November 28, 2025 • 38 mins
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.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. In his office under the Great Gothic vaults of
London's Natural History Museum, Arthur Woodward was opening the mail
and found a note from his friend Charles Dawson, postmarked
(00:38):
the previous day Valentine's Day, nineteen twelve. Woodward was the
keeper of the museum's geology department and a notable figure
in British science. Dawson, a country lawyer, was an amateur
geologist with a growing reputation of his own. His letter
began with small talk the latest news on Sir Arthur
(01:01):
Conan Doyle's new book Idea. Dawson knew Conan Doyle personally,
but then Dawson turned to Moore magnificant matters. Some workmen
had been digging in the soils of Piltdown, a few
miles away from Dawson's home on the South Coast, and
they found a fossilized fragment of a human skull. It
(01:24):
might be something pretty special, so would Arthur Woodward care
to visit the site and take a look. He would.
Over the months that followed, Dawson and Woodward would supervise
digs in the flint beds of Piltdown, piecing together bone
fragments that would change our understanding of the world and
(01:47):
how humans took their place in it. The discovery became
known as Piltdown Man, the most famous, most earth shaking
missing link in the evolutionary chain connecting modern humans and
their ape like ancestors. Piltdown Man had a thick, but
otherwise human seeming skull, big cranium, steep forehead. The lower
(02:13):
jaw was more like that of an ape. A tooth
was found two halfway between ape and human. It was
truly an astonishing discovery. There were some doubters at the time.
Were these fragments really from the same primate or might
there somehow be a human skull and an ape jaw
(02:36):
in the same flinty gravel, because apart from that tooth,
it did look a bit like a human skull and
an ape jaw. But a few years later Dawson found
similar fossils a couple of miles away. They became known
as pilt Down two. Their discovery surely proved that pilt
(02:56):
Down one couldn't possibly be an accidental jumble of ape
and human, because how could the same accidental jumble occur
twice on two different sites. Although the amateur paleontologist Charles
Dawson had been the one to find the fossils that
pilt Down two. He died before he had a chance
(03:19):
to join Arthur Woodward in announcing that discovery, so Woodward
was left to carry the scientific torch and receive the
glory and glory there was. Woodward would become Sir Arthur Woodward,
a Knight Commander of the British Empire, a recipient of
(03:41):
the Royal Society's Gold Medal, the Liel Medal, the Lynneian Medal,
the Thompson Medal, and many other honors beside, all just
rewards for his skill, dedication, and prodigious scientific output, but
also surely rewards for his role in discovering evolution's first
(04:04):
true missing link, pilt Down Man. After he retired, so
Arthur Woodward mused that the discovery at Piltdown had been
the most important thing that ever happened in my life.
A lovely thought, but it wasn't a discovery, and it
(04:27):
didn't just happen. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to
cautionary tales. It was July nineteen fifty three when Joseph
(05:03):
Weiner first had a chance to handle the Piltdown Man
relics deep insid side London's Natural History Museum. It was
a breathtaking moment. Weiner was a young high flier professor
of physical anthropology at Oxford at the age of just
thirty eight, which meant that when the discovery of Piltdown
(05:26):
Man had been announced forty one years earlier, Weiner hadn't
even been born. But of course he knew all about
Piltdown Man. Everybody did. This was the most famous human
fossil ever found, even if it was proving ever more
of a headache to scientists. The problem was this, Dawson
(05:51):
and Woodward had pieced together the fragments from the Piltdown
flints to reveal a creature with a primitive jaw but
a modern skull and therefore an advanced brain. This supported
the so called brain first hypothesis that are crimate ancestors
had evolved into humans by developing large brains, other changes
(06:15):
such as a smaller jaw, had come later. Why was
that a problem, because every time a subsequent fossil was discovered,
it suggested the opposite pattern that proto humans had first
developed a human jaw and a human diet, and only
later had developed a human skull and a human brain.
(06:38):
Piltdown Man didn't fit. Young anthropologists, paleontologists, and biologists had
devoted their careers to trying to figure it out. Later
that day, at a grand summer banquet near the museum,
Weiner had the chance to sit next to Kenneth Oakley,
(07:02):
the man who was now the guardian of the Piltdown
Bones at the museum. There was such a mystery, mused,
and such a shame that the Piltdown bones were an
isolated discovery. In year upon year of looking, researchers had
never found another bone of interest at the Piltdown site.
(07:23):
Then Winer wandered out loud to Oakley, what about Piltdown two?
Why hadn't that site been more fully explored? Funny thing,
replied Oakley, nobody actually knows exactly where the pilt Down
two site is. It was common enough to keep such
matters confidential so that tourists and scavengers didn't descend on
(07:47):
the site and ruin it. But in this case the
details were more than confidential. They were lost to history.
Well how could that be, asked Winer? Above the hubbub
of conversation and the clinking of cutlery. Oakley explained that
Woodward presented the pilt Down two discoveries after Dawson was dead.
(08:09):
The precise location was never mentioned in correspondence between them.
Maybe Dawson had died without telling him. Woodward had certainly
never recorded the site's location. Strange, yes, thought Weiner, very strange.
(08:30):
The Piltdown discovery had been viewed with some skepticism until
pilt Down Two seemed to provide confirmation. Now it turns
out that the pilt Down two fossils simply appeared at
the Natural History Museum from well, from out of nowhere.
Convenient that that hot summer night, Weiner drove back to Oxford.
(08:56):
It was after midnight when he got home. He couldn't sleep.
His mind just kept turning and turning over and over.
The next morning, Winer was examining casts of built down
man in his lab. Freed from preconceptions, he tried to
look directly at what was in front of him. It
(09:17):
looked like a human skull and an ape jaw, and
these strange molar teeth, part ape and part human. In fact,
it was really only the teeth that suggested any link
between the jaw and skull. Under a powerful magnifying lens,
(09:37):
Winer examined a tooth, the pattern of where was a
bit odd. Before long he had obtained an ape tooth
from Oxford's anatomy department, grabbed a file and a clamp,
and began experimenting. It was astonishing how easy it was
(10:01):
to file the ape tooth down to look exactly like
the piltdown fossil. Discussed his doubts with a colleague. There's
another funny thing. The bones with a deep rich color
of dark chocolate, stained with rust from the iron rich flints.
(10:23):
But a few years before Oakley himself had drilled into
the bones to get a chemical sample, and had noted
in his write up that the brown stain was completely superficial.
The bones were bright white underneath. To an already suspicious Whiner,
(10:44):
that was odd too. No, they decided to pick up
the phone and call Kenneth Oakley in his office under
the great Gothic vaults of London's Natural History Museum. Kenneth
Oakley picked up the telephone. He was sitting not far
(11:06):
from where his predecessor, Arthur Woodward had opened the letter
from Charles Dawson. Dawson's letter to Woodward had begun the
remarkable story of Piltdown Man. The phone call from Oxford
to Oakley would end that story as we know it.
Winer and his colleague told Oakley that Piltdown Man was
(11:29):
nothing more than a fake. Oakley was stunned. Then Winer's
colleague asked him to drop everything, go down to the
museum's storerooms with a microscope and examine the Piltdown moler
for signs of artificial abrasion had it been filed down.
(11:51):
An hour later he called them back. They were right,
There was absolutely no doubt about it. Over the following
weeks and then months, further tests established unnatural patterns of
wear on the fossils. The latest most accurate chemical dating
(12:11):
test was used, demonstrating that the Piltdown skull, the Piltdown
jaw fossils from the Piltdown two site, all of them
were modern, a few hundred years old at best, and
the chocolate brown iron staining wasn't iron, It was an
artificial stain, or, in the case of the tooth, was
(12:32):
a layer of paint Van Dyke brown. Over the following year,
a thorough investigation scrutinized every single discovery associated with piltdown
the fossils various tools, a total of forty different specimens
from three different sites in the area, and concluded that
(12:56):
every single one of them was a fake. Each individual
forgery had been bold and simple. Collectively, they had been
devastatingly convincing, and the deception had been more ambitious and
elaborate than Joseph Weiner had dreamed. But who was the fraudster?
(13:19):
Weiner's astonishing discovery set off a frenzied cottage industry of speculation.
Had it been Dawsome, the man who claimed to find
the fossils, or Woodward, who did so much to promote
them and in doing so, reaped the glory. Or were
they both the victims of a cruel hoax by some
(13:40):
third party Cautionary tales will be back after the break
ten years ago, I kept bumping into policy wonks discussing
(14:02):
an exciting new idea. Exciting to policy wonks anyway. A
recent peer reviewed article five behavioral scientists reporting the results
of several different experiments had found that if you want
somebody to truthfully fill in a form such as a
tax return or an insurance claim. Then don't get them
(14:22):
to sign the form at the end saying they were honest.
Get them to sign at the beginning promising that they
will be honest, clever, and that could save real money.
Imagine collecting more taxes simply by getting people to sign
at the top of their tax return, nudging them into
telling the truth about their income. The UK's Behavioral Insights Team,
(14:48):
better known as the Nudge Unit, leapt into action, designing
a controlled experiment on behalf of the government of Guatemala.
Three million tax returns. Later, the idea didn't work. Researchers
at the Nudge Unit were left scratching their heads, much
like the paleontologists who kept finding fossils that would die
(15:09):
at first, not brain first. What had they got wrong?
And then came the Joseph Weiner moment. Three psychologists Joe Simmons,
Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonson wrote a website together under
the jokey name data Colada. Usually, they poked fun at
(15:31):
sloppy research methods in social science, for example, using some
dubious statistical techniques that were all too common in the field.
That data Klada team demonstrated that listening to the song
when I'm sixty four by the Beatles makes you a
year and a half younger unbelievable. Clearly, not even the
(15:54):
Beatles are quite that brilliant, but the point was well made.
If the standard techniques in psychology and marketing research could
produce that sort of nonsense, the standard techniques needed to
be drastically improved. Sometimes, however, the Data Colada team found
themselves dealing not with sloppy practice, but with fraud. When Simmons, Nelson,
(16:20):
and Simonson looked into that sign at the top academic paper,
they realized that the data behind one of the experimental
studies made no sense. The data apparently described the behavior
of insurance company customers reporting their vehicle mileage. On closer inspection,
it didn't look anything like real mileage data, and it
(16:43):
looked exactly like what you'd get if you used Microsoft
ex Cells randomization function. But things got weirder than that,
because the investigators also found evidence that another study conducted
by different researchers and then published in the same article,
also contained manipulated data. The Data Colada team wrote a
(17:08):
blog post titled Cluster Fake, exclaiming that's right, two different
people independently faked data for two different studies in a
paper about dishonesty. To make matters even more interesting, two
of the academics involved, the ones most closely associated with
(17:32):
the manipulated data were superstars of behavioral science Dan Arielli
and Francesca Gino. If they had committed the fraud, this
was big news. As with pilt Down Man in the
nineteen fifties, there was no doubt that somebody had faked
(17:53):
the evidence, or in this case, two different people. The
question was who. By nineteen fifty three, when Joseph Weiner
and his colleagues comprehensively demonstrated that piltdown Man was a fake,
Sir Arthur Woodward was dead. Charles Dawson had died decades before,
(18:16):
before the pilt Down two find had even been announced.
One or both of those men were the obvious people
to blame for the lie, but there were others. Over
the years, a variety of books and essays have accused
twenty different suspects of the fraud. Some of them were
(18:38):
acquaintances of Dawson. In Hastings, he had been feuding with
the local antiquarian society, and several knowledgeable locals had good
reason to dislike him. Perhaps one of them had faked
the bones and planted them at the Piltdown site, where
Dawson would find them and embarrass himself. Then there were
(19:00):
people from Woodward's world of academic paleontology, friends, rivals, subordinates.
One of them was a huge champion of Piltdown man,
had he colluded with Dawson. Perhaps another was a zoologist.
In nineteen seventy, after his death, a trunk had left
(19:20):
in storage at the Natural History Museum was opened. It
contained animal bones stained chocolate brown like the Piltdown's skull
and jaw. A fraudster, or perhaps a skeptic trying to
understand a fraud, just as Winer had filed down, an
(19:41):
aped to understand the forger's methods. The most spectacular theory
about the Piltdown fraudster was published in the magazine's Science
in nineteen eighty three. The forger was none other than
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dawson's neighbor. Doyle might have
had the opportunity to plant fakes, and as a doctor,
(20:04):
he had the expertise to make them, But the case
against Conan Doyle a pro pritty enough for such a
gripping storyteller is nothing more than a good story. Not
only is there no evidence that he was involved, there's
no plausible motive either. The theory rests on little more
than a famous man's proximity to the piltdown site. No,
(20:28):
it's far more likely that the fraud was not perpetrated
on the discoverers of Piltdown Man, but by one of them.
The forgery was masterminded, either by Sir Arthur Woodward or
by Charles Dawson, or by them both faced with the
(20:49):
two fraudulent studies on dishonesty, both published in the same article,
the academic community faced a similar question. Some of the
fraudulent data was managed by dan Arielli and definitely not
his named co authors. Does that prove he faked the data?
He says he didn't, and it must have been faked
(21:11):
by the insurance company he collaborated with. But the insurance
company had no reason to make up data to support
dan Arielli's theory, and they've also denied Ariel's claim. Or
maybe there was some third party involved, an eager, unnamed
research assistant, a disgruntled insurance company analyst. It doesn't seem likely,
(21:35):
but there's no way to be sure. As for the
other study with fake data that was conducted by Francesca Gino,
did she fake the data or was it faked by
some other unknown party. She says she did nothing wrong.
Data Kalada sent a concise dossier of evidence to Gino's employer,
(21:58):
Harvard University, knowing that they would have access to detailed
data logs that might prove her guilt or her innocence.
Harvard spent eighteen months investigating, then suspended Gino without pay,
stripped her of her named professorship, and began proceedings to
(22:19):
evoke her tenure. There had been quiet mutterings about Arielli
and Gino long before Data Callada published their forensic expose.
As then again, there were mutterings about Charles Dawson, the
discoverer of the first Piltdown bone fragments, long before Joseph
(22:43):
Weiner's bombshell. Among the most intriguing was the Mayor's Field Map,
an old map showing the area near Piltdown. It was
published in a local archaeological journal in nineteen twelve, the
year of the Piltdown discovery. It's a strange thing, a
(23:05):
crude forgery claiming to be from seventeen twenty five, or
but full of anachronisms, the wrong spellings, the wrong typefaces,
roads that didn't exist until a century later, and many
other errors. And make of this what you will. On
the map, the word one hundred is misspelled as hundred.
(23:29):
The O of hundred has a tiny arrow pointing to it,
and that O. Maybe this is mere coincidence, but the
O just happens to be on the spot where the
first pilt Down fossils were found. Near the O on
one side are the words pilt down near the O.
(23:51):
On the other side, the map notes the location of
Forge Pits. Strange. The map was published without explanation and
with the label made by C. Dawson FSA. It's a
kind of treasure map. Either Dawson was publishing a prank confession,
(24:16):
or more likely, it's an anonymous accusation in code by
a local antiquarian who dislike Dawson and suspected foul play
at Piltdown. Dawson never protested about the map's publication. That
was wise at the time. The veiled accusation in a
(24:37):
niche local journal passed unnoticed by the wider world. Complaining
would only have drawn attention to it. But why didn't
the whistleblower say something more direct about their suspicions. That's unclear,
but it's no mystery why they preferred to remain anonymous.
(25:00):
Identifying a fraud can be a dangerous business. A few
weeks after Data Callada published a detail filled four part
expose of fraudulent data in work co authored by Francesca Gino,
Geno filed a lawsuit against Harvard University and also sued
(25:22):
Data Collada for defamation. She asked for damages of twenty
five million dollars. Cautionary tales will return after the break
(25:44):
dead men can't sue, which may be why so many
different authors have accused so many long dead Edwardians of
being the Piltdown fraudster. But in truth, it's hard to
look past Charles Dawson. In the book The Piltdown Man
Hoax Case Closed, the historian Miles Russell sets out an
(26:09):
honishing track record of discoveries by Dawson. In eighteen ninety one,
Dawson sent a large fossil tooth to Woodward at the
Natural History Museum, who received it with the light, believing
that it was a missing link in the fossil record
one hundred million year old mammal in Europe. It was
(26:29):
also a fake. Modern analysis shows that it was filed
down from another tooth, just as the piltdown tooth had been.
Dawson had access to fossils he could doctor, and now
he had the ear of Woodward, a dupe who trusted
him and would vouch for whatever Dawson found. In eighteen
(26:50):
ninety three, Dawson sent a rusty little iron statuette to
an expert at the British Museum. It was in the
Roman style, but the exciting thing, said Dawson, was that
it had been found at a known Roman iron working
site in Sussex. Yet it was made of cast iron.
(27:12):
Experts had thought cast iron wasn't made in Europe until
many centuries after the Romans left Britain. So this was
another missing link, a piece of evidence that fundamentally reframed
our understanding of Roman technology. Where exactly had it been
found again and by whom? Not to worry about those details,
(27:34):
said Dawson. It was a workman. Couldn't remember the chap's name.
It was a few years back. More recent chemical analysis
confirms that the statue is modern in eighteen ninety four,
Dawson published a remarkable drawing of a Neolithic flint axe
attached to a wooden halft. And it wasn't just a drawing.
(27:57):
Dawson had based his drawing on an earlier sketch by
a local hobbyist who discovered the axe and the haft
when a few years back the halft alas had crumbled
at the touch and all attempts to save it had
proved futile. So here was yet another missing link early
(28:23):
evidence of halfted prehistoric tools. If you regard a drawing
of a drawing of a disintegrated piece of wood as evidence,
that is, even the flint axe head has been lost,
if indeed it ever existed. Then there was an ancient
horseshoe of an unusual design, a spur, possibly Roman, a
(28:47):
neolithic hammer made of deer bone, very rare. It was
carved with precision, and we now know that's because it
was carved by a modern steel chisel. A Chinese bronze
bowl from the Han dynasty two thousand years ago, found
in a medieval structure in the English coastal town of Dover,
(29:09):
remarkable evidence of global trade. Where exactly were these things
found mister Dawson, and by whom and when? Ah, it
was all a few years back, I could continue. Miles
Russell certainly does, detailing a long series of Dawson fakes. Dawson,
(29:32):
it seems, was desperate for academic recognition, and especially he
yearned to be a fellow of the Royal Society. Perhaps
if he'd lived a little longer he might have succeeded.
After all, he had an astonishing track record of repeatedly
finding novel and important discoveries, the sort of things other
(29:55):
researchers just couldn't find, not if they tried for a lifetime.
What we can say for certain is that many of
these Dawson fakes have traits in common. There's a missing link,
something new and surprising, yet connected to what's already known.
There's often an academic dupe, somebody who's come to trust
(30:18):
Dawson and speak up in support of him. And there's
a persistent vagueness about the providence of the items where
the exact time, location, and finder of the discovery are unclear.
Dawson often sat on his treasures for several years before
announcing their existence. That gave him deniability if challenged and
(30:42):
it also made life difficult for anyone trying to follow
the trail and what have pilled down. It's the ultimate
missing link, of course, And if Sir Arthur Woodward was
innocent of the fraud, as seems likely, he was the
ultimate dupe. And there was the vagueness again. In his fateful
letter to Woodward, Dawson provided few details. In fact, Dawson's
(31:08):
ambiguous areas counts imply that he acquired the first pilt
Down bone fragment sometime between one and thirteen years before
showing it to Woodward. It was, shall we say, all
a few years back. As for pilt Down two, the
(31:28):
discovery of another human like skull alongside another ape like jawbone,
the discovery which dispelled all the doubts back in nineteen sixteen,
we don't know where it was discovered, and we don't
know when. The overwhelming probability is that it was never
discovered at all. The bones went straight from Dawson's workbench
(31:50):
to Arthur Woodward's office without Dawson having bothered to bury them.
If Dawson hadn't faded away and died, presumably he would
have started to craft one of his characteristically vague stories,
but without Dawson to spin his yarns pilt down to
two who was largely forgotten, it had served its purpose.
(32:16):
Francesca Gino's twenty five million dollar lawsuit against Data Calada
was dismissed in September twenty twenty four, thirteen months after
it was filed. Can't have been a fun thirteen months
for Joe Simmons, Leif Nielsen, and Yuri Simonson. The suit
against Harvard continues. In August twenty twenty five, Harvard filed
(32:40):
a counterclaim against Gino, suing her for defamation and alleging
she falsified court evidence. Gino maintains her innocence. As for
dan Arielli, everyone agrees that he published a study containing
fabricated data, but nobody can prove that he was the
one who fabricated it. He continues to deny wrongdoing. I
(33:04):
would never falsify any data on any experiment, he told
New Yorker. He told me the same thing. At no
point did I knowingly use unreliable, inaccurate, or manipulated data
in our research, And there's no solid proof that he did.
It's easy to chuckle at some of this stuff, So
(33:27):
what if It actually makes no difference whether you sign
at the top of a form or at the end.
So what if Charles Dawson did fabricate evidence of early
humans and Cretaceous mammals, and Roman cast iron and palelithic
axes and trade between China and Kent. But it would
be wrong to categorize Piltdown as merely a prank. It
(33:50):
was an astonishing, brazen forgery that had led paleontologists astray
for forty years. Countless hours were wasted, entire careers were
devoted to making sense of the Piltdown discoveries and what
they told us about human evolution, all in vain, all
(34:11):
because of a lie that was designed to advance the
career of the fraudster. The same can be said about
fraudulent research in modern science. Three million Guatemalan taxpayers were
enrolled in an experiment to test an idea that now
seems to have been built on lies. And if that
(34:34):
seems bad, what about medical fraud? A few years ago,
a Dutch researcher, Don Polderman's was found by his own employer,
Erasmus Medical School, to have used fictitious and knowingly unreliable
data Polderman's himself has apologized and said that the use
of the fake data was an accident. But this wasn't
(34:56):
a study about signing forms. It was a study about
how to do major surgery. Polderman's had published research recommending
the use of beta blocker drugs before some surgical operations
to lower blood pressure. After the problems with his research
became known, a new analysis of the evidence concluded that
(35:18):
beta blockers weren't just useless as a pre surgical treatment,
but potentially deadly. They raised the risk of post surgical
death by more than a quarter. That's even worse than
it sounds. Two researchers estimated that if the confusion about
beta blockers had delayed the adoption of best practices by
(35:40):
five years, the consequence was eight hundred thousand additional deaths.
That's more people than died at the Battle of the Somme.
Maybe that's an alarmist number, but it certainly gives a
sense of what's at stake. Sometimes it's a matter of
(36:00):
life and death, a lot of death, and even if
it isn't, it's about truth and truth matters. One of
the data Collada team, Joe Simmons, has been reflecting about
the way bad science, both the fakes and the sloppy stuff,
(36:21):
distorts our view of reality and perverts the scientific process.
Flawed analysis tends to produce more interesting results than careful stuff.
Fake data absolutely guarantees those interesting results. Just as Dawson
seemed to be able to dig up something amazing every
(36:41):
time he went to a site, an influential portion of
our literature is effectively a made up story. Joe Simmons
told The New Yorker A field cannot reward truth if
it does not or cannot decipher it, so it rewards
other things instead, interestingness, novelty, speed, impact, fantasy, interestingness, novelty, fantasy.
(37:15):
Charles Dawson would have been right at home. Key sources
were Unraveling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh and the Piltdown
Man Hoax Case Closed by Miles Russell. For a full
(37:35):
list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford
dot com. Cautionary Tales as written by me, Tim Harford
and Andrew Wright, Alice Vines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced
(37:57):
by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and
original music of the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound
design is by Carlos san Juan at Brain Audio. Ben
daff Haffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice
talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough and Sarah
(38:17):
Jupp as Sam and Roe, Jamal Westman and Ruthers Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
of Jacob Weisberg, Gretta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Autionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardore Studios
(38:39):
in London by Tom Barry. If you like the show,
please remember to share rate band review. It really makes
a difference to us and if you want to hear
the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on
the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm,
slash plus
Pushkin. In his office under the Great Gothic vaults of
London's Natural History Museum, Arthur Woodward was opening the mail
and found a note from his friend Charles Dawson, postmarked
(00:38):
the previous day Valentine's Day, nineteen twelve. Woodward was the
keeper of the museum's geology department and a notable figure
in British science. Dawson, a country lawyer, was an amateur
geologist with a growing reputation of his own. His letter
began with small talk the latest news on Sir Arthur
(01:01):
Conan Doyle's new book Idea. Dawson knew Conan Doyle personally,
but then Dawson turned to Moore magnificant matters. Some workmen
had been digging in the soils of Piltdown, a few
miles away from Dawson's home on the South Coast, and
they found a fossilized fragment of a human skull. It
(01:24):
might be something pretty special, so would Arthur Woodward care
to visit the site and take a look. He would.
Over the months that followed, Dawson and Woodward would supervise
digs in the flint beds of Piltdown, piecing together bone
fragments that would change our understanding of the world and
(01:47):
how humans took their place in it. The discovery became
known as Piltdown Man, the most famous, most earth shaking
missing link in the evolutionary chain connecting modern humans and
their ape like ancestors. Piltdown Man had a thick, but
otherwise human seeming skull, big cranium, steep forehead. The lower
(02:13):
jaw was more like that of an ape. A tooth
was found two halfway between ape and human. It was
truly an astonishing discovery. There were some doubters at the time.
Were these fragments really from the same primate or might
there somehow be a human skull and an ape jaw
(02:36):
in the same flinty gravel, because apart from that tooth,
it did look a bit like a human skull and
an ape jaw. But a few years later Dawson found
similar fossils a couple of miles away. They became known
as pilt Down two. Their discovery surely proved that pilt
(02:56):
Down one couldn't possibly be an accidental jumble of ape
and human, because how could the same accidental jumble occur
twice on two different sites. Although the amateur paleontologist Charles
Dawson had been the one to find the fossils that
pilt Down two. He died before he had a chance
(03:19):
to join Arthur Woodward in announcing that discovery, so Woodward
was left to carry the scientific torch and receive the
glory and glory there was. Woodward would become Sir Arthur Woodward,
a Knight Commander of the British Empire, a recipient of
(03:41):
the Royal Society's Gold Medal, the Liel Medal, the Lynneian Medal,
the Thompson Medal, and many other honors beside, all just
rewards for his skill, dedication, and prodigious scientific output, but
also surely rewards for his role in discovering evolution's first
(04:04):
true missing link, pilt Down Man. After he retired, so
Arthur Woodward mused that the discovery at Piltdown had been
the most important thing that ever happened in my life.
A lovely thought, but it wasn't a discovery, and it
(04:27):
didn't just happen. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to
cautionary tales. It was July nineteen fifty three when Joseph
(05:03):
Weiner first had a chance to handle the Piltdown Man
relics deep insid side London's Natural History Museum. It was
a breathtaking moment. Weiner was a young high flier professor
of physical anthropology at Oxford at the age of just
thirty eight, which meant that when the discovery of Piltdown
(05:26):
Man had been announced forty one years earlier, Weiner hadn't
even been born. But of course he knew all about
Piltdown Man. Everybody did. This was the most famous human
fossil ever found, even if it was proving ever more
of a headache to scientists. The problem was this, Dawson
(05:51):
and Woodward had pieced together the fragments from the Piltdown
flints to reveal a creature with a primitive jaw but
a modern skull and therefore an advanced brain. This supported
the so called brain first hypothesis that are crimate ancestors
had evolved into humans by developing large brains, other changes
(06:15):
such as a smaller jaw, had come later. Why was
that a problem, because every time a subsequent fossil was discovered,
it suggested the opposite pattern that proto humans had first
developed a human jaw and a human diet, and only
later had developed a human skull and a human brain.
(06:38):
Piltdown Man didn't fit. Young anthropologists, paleontologists, and biologists had
devoted their careers to trying to figure it out. Later
that day, at a grand summer banquet near the museum,
Weiner had the chance to sit next to Kenneth Oakley,
(07:02):
the man who was now the guardian of the Piltdown
Bones at the museum. There was such a mystery, mused,
and such a shame that the Piltdown bones were an
isolated discovery. In year upon year of looking, researchers had
never found another bone of interest at the Piltdown site.
(07:23):
Then Winer wandered out loud to Oakley, what about Piltdown two?
Why hadn't that site been more fully explored? Funny thing,
replied Oakley, nobody actually knows exactly where the pilt Down
two site is. It was common enough to keep such
matters confidential so that tourists and scavengers didn't descend on
(07:47):
the site and ruin it. But in this case the
details were more than confidential. They were lost to history.
Well how could that be, asked Winer? Above the hubbub
of conversation and the clinking of cutlery. Oakley explained that
Woodward presented the pilt Down two discoveries after Dawson was dead.
(08:09):
The precise location was never mentioned in correspondence between them.
Maybe Dawson had died without telling him. Woodward had certainly
never recorded the site's location. Strange, yes, thought Weiner, very strange.
(08:30):
The Piltdown discovery had been viewed with some skepticism until
pilt Down Two seemed to provide confirmation. Now it turns
out that the pilt Down two fossils simply appeared at
the Natural History Museum from well, from out of nowhere.
Convenient that that hot summer night, Weiner drove back to Oxford.
(08:56):
It was after midnight when he got home. He couldn't sleep.
His mind just kept turning and turning over and over.
The next morning, Winer was examining casts of built down
man in his lab. Freed from preconceptions, he tried to
look directly at what was in front of him. It
(09:17):
looked like a human skull and an ape jaw, and
these strange molar teeth, part ape and part human. In fact,
it was really only the teeth that suggested any link
between the jaw and skull. Under a powerful magnifying lens,
(09:37):
Winer examined a tooth, the pattern of where was a
bit odd. Before long he had obtained an ape tooth
from Oxford's anatomy department, grabbed a file and a clamp,
and began experimenting. It was astonishing how easy it was
(10:01):
to file the ape tooth down to look exactly like
the piltdown fossil. Discussed his doubts with a colleague. There's
another funny thing. The bones with a deep rich color
of dark chocolate, stained with rust from the iron rich flints.
(10:23):
But a few years before Oakley himself had drilled into
the bones to get a chemical sample, and had noted
in his write up that the brown stain was completely superficial.
The bones were bright white underneath. To an already suspicious Whiner,
(10:44):
that was odd too. No, they decided to pick up
the phone and call Kenneth Oakley in his office under
the great Gothic vaults of London's Natural History Museum. Kenneth
Oakley picked up the telephone. He was sitting not far
(11:06):
from where his predecessor, Arthur Woodward had opened the letter
from Charles Dawson. Dawson's letter to Woodward had begun the
remarkable story of Piltdown Man. The phone call from Oxford
to Oakley would end that story as we know it.
Winer and his colleague told Oakley that Piltdown Man was
(11:29):
nothing more than a fake. Oakley was stunned. Then Winer's
colleague asked him to drop everything, go down to the
museum's storerooms with a microscope and examine the Piltdown moler
for signs of artificial abrasion had it been filed down.
(11:51):
An hour later he called them back. They were right,
There was absolutely no doubt about it. Over the following
weeks and then months, further tests established unnatural patterns of
wear on the fossils. The latest most accurate chemical dating
(12:11):
test was used, demonstrating that the Piltdown skull, the Piltdown
jaw fossils from the Piltdown two site, all of them
were modern, a few hundred years old at best, and
the chocolate brown iron staining wasn't iron, It was an
artificial stain, or, in the case of the tooth, was
(12:32):
a layer of paint Van Dyke brown. Over the following year,
a thorough investigation scrutinized every single discovery associated with piltdown
the fossils various tools, a total of forty different specimens
from three different sites in the area, and concluded that
(12:56):
every single one of them was a fake. Each individual
forgery had been bold and simple. Collectively, they had been
devastatingly convincing, and the deception had been more ambitious and
elaborate than Joseph Weiner had dreamed. But who was the fraudster?
(13:19):
Weiner's astonishing discovery set off a frenzied cottage industry of speculation.
Had it been Dawsome, the man who claimed to find
the fossils, or Woodward, who did so much to promote
them and in doing so, reaped the glory. Or were
they both the victims of a cruel hoax by some
(13:40):
third party Cautionary tales will be back after the break
ten years ago, I kept bumping into policy wonks discussing
(14:02):
an exciting new idea. Exciting to policy wonks anyway. A
recent peer reviewed article five behavioral scientists reporting the results
of several different experiments had found that if you want
somebody to truthfully fill in a form such as a
tax return or an insurance claim. Then don't get them
(14:22):
to sign the form at the end saying they were honest.
Get them to sign at the beginning promising that they
will be honest, clever, and that could save real money.
Imagine collecting more taxes simply by getting people to sign
at the top of their tax return, nudging them into
telling the truth about their income. The UK's Behavioral Insights Team,
(14:48):
better known as the Nudge Unit, leapt into action, designing
a controlled experiment on behalf of the government of Guatemala.
Three million tax returns. Later, the idea didn't work. Researchers
at the Nudge Unit were left scratching their heads, much
like the paleontologists who kept finding fossils that would die
(15:09):
at first, not brain first. What had they got wrong?
And then came the Joseph Weiner moment. Three psychologists Joe Simmons,
Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonson wrote a website together under
the jokey name data Colada. Usually, they poked fun at
(15:31):
sloppy research methods in social science, for example, using some
dubious statistical techniques that were all too common in the field.
That data Klada team demonstrated that listening to the song
when I'm sixty four by the Beatles makes you a
year and a half younger unbelievable. Clearly, not even the
(15:54):
Beatles are quite that brilliant, but the point was well made.
If the standard techniques in psychology and marketing research could
produce that sort of nonsense, the standard techniques needed to
be drastically improved. Sometimes, however, the Data Colada team found
themselves dealing not with sloppy practice, but with fraud. When Simmons, Nelson,
(16:20):
and Simonson looked into that sign at the top academic paper,
they realized that the data behind one of the experimental
studies made no sense. The data apparently described the behavior
of insurance company customers reporting their vehicle mileage. On closer inspection,
it didn't look anything like real mileage data, and it
(16:43):
looked exactly like what you'd get if you used Microsoft
ex Cells randomization function. But things got weirder than that,
because the investigators also found evidence that another study conducted
by different researchers and then published in the same article,
also contained manipulated data. The Data Colada team wrote a
(17:08):
blog post titled Cluster Fake, exclaiming that's right, two different
people independently faked data for two different studies in a
paper about dishonesty. To make matters even more interesting, two
of the academics involved, the ones most closely associated with
(17:32):
the manipulated data were superstars of behavioral science Dan Arielli
and Francesca Gino. If they had committed the fraud, this
was big news. As with pilt Down Man in the
nineteen fifties, there was no doubt that somebody had faked
(17:53):
the evidence, or in this case, two different people. The
question was who. By nineteen fifty three, when Joseph Weiner
and his colleagues comprehensively demonstrated that piltdown Man was a fake,
Sir Arthur Woodward was dead. Charles Dawson had died decades before,
(18:16):
before the pilt Down two find had even been announced.
One or both of those men were the obvious people
to blame for the lie, but there were others. Over
the years, a variety of books and essays have accused
twenty different suspects of the fraud. Some of them were
(18:38):
acquaintances of Dawson. In Hastings, he had been feuding with
the local antiquarian society, and several knowledgeable locals had good
reason to dislike him. Perhaps one of them had faked
the bones and planted them at the Piltdown site, where
Dawson would find them and embarrass himself. Then there were
(19:00):
people from Woodward's world of academic paleontology, friends, rivals, subordinates.
One of them was a huge champion of Piltdown man,
had he colluded with Dawson. Perhaps another was a zoologist.
In nineteen seventy, after his death, a trunk had left
(19:20):
in storage at the Natural History Museum was opened. It
contained animal bones stained chocolate brown like the Piltdown's skull
and jaw. A fraudster, or perhaps a skeptic trying to
understand a fraud, just as Winer had filed down, an
(19:41):
aped to understand the forger's methods. The most spectacular theory
about the Piltdown fraudster was published in the magazine's Science
in nineteen eighty three. The forger was none other than
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dawson's neighbor. Doyle might have
had the opportunity to plant fakes, and as a doctor,
(20:04):
he had the expertise to make them, But the case
against Conan Doyle a pro pritty enough for such a
gripping storyteller is nothing more than a good story. Not
only is there no evidence that he was involved, there's
no plausible motive either. The theory rests on little more
than a famous man's proximity to the piltdown site. No,
(20:28):
it's far more likely that the fraud was not perpetrated
on the discoverers of Piltdown Man, but by one of them.
The forgery was masterminded, either by Sir Arthur Woodward or
by Charles Dawson, or by them both faced with the
(20:49):
two fraudulent studies on dishonesty, both published in the same article,
the academic community faced a similar question. Some of the
fraudulent data was managed by dan Arielli and definitely not
his named co authors. Does that prove he faked the data?
He says he didn't, and it must have been faked
(21:11):
by the insurance company he collaborated with. But the insurance
company had no reason to make up data to support
dan Arielli's theory, and they've also denied Ariel's claim. Or
maybe there was some third party involved, an eager, unnamed
research assistant, a disgruntled insurance company analyst. It doesn't seem likely,
(21:35):
but there's no way to be sure. As for the
other study with fake data that was conducted by Francesca Gino,
did she fake the data or was it faked by
some other unknown party. She says she did nothing wrong.
Data Kalada sent a concise dossier of evidence to Gino's employer,
(21:58):
Harvard University, knowing that they would have access to detailed
data logs that might prove her guilt or her innocence.
Harvard spent eighteen months investigating, then suspended Gino without pay,
stripped her of her named professorship, and began proceedings to
(22:19):
evoke her tenure. There had been quiet mutterings about Arielli
and Gino long before Data Callada published their forensic expose.
As then again, there were mutterings about Charles Dawson, the
discoverer of the first Piltdown bone fragments, long before Joseph
(22:43):
Weiner's bombshell. Among the most intriguing was the Mayor's Field Map,
an old map showing the area near Piltdown. It was
published in a local archaeological journal in nineteen twelve, the
year of the Piltdown discovery. It's a strange thing, a
(23:05):
crude forgery claiming to be from seventeen twenty five, or
but full of anachronisms, the wrong spellings, the wrong typefaces,
roads that didn't exist until a century later, and many
other errors. And make of this what you will. On
the map, the word one hundred is misspelled as hundred.
(23:29):
The O of hundred has a tiny arrow pointing to it,
and that O. Maybe this is mere coincidence, but the
O just happens to be on the spot where the
first pilt Down fossils were found. Near the O on
one side are the words pilt down near the O.
(23:51):
On the other side, the map notes the location of
Forge Pits. Strange. The map was published without explanation and
with the label made by C. Dawson FSA. It's a
kind of treasure map. Either Dawson was publishing a prank confession,
(24:16):
or more likely, it's an anonymous accusation in code by
a local antiquarian who dislike Dawson and suspected foul play
at Piltdown. Dawson never protested about the map's publication. That
was wise at the time. The veiled accusation in a
(24:37):
niche local journal passed unnoticed by the wider world. Complaining
would only have drawn attention to it. But why didn't
the whistleblower say something more direct about their suspicions. That's unclear,
but it's no mystery why they preferred to remain anonymous.
(25:00):
Identifying a fraud can be a dangerous business. A few
weeks after Data Callada published a detail filled four part
expose of fraudulent data in work co authored by Francesca Gino,
Geno filed a lawsuit against Harvard University and also sued
(25:22):
Data Collada for defamation. She asked for damages of twenty
five million dollars. Cautionary tales will return after the break
(25:44):
dead men can't sue, which may be why so many
different authors have accused so many long dead Edwardians of
being the Piltdown fraudster. But in truth, it's hard to
look past Charles Dawson. In the book The Piltdown Man
Hoax Case Closed, the historian Miles Russell sets out an
(26:09):
honishing track record of discoveries by Dawson. In eighteen ninety one,
Dawson sent a large fossil tooth to Woodward at the
Natural History Museum, who received it with the light, believing
that it was a missing link in the fossil record
one hundred million year old mammal in Europe. It was
(26:29):
also a fake. Modern analysis shows that it was filed
down from another tooth, just as the piltdown tooth had been.
Dawson had access to fossils he could doctor, and now
he had the ear of Woodward, a dupe who trusted
him and would vouch for whatever Dawson found. In eighteen
(26:50):
ninety three, Dawson sent a rusty little iron statuette to
an expert at the British Museum. It was in the
Roman style, but the exciting thing, said Dawson, was that
it had been found at a known Roman iron working
site in Sussex. Yet it was made of cast iron.
(27:12):
Experts had thought cast iron wasn't made in Europe until
many centuries after the Romans left Britain. So this was
another missing link, a piece of evidence that fundamentally reframed
our understanding of Roman technology. Where exactly had it been
found again and by whom? Not to worry about those details,
(27:34):
said Dawson. It was a workman. Couldn't remember the chap's name.
It was a few years back. More recent chemical analysis
confirms that the statue is modern in eighteen ninety four,
Dawson published a remarkable drawing of a Neolithic flint axe
attached to a wooden halft. And it wasn't just a drawing.
(27:57):
Dawson had based his drawing on an earlier sketch by
a local hobbyist who discovered the axe and the haft
when a few years back the halft alas had crumbled
at the touch and all attempts to save it had
proved futile. So here was yet another missing link early
(28:23):
evidence of halfted prehistoric tools. If you regard a drawing
of a drawing of a disintegrated piece of wood as evidence,
that is, even the flint axe head has been lost,
if indeed it ever existed. Then there was an ancient
horseshoe of an unusual design, a spur, possibly Roman, a
(28:47):
neolithic hammer made of deer bone, very rare. It was
carved with precision, and we now know that's because it
was carved by a modern steel chisel. A Chinese bronze
bowl from the Han dynasty two thousand years ago, found
in a medieval structure in the English coastal town of Dover,
(29:09):
remarkable evidence of global trade. Where exactly were these things
found mister Dawson, and by whom and when? Ah, it
was all a few years back, I could continue. Miles
Russell certainly does, detailing a long series of Dawson fakes. Dawson,
(29:32):
it seems, was desperate for academic recognition, and especially he
yearned to be a fellow of the Royal Society. Perhaps
if he'd lived a little longer he might have succeeded.
After all, he had an astonishing track record of repeatedly
finding novel and important discoveries, the sort of things other
(29:55):
researchers just couldn't find, not if they tried for a lifetime.
What we can say for certain is that many of
these Dawson fakes have traits in common. There's a missing link,
something new and surprising, yet connected to what's already known.
There's often an academic dupe, somebody who's come to trust
(30:18):
Dawson and speak up in support of him. And there's
a persistent vagueness about the providence of the items where
the exact time, location, and finder of the discovery are unclear.
Dawson often sat on his treasures for several years before
announcing their existence. That gave him deniability if challenged and
(30:42):
it also made life difficult for anyone trying to follow
the trail and what have pilled down. It's the ultimate
missing link, of course, And if Sir Arthur Woodward was
innocent of the fraud, as seems likely, he was the
ultimate dupe. And there was the vagueness again. In his fateful
letter to Woodward, Dawson provided few details. In fact, Dawson's
(31:08):
ambiguous areas counts imply that he acquired the first pilt
Down bone fragment sometime between one and thirteen years before
showing it to Woodward. It was, shall we say, all
a few years back. As for pilt Down two, the
(31:28):
discovery of another human like skull alongside another ape like jawbone,
the discovery which dispelled all the doubts back in nineteen sixteen,
we don't know where it was discovered, and we don't
know when. The overwhelming probability is that it was never
discovered at all. The bones went straight from Dawson's workbench
(31:50):
to Arthur Woodward's office without Dawson having bothered to bury them.
If Dawson hadn't faded away and died, presumably he would
have started to craft one of his characteristically vague stories,
but without Dawson to spin his yarns pilt down to
two who was largely forgotten, it had served its purpose.
(32:16):
Francesca Gino's twenty five million dollar lawsuit against Data Calada
was dismissed in September twenty twenty four, thirteen months after
it was filed. Can't have been a fun thirteen months
for Joe Simmons, Leif Nielsen, and Yuri Simonson. The suit
against Harvard continues. In August twenty twenty five, Harvard filed
(32:40):
a counterclaim against Gino, suing her for defamation and alleging
she falsified court evidence. Gino maintains her innocence. As for
dan Arielli, everyone agrees that he published a study containing
fabricated data, but nobody can prove that he was the
one who fabricated it. He continues to deny wrongdoing. I
(33:04):
would never falsify any data on any experiment, he told
New Yorker. He told me the same thing. At no
point did I knowingly use unreliable, inaccurate, or manipulated data
in our research, And there's no solid proof that he did.
It's easy to chuckle at some of this stuff, So
(33:27):
what if It actually makes no difference whether you sign
at the top of a form or at the end.
So what if Charles Dawson did fabricate evidence of early
humans and Cretaceous mammals, and Roman cast iron and palelithic
axes and trade between China and Kent. But it would
be wrong to categorize Piltdown as merely a prank. It
(33:50):
was an astonishing, brazen forgery that had led paleontologists astray
for forty years. Countless hours were wasted, entire careers were
devoted to making sense of the Piltdown discoveries and what
they told us about human evolution, all in vain, all
(34:11):
because of a lie that was designed to advance the
career of the fraudster. The same can be said about
fraudulent research in modern science. Three million Guatemalan taxpayers were
enrolled in an experiment to test an idea that now
seems to have been built on lies. And if that
(34:34):
seems bad, what about medical fraud? A few years ago,
a Dutch researcher, Don Polderman's was found by his own employer,
Erasmus Medical School, to have used fictitious and knowingly unreliable
data Polderman's himself has apologized and said that the use
of the fake data was an accident. But this wasn't
(34:56):
a study about signing forms. It was a study about
how to do major surgery. Polderman's had published research recommending
the use of beta blocker drugs before some surgical operations
to lower blood pressure. After the problems with his research
became known, a new analysis of the evidence concluded that
(35:18):
beta blockers weren't just useless as a pre surgical treatment,
but potentially deadly. They raised the risk of post surgical
death by more than a quarter. That's even worse than
it sounds. Two researchers estimated that if the confusion about
beta blockers had delayed the adoption of best practices by
(35:40):
five years, the consequence was eight hundred thousand additional deaths.
That's more people than died at the Battle of the Somme.
Maybe that's an alarmist number, but it certainly gives a
sense of what's at stake. Sometimes it's a matter of
(36:00):
life and death, a lot of death, and even if
it isn't, it's about truth and truth matters. One of
the data Collada team, Joe Simmons, has been reflecting about
the way bad science, both the fakes and the sloppy stuff,
(36:21):
distorts our view of reality and perverts the scientific process.
Flawed analysis tends to produce more interesting results than careful stuff.
Fake data absolutely guarantees those interesting results. Just as Dawson
seemed to be able to dig up something amazing every
(36:41):
time he went to a site, an influential portion of
our literature is effectively a made up story. Joe Simmons
told The New Yorker A field cannot reward truth if
it does not or cannot decipher it, so it rewards
other things instead, interestingness, novelty, speed, impact, fantasy, interestingness, novelty, fantasy.
(37:15):
Charles Dawson would have been right at home. Key sources
were Unraveling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh and the Piltdown
Man Hoax Case Closed by Miles Russell. For a full
(37:35):
list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford
dot com. Cautionary Tales as written by me, Tim Harford
and Andrew Wright, Alice Vines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced
(37:57):
by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and
original music of the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound
design is by Carlos san Juan at Brain Audio. Ben
daff Haffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice
talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough and Sarah
(38:17):
Jupp as Sam and Roe, Jamal Westman and Ruthers Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
of Jacob Weisberg, Gretta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Autionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardore Studios
(38:39):
in London by Tom Barry. If you like the show,
please remember to share rate band review. It really makes
a difference to us and if you want to hear
the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on
the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm,
slash plus
Host
Tim Harford
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Male Room with Dr. Jesse Mills
As Director of The Men’s Clinic at UCLA, Dr. Jesse Mills has spent his career helping men understand their bodies, their hormones, and their health. Now he’s bringing that expertise to The Male Room — a podcast where data-driven medicine meets common sense. Each episode separates fact from hype, science from snake oil, and gives men the tools to live longer, stronger, and happier lives. With candor, humor, and real-world experience from the exam room and the operating room, Dr. Mills breaks down the latest health headlines, dissects trends, and explains what actually works — and what doesn’t. Smart, straightforward, and entertaining, The Male Room is the show that helps men take charge of their health without the jargon.