker 1: Identifying a fraud can be a dangerous business. A few
[25:06] Speaker 1: weeks after Data Callada published a detail filled four part
[25:10] Speaker 1: expose of fraudulent data in work co authored by Francesca Gino,
[25:16] Speaker 1: Geno filed a lawsuit against Harvard University and also sued
[25:22] Speaker 1: Data Collada for defamation. She asked for damages of twenty
[25:27] Speaker 1: five million dollars. Cautionary tales will return after the break
[25:44] Speaker 1: dead men can't sue, which may be why so many
[25:48] Speaker 1: different authors have accused so many long dead Edwardians of
[25:53] Speaker 1: being the Piltdown fraudster. But in truth, it's hard to
[25:58] Speaker 1: look past Charles Dawson. In the book The Piltdown Man
[26:03] Speaker 1: Hoax Case Closed, the historian Miles Russell sets out an
[26:09] Speaker 1: honishing track record of discoveries by Dawson. In eighteen ninety one,
[26:15] Speaker 1: Dawson sent a large fossil tooth to Woodward at the
[26:19] Speaker 1: Natural History Museum, who received it with the light, believing
[26:23] Speaker 1: that it was a missing link in the fossil record
[26:25] Speaker 1: one hundred million year old mammal in Europe. It was
[26:29] Speaker 1: also a fake. Modern analysis shows that it was filed
[26:33] Speaker 1: down from another tooth, just as the piltdown tooth had been.
[26:38] Speaker 1: Dawson had access to fossils he could doctor, and now
[26:43] Speaker 1: he had the ear of Woodward, a dupe who trusted
[26:46] Speaker 1: him and would vouch for whatever Dawson found. In eighteen
[26:50] Speaker 1: ninety three, Dawson sent a rusty little iron statuette to
[26:55] Speaker 1: an expert at the British Museum. It was in the
[26:58] Speaker 1: Roman style, but the exciting thing, said Dawson, was that
[27:03] Speaker 1: it had been found at a known Roman iron working
[27:07] Speaker 1: site in Sussex. Yet it was made of cast iron.
[27:12] Speaker 1: Experts had thought cast iron wasn't made in Europe until
[27:16] Speaker 1: many centuries after the Romans left Britain. So this was
[27:19] Speaker 1: another missing link, a piece of evidence that fundamentally reframed
[27:24] Speaker 1: our understanding of Roman technology. Where exactly had it been
[27:29] Speaker 1: found again and by whom? Not to worry about those details,
[27:34] Speaker 1: said Dawson. It was a workman. Couldn't remember the chap's name.
[27:38] Speaker 1: It was a few years back. More recent chemical analysis
[27:43] Speaker 1: confirms that the statue is modern in eighteen ninety four,
[27:48] Speaker 1: Dawson published a remarkable drawing of a Neolithic flint axe
[27:53] Speaker 1: attached to a wooden halft. And it wasn't just a drawing.
[27:57] Speaker 1: Dawson had based his drawing on an earlier sketch by
[28:01] Speaker 1: a local hobbyist who discovered the axe and the haft
[28:06] Speaker 1: when a few years back the halft alas had crumbled
[28:12] Speaker 1: at the touch and all attempts to save it had
[28:15] Speaker 1: proved futile. So here was yet another missing link early
[28:23] Speaker 1: evidence of halfted prehistoric tools. If you regard a drawing
[28:28] Speaker 1: of a drawing of a disintegrated piece of wood as evidence,
[28:32] Speaker 1: that is, even the flint axe head has been lost,
[28:36] Speaker 1: if indeed it ever existed. Then there was an ancient
[28:42] Speaker 1: horseshoe of an unusual design, a spur, possibly Roman, a
[28:47] Speaker 1: neolithic hammer made of deer bone, very rare. It was
[28:52] Speaker 1: carved with precision, and we now know that's because it
[28:55] Speaker 1: was carved by a modern steel chisel. A Chinese bronze
[29:00] Speaker 1: bowl from the Han dynasty two thousand years ago, found
[29:04] Speaker 1: in a medieval structure in the English coastal town of Dover,
[29:09] Speaker 1: remarkable evidence of global trade. Where exactly were these things
[29:14] Speaker 1: found mister Dawson, and by whom and when? Ah, it
[29:20] Speaker 1: was all a few years back, I could continue. Miles
[29:26] Speaker 1: Russell certainly does, detailing a long series of Dawson fakes. Dawson,
[29:32] Speaker 1: it seems, was desperate for academic recognition, and especially he
[29:38] Speaker 1: yearned to be a fellow of the Royal Society. Perhaps
[29:42] Speaker 1: if he'd lived a little longer he might have succeeded.
[29:45] Speaker 1: After all, he had an astonishing track record of repeatedly
[29:50] Speaker 1: finding novel and important discoveries, the sort of things other
[29:55] Speaker 1: researchers just couldn't find, not if they tried for a lifetime.
[30:02] Speaker 1: What we can say for certain is that many of
[30:04] Speaker 1: these Dawson fakes have traits in common. There's a missing link,
[30:10] Speaker 1: something new and surprising, yet connected to what's already known.
[30:14] Speaker 1: There's often an academic dupe, somebody who's come to trust
[30:18] Speaker 1: Dawson and speak up in support of him. And there's
[30:22] Speaker 1: a persistent vagueness about the providence of the items where
[30:26] Speaker 1: the exact time, location, and finder of the discovery are unclear.
[30:33] Speaker 1: Dawson often sat on his treasures for several years before
[30:36] Speaker 1: announcing their existence. That gave him deniability if challenged and
[30:42] Speaker 1: it also made life difficult for anyone trying to follow
[30:45] Speaker 1: the trail and what have pilled down. It's the ultimate
[30:50] Speaker 1: missing link, of course, And if Sir Arthur Woodward was
[30:54] Speaker 1: innocent of the fraud, as seems likely, he was the
[30:57] Speaker 1: ultimate dupe. And there was the vagueness again. In his fateful
[31:02] Speaker 1: letter to Woodward, Dawson provided few details. In fact, Dawson's
[31:08] Speaker 1: ambiguous areas counts imply that he acquired the first pilt
[31:11] Speaker 1: Down bone fragment sometime between one and thirteen years before
[31:18] Speaker 1: showing it to Woodward. It was, shall we say, all
[31:22] Speaker 1: a few years back. As for pilt Down two, the
[31:28] Speaker 1: discovery of another human like skull alongside another ape like jawbone,
[31:33] Speaker 1: the discovery which dispelled all the doubts back in nineteen sixteen,
[31:38] Speaker 1: we don't know where it was discovered, and we don't
[31:40] Speaker 1: know when. The overwhelming probability is that it was never
[31:45] Speaker 1: discovered at all. The bones went straight from Dawson's workbench
[31:50] Speaker 1: to Arthur Woodward's office without Dawson having bothered to bury them.
[31:55] Speaker 1: If Dawson hadn't faded away and died, presumably he would
[31:59] Speaker 1: have started to craft one of his characteristically vague stories,
[32:04] Speaker 1: but without Dawson to spin his yarns pilt down to
[32:08] Speaker 1: two who was largely forgotten, it had served its purpose.
[32:16] Speaker 1: Francesca Gino's twenty five million dollar lawsuit against Data Calada
[32:21] Speaker 1: was dismissed in September twenty twenty four, thirteen months after
[32:26] Speaker 1: it was filed. Can't have been a fun thirteen months
[32:30] Speaker 1: for Joe Simmons, Leif Nielsen, and Yuri Simonson. The suit
[32:35] Speaker 1: against Harvard continues. In August twenty twenty five, Harvard filed
[32:40] Speaker 1: a counterclaim against Gino, suing her for defamation and alleging
[32:46] Speaker 1: she falsified court evidence. Gino maintains her innocence. As for
[32:52] Speaker 1: dan Arielli, everyone agrees that he published a study containing
[32:56] Speaker 1: fabricated data, but nobody can prove that he was the
[33:00] Speaker 1: one who fabricated it. He continues to deny wrongdoing. I
[33:04] Speaker 1: would never falsify any data on any experiment, he told
[33:09] Speaker 1: New Yorker. He told me the same thing. At no
[33:12] Speaker 1: point did I knowingly use unreliable, inaccurate, or manipulated data
[33:17] Speaker 1: in our research, And there's no solid proof that he did.
[33:24] Speaker 1: It's easy to chuckle at some of this stuff, So
[33:27] Speaker 1: what if It actually makes no difference whether you sign
[33:30] Speaker 1: at the top of a form or at the end.
[33:32] Speaker 1: So what if Charles Dawson did fabricate evidence of early
[33:36] Speaker 1: humans and Cretaceous mammals, and Roman cast iron and palelithic
[33:40] Speaker 1: axes and trade between China and Kent. But it would
[33:46] Speaker 1: be wrong to categorize Piltdown as merely a prank. It
[33:50] Speaker 1: was an astonishing, brazen forgery that had led paleontologists astray
[33:56] Speaker 1: for forty years. Countless hours were wasted, entire careers were
[34:02] Speaker 1: devoted to making sense of the Piltdown discoveries and what
[34:07] Speaker 1: they told us about human evolution, all in vain, all
[34:11] Speaker 1: because of a lie that was designed to advance the
[34:14] Speaker 1: career of the fraudster. The same can be said about
[34:19] Speaker 1: fraudulent research in modern science. Three million Guatemalan taxpayers were
[34:25] Speaker 1: enrolled in an experiment to test an idea that now
[34:29] Speaker 1: seems to have been built on lies. And if that
[34:34] Speaker 1: seems bad, what about medical fraud? A few years ago,
[34:38] Speaker 1: a Dutch researcher, Don Polderman's was found by his own employer,
[34:43] Speaker 1: Erasmus Medical School, to have used fictitious and knowingly unreliable
[34:48] Speaker 1: data Polderman's himself has apologized and said that the use
[34:53] Speaker 1: of the fake data was an accident. But this wasn't
[34:56] Speaker 1: a study about signing forms. It was a study about
[35:00] Speaker 1: how to do major surgery. Polderman's had published research recommending
[35:06] Speaker 1: the use of beta blocker drugs before some surgical operations
[35:10] Speaker 1: to lower blood pressure. After the problems with his research
[35:14] Speaker 1: became known, a new analysis of the evidence concluded that
[35:18] Speaker 1: beta blockers weren't just useless as a pre surgical treatment,
[35:22] Speaker 1: but potentially deadly. They raised the risk of post surgical
[35:27] Speaker 1: death by more than a quarter. That's even worse than
[35:31] Speaker 1: it sounds. Two researchers estimated that if the confusion about
[35:36] Speaker 1: beta blockers had delayed the adoption of best practices by
[35:40] Speaker 1: five years, the consequence was eight hundred thousand additional deaths.
[35:47] Speaker 1: That's more people than died at the Battle of the Somme.
[35:52] Speaker 1: Maybe that's an alarmist number, but it certainly gives a
[35:56] Speaker 1: sense of what's at stake. Sometimes it's a matter of
[36:00] Speaker 1: life and death, a lot of death, and even if
[36:06] Speaker 1: it isn't, it's about truth and truth matters. One of
[36:13] Speaker 1: the data Collada team, Joe Simmons, has been reflecting about
[36:17] Speaker 1: the way bad science, both the fakes and the sloppy stuff,
[36:21] Speaker 1: distorts our view of reality and perverts the scientific process.
[36:27] Speaker 1: Flawed analysis tends to produce more interesting results than careful stuff.
[36:33] Speaker 1: Fake data absolutely guarantees those interesting results. Just as Dawson
[36:38] Speaker 1: seemed to be able to dig up something amazing every
[36:41] Speaker 1: time he went to a site, an influential portion of
[36:45] Speaker 1: our literature is effectively a made up story. Joe Simmons
[36:49] Speaker 1: told The New Yorker A field cannot reward truth if
[36:54] Speaker 1: it does not or cannot decipher it, so it rewards
[36:58] Speaker 1: other things instead, interestingness, novelty, speed, impact, fantasy, interestingness, novelty, fantasy.
[37:15] Speaker 1: Charles Dawson would have been right at home. Key sources
[37:25] Speaker 1: were Unraveling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh and the Piltdown
[37:31] Speaker 1: Man Hoax Case Closed by Miles Russell. For a full
[37:35] Speaker 1: list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford
[37:38] Speaker 1: dot com. Cautionary Tales as written by me, Tim Harford
[37:53] Speaker 1: and Andrew Wright, Alice Vines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced
[37:57] Speaker 1: by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and
[38:00] Speaker 1: original music of the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound
[38:04] Speaker 1: design is by Carlos san Juan at Brain Audio. Ben
[38:09] Speaker 1: daff Haffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice
[38:13] Speaker 1: talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough and Sarah
[38:17] Speaker 1: Jupp as Sam and Roe, Jamal Westman and Ruthers Wright.
[38:21] Speaker 1: The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
[38:24] Speaker 1: of Jacob Weisberg, Gretta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
[38:29] Speaker 1: Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Autionary Tales is
[38:35] Speaker 1: a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardore Studios
[38:39] Speaker 1: in London by Tom Barry. If you like the show,
[38:43] Speaker 1: please remember to share rate band review. It really makes
[38:46] Speaker 1: a difference to us and if you want to hear
[38:47] Speaker 1: the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on
[38:51] Speaker 1: the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm,
[38:55] Speaker 1: slash plus

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