August 15, 2020 • 20 mins
This 2013 episode covers Johann Beringer, the University of Wurzburg's chair of natural history and chief physician to the prince bishop in 1725. He was also unpopular, and some of his colleagues sought to discredit him. There are two versions of the story -- but which is true?
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Our Saturday classics over the last few
weeks have been on the heavier side, so we thought
we would pull something a little lighter out of the
archive today, and that is Johann Berenger's Fossils. Fossils kind
of goes in quotation marks there. Yeah. Uh. This is
a story that combines all of the key ingredients personality conflicts,
(00:24):
a hoax, and the delightful explanations that people came up
with for how to explain fossils before humanity had actually
worked out the science there. This originally came out on
April Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:55):
My name is Holly Fry and I am Tracy V. Wilson,
and today we're going to a little bit about early
fossil study. Yes, when when we started on this podcast,
I was very sad that previous hosts had already talked
about the bone Wars, So I am glad that you
found a different, crazy fossil story for us to talk about.
(01:16):
It is It's one of those things that's often told
in um archaeology studies as sort of a cautionary tale
to some degree, but it's kind of a fascinating little story,
and the tale that's often told is not really completely accurate.
So what we're talking about today is Johann Berenger and
he was born Johann Bartolomas Adam Berenger in sixteen sixty seven.
(01:42):
He was the son of a professor, Johann Ludwig Berenger,
and Berenger was an active scholar. He eventually became the
chair of natural history at the University of Wurtzburg and
he was also chief physician to the prince Bishop of Wurtzburg,
and the prince Bishop's patronage enabled Old Barringer to study
a hobby subject, which was fossils. But unfortunately Barringer was
(02:06):
by most accounts rather arrogant and conceded, which kind of
led to the events that ended up unfolding. Right, So,
there were several theories about the origins of fossils at
the time. There was the spermatic principle, and that was
that the results of marine animals mating could escape into
the sea and sometimes evaporate into the atmosphere, fall down
(02:30):
as rain, and grow new fish in the rock crevices
where the fertilized eggs fell, which is delightful. So the
theory there is that the fish examples that you would
find in fossils were actual fish that had grown in
the rock because they had fallen from the sky as
fertilized eggs. There's the helio memory theory, which is that
(02:51):
raised from the sun could sort of leave a photo
imprint onto stones of the things that the light had
already touched, which is also lightful. It is, and it
makes me think of photography a little bit in some ways.
It's kind of a fascinating theory to be rolling around
in the early seventeen hundreds, right, the sun was painting
pictures on things. So the next was the plastic theory,
(03:13):
and that's similar to the spermatic theory, but with the
fossils spontaneously growing inside of rocks. People had that same
theory about other animals, like living animals too. Yeah, it
was that that was used to confuse me. Generation was
popular as so goose neck clams were spawning geese in
(03:34):
people's minds at time. So then there's the signature of God,
which was Brenger's favorite and it is mine too because
I want to call it the slart of oart Bast
theory if you have ever read The Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy, and that's that God carved out the images
of animals and plants into the rocks when he was
making the earth. And Berenger believed that fossils were quote
(03:56):
stones of a peculiar sword, hidden by the author of
nature for his own pleasure, i e. They were made
by a higher power, often just out of a sense
of delight, rather than occurring via these other principles that
were in discussion at the time. And so to set
that up, uh, that kind of sets up our story,
which is, as we said, there are two versions. So
(04:18):
we're going to start with the first version, which is
kind of the legendary version. And according to this version,
again he Baringer was a professor at the time, and
on May thirty one, seventy five, two or sometimes three
depending on the source, students brought him fossil samples um
and there were three samples. One had a three dimensional
(04:39):
image of the sun and two had worms or worm
like markings on them. But they were raised up, they
weren't embedded inside the rock. They were on top of
it like extruded. So he was immediately excited and puzzled
by these stones. Um. And between the first delivery at
the end of May and November of sevent more sample
(05:00):
fossils followed. Yes, the students kept bringing him samples, and
these contained all kinds of different images, including heavenly objects
like comets with tales and moons, and then even things
like Hebraic letters. Uh, there were plants, there were insects,
there were small animals. Things that we would probably recognize
(05:21):
pretty quickly couldn't happen because a lot of them involved
soft tissue that would normally be broken down in a
fossil situation. But Berenger was just super excited by all
of these discoveries, right, and we as we've talked about before,
he was pretty arrogant and had a high opinion of
his own knowledge. So this is sort of a pride
go with before the Fall kind of situation. Yes, So
(05:45):
he allegedly received somewhere around two thousand of these stones,
which he thought were legitimate things. Yeah, So he after
studying them over the course of several months. As they
were coming in, he said about writing what he believed
would be a masterpiece in lithography study these, which lithography
is what fossils were called at the time, not the
modern meaning. Uh. And his seventeen twenty six book, The
(06:06):
Wurtzburg Lithography was this masterpiece which he thought was going
to be kind of his own scientific opus. And the
book features illustrations of the stones, and it discusses their
possible origins, including the theories that we mentioned at the
beginning of the podcast. While he was working on the book,
rumors started to circulate that the stones that he had
(06:27):
were fake contributor created by contemporary hoaxters with the goal
of seriously embarrassing him because he was pompous and pretentious.
And in his book, because these rumors did start to
(06:48):
circulate before it was complete, he actually includes an entire
chapter about the hoax rumors. UH. And I'm going to
read a passage from it. It's a little bit lengthy,
but stick with us, uh, he says. Quote then, and
when I had all but completed my work, I caught
the rumors circulating throughout the city, especially among prominent and
learned men, that every one of these stones, which on
(07:09):
the advice of wise men, I proposed to expound in
a published treatise, were quote recently sculpted by hand, made
to look as though at different periods they had been
resurrected from a very old burial and sold to me
as one indifferent to fraud and caught up in the
blind greed of curiosity. Further that I, once deceived, in
my wretched turn, was deluding the world and trying to
(07:31):
sell new hoaxes as genuine antiques to the silent laughter
of prudent souls. I was shocked beyond words to learn
that the authors of this atrocious calumny were two men,
perhaps best described as a pair of antagonists whose names
I have reason to protect at present, men with whom
I was closely associated in numerous functions former colleagues in
the academic society. He went on in this whole chapter
(07:55):
about the hoax rumors to say, our idiomorphic stones are
not the handwrought products of recent artistry, as some persons
have shamelessly pretended and attempted to pedal to the public
by widespread rumor and gossip. So the two men he
keeps referring to but not naming are a geographer, ja
(08:16):
Ignance Roderick, who was a professor of geography, algebra and
analysis at the University of Wurzburg and a historian, George
van Eckhard, who was privy counselor and librarian to the
court and the university. Uh. But the hoax rumors, of course,
were indeed true. So he became so embarrassed, according to
(08:36):
the legend, when he found a stone that had his
name carved on it just as the book was rolling
off the presses and into the hands of the public.
And he was allegedly so chagrined at this and it
having having been pranked by students, that he tried to
buy up every copy of the book in existence and
bankrupted himself and died soon after the ordeal in misery
(08:58):
and destitution. So that's sort of legendary version of the story. Yes,
that's the extremely cautionary tale of a fossil hoax, and
the real story does have some seeds of truth in
that version, but there are some wide swings into the
realm of falsehood as well. The dates for the stones
being presented to Berenger in the publication of his book
(09:19):
R and D correct, But the mock nations of the
hoax and the manner in which it was revealed and
what happened post discovery are quite different, and the real
story was actually revealed in court documents and transcripts that
were found in the Votzburg State Archives. Dr Heinrich Kirshner
is recognized as the person who discovered these items in
(09:41):
although Melvin E. Yawn and Daniel J. Wolfe, who produced
the annotated and translated work of Berenger's book, are the
people that are cited with doing so. More often, Yawn
and wolf themselves cite Kirshner's work, and the story that's
told in the transcripts is really one and of academic envy.
(10:01):
It's kind of just a drama that's playing out among
colleagues that are just kind of have vendetta's against one
another and have a jealousy at the heart of their relationship.
Uh Berenger did take students with him to dig for fossils,
and there were three in particular that were involved in
this particular episode. One was seventeen year old Christian Zonger
(10:23):
and two brothers, Nicholas who was eighteen and Valentine who
was fourteen Hayne. It turns out that the prank was
not something that they thought up themselves. It was a
plan on the parts of Jay Ignatz, Roderick, and George
vont Eckhart to use Berenger's own obstinates against him. Roderick
and Eckhart had apparently hired Zonga to polish stones for
(10:47):
them that Roderick had carved and sort of aged them
a little bit, and then Zonger would plant them in
dig sites, but some were also handed off to a
stone cutter's assistant to sell to Berenger, though he had
accidentally found them at sites, or as though he had
come into possession of them, kind of to support the
idea that it was natural by having these things come
(11:09):
from multiple sources instead of one stream of supply, which
might look suspicious, right, And part of the reason that
he was convinced that these fossil samples were the work
of God was the inclusion on some of the stones
of language that put them outside the natural imprint theory. Right.
While animals and plants happen in nature, letters don't. So
(11:31):
that's part of why Berenger, who was already a little
predisposed to think that these were divine creations, that just
supported that theory as far as he was concerned, rather
than dismissing the validity of the fossils as some people
might have approached them. Right, So, because the samples substantiated
his theories of fossils, of where fossils came from, as
(11:53):
cognitive bias kind of led him down the path of
words mean they're real instead of words mean they're fake. Yeah,
so he fell right into the trap set by his
fellow academics. And as berenger sample set grew and he
started working on his book in earnest Roderick and Eckart
apparently began circulating the hoax rumor because they were afraid
that if Berenger published the work without the hoax being revealed,
(12:16):
they could somehow be connected to the findings and would
be ruined along with their colleague. They were starting to
think that if he went ahead and published it, the
entire university would kind of be embarrassed, and they would
be embarrassed, and whether or not they were implicated as hoaxters,
it could be just a really bad scene. So they
didn't want him to publish the book. Now it was
(12:37):
partially covering their own behind. At this point. There's some
dispute as to how he was finally convinced that this
was a hoax. It is possible that he found a
rock with his name on it, but no such rock
(12:58):
has ever been recovered, and some accounts suggest that Roderick
and Eckhart had finally thought that things had gone too
far and that they outright told Berenger that the stones
were fakes, but he wouldn't believe their confession because he
was so convinced at that point. There's also a theory
that the church bishop was involved in convincing him of
the truth. This is a part of the story that
(13:20):
hasn't ever really been clear, and it's not referenced in
the court proceedings that we have to document it. Uh
And after the fraud was exposed, though, however, he was convinced,
Berenger took action, and on April thirteenth of seventeen twenty six,
there was a hearing at the Votzburg Cathedral chapter accusing
Roderick and Eckhart of trying to dop Berenger. So unlike
(13:41):
the legend story where he just is ashamed and tries
to hide the whole thing, he actually is pretty open
about trying to pursue his hoxters and bring them to justice.
Municipal trials followed all of this on April the fifteenth
and June eleventh of seventeen, twenty six. Uh. The young
aggers that were involved were questioned about their involvement, and
(14:03):
if you read the Yn and Wolf translation and annotation
of Berenger's book, the hearings are included in the appendices,
and all of the specific questions that they asked the
kids are in there, which we won't go through because
it really is kind of a long arduous Have you
ever carved a thing? Do you know how to carve?
I mean, they're really specific questions, and they go on
for quite a while. But the trial papers begin and
(14:25):
end rather abruptly. We've talked about other trials on the podcast,
and there's often like we get the opening arguments and
the discussion and the lead in this kind of just
starts with questions to the kids and ends after the
June eleven trial, which was also questions. It doesn't really
get to what happened like in deliberation and discussion. Uh,
(14:48):
it just kind of includes the questions and the answers
Roderick tried to shift the blame to the boys Berenger
had hired to help him with his digs, and the
Haynes really appeared to be innocent in the whole thing.
There was apparently a bribe that was offered to Zanger
also to blame the hang the Han brothers, but Zanger
refused to take it. Yeah, so it pretty quickly became
(15:10):
apparent that Roderick and Eckhart were in fact guilty, and
they were disgraced when that became obvious. So the very
thing they had hoped to avoid by h pointing out
the hoax and starting the hoax rumors came to fruition
in their trial. So Zonga was implicated, but it doesn't
appear that any real punishment came to him because he
didn't know that they were faking these stones. But he
(15:32):
did ask the Commission for assistance in collecting eight days
worth of wages that Roderick owed him for polishing stones,
which I just thought was sort of funny. But in
the midst of all of this, he's like, yeah, they
were faking it, and he still owes me money for
this fraud. I sort of loved it. So what was
the motivation for all of this, It's that the antagonists
(15:53):
wanted to ruin Barranger because quote, he was so arrogant
and despised them all. Yeah, it was just as simple
as that. I have seen some kind of less um
dependable sources that suggested that there may or may not
have been a love affair involved between Um, one of
(16:14):
the other academics, and someone that was connected to Berenger,
but I never found any verification of that. It really
does in most articles and discussions of it kind of
come down to you. They just thought he was an
arrogant jerk, and they just wanted to put him in
his place. Let's show that jerk face with our fake fossils. Yeah.
And while tales of Baringer's shame and demise completely colored
(16:36):
the apocryphal story, as you said, it's kind of a
cautionary tale of, like, you know, don't fall for things
that you just want to believe, because you'll end up
poor and embarrassed and and die and early death because
of your shame. He actually emerged from the hoax or
deal pretty well in his time, and he went on
to write two more books that were not about fossils. Uh,
so he really came out pretty well in the whole deal.
(17:00):
So Eckhart, on the other hand, died four years after
the trial, and he had actually been working on a
history of the Duchy of Wurtzburg for many years, but
after this all happened, he was denied access to the
library archives uh, and he never got to finish that work.
Roderick left Wurtzburg in shame. Berenger died in seventeen forty,
which was fourteen years after the hoax trial. And even
(17:23):
though the remainder of his life seems to have gone
pretty well, he has not been treated terribly well by history.
He's become kind of a symbol of gullibility and um
the foolishness of cognitive bias. In seventeen sixty seven, which
was twenty seven years after his death and forty one
years after the original publication and trial, bereng Jer's Wurtzburg
(17:45):
lithography was republished and forty four hundred thirty four of
Berenger stones, which came to be known as lugensteina, which
literally means live stones or lying stones, actually survive. There
were four hundred and ninety four were depicted in the book, UH,
and many of the collection that remains are at the
University Museum at Oxford. Berenger claimed that he had received
(18:08):
more than two thousand, but it's possible that that's a
bit of an inflated number. So you can go visit
some of these stones. Some of them are apparently in
the hands of private collectors as well, because they are
still significant in their in antiquity and continue to be
a cautionary tale. Even though he did not die in shame.
(18:28):
Immediately after he went after the people that tried to
make a fool of him, which I kind of love
about the story. Don't be a jerk or fall prey
to your own humorous is the moral of this story. Yeah.
So that is the story of Johann Berenger's Lying Stones,
which I sort of just love. It's one of the
stories that we wish there were even more records. There
(18:50):
are no like portraits of him, for example, but I
still just love that it's studied and examined and UH,
as we've said, it's become most like a fairy tale
told to archaeology students on how not to be duped.
(19:11):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday, since
this episode is out of the archive. If you heard
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something similar over the course of the show, that could
be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast
at i heart radio dot com. Our old hew stuff
works email address no longer works, and you can find
(19:33):
us all over social media at missed in History. And
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to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
(19:55):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, everybody. Our Saturday classics over the last few
weeks have been on the heavier side, so we thought
we would pull something a little lighter out of the
archive today, and that is Johann Berenger's Fossils. Fossils kind
of goes in quotation marks there. Yeah. Uh. This is
a story that combines all of the key ingredients personality conflicts,
(00:24):
a hoax, and the delightful explanations that people came up
with for how to explain fossils before humanity had actually
worked out the science there. This originally came out on
April Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:55):
My name is Holly Fry and I am Tracy V. Wilson,
and today we're going to a little bit about early
fossil study. Yes, when when we started on this podcast,
I was very sad that previous hosts had already talked
about the bone Wars, So I am glad that you
found a different, crazy fossil story for us to talk about.
(01:16):
It is It's one of those things that's often told
in um archaeology studies as sort of a cautionary tale
to some degree, but it's kind of a fascinating little story,
and the tale that's often told is not really completely accurate.
So what we're talking about today is Johann Berenger and
he was born Johann Bartolomas Adam Berenger in sixteen sixty seven.
(01:42):
He was the son of a professor, Johann Ludwig Berenger,
and Berenger was an active scholar. He eventually became the
chair of natural history at the University of Wurtzburg and
he was also chief physician to the prince Bishop of Wurtzburg,
and the prince Bishop's patronage enabled Old Barringer to study
a hobby subject, which was fossils. But unfortunately Barringer was
(02:06):
by most accounts rather arrogant and conceded, which kind of
led to the events that ended up unfolding. Right, So,
there were several theories about the origins of fossils at
the time. There was the spermatic principle, and that was
that the results of marine animals mating could escape into
the sea and sometimes evaporate into the atmosphere, fall down
(02:30):
as rain, and grow new fish in the rock crevices
where the fertilized eggs fell, which is delightful. So the
theory there is that the fish examples that you would
find in fossils were actual fish that had grown in
the rock because they had fallen from the sky as
fertilized eggs. There's the helio memory theory, which is that
(02:51):
raised from the sun could sort of leave a photo
imprint onto stones of the things that the light had
already touched, which is also lightful. It is, and it
makes me think of photography a little bit in some ways.
It's kind of a fascinating theory to be rolling around
in the early seventeen hundreds, right, the sun was painting
pictures on things. So the next was the plastic theory,
(03:13):
and that's similar to the spermatic theory, but with the
fossils spontaneously growing inside of rocks. People had that same
theory about other animals, like living animals too. Yeah, it
was that that was used to confuse me. Generation was
popular as so goose neck clams were spawning geese in
(03:34):
people's minds at time. So then there's the signature of God,
which was Brenger's favorite and it is mine too because
I want to call it the slart of oart Bast
theory if you have ever read The Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy, and that's that God carved out the images
of animals and plants into the rocks when he was
making the earth. And Berenger believed that fossils were quote
(03:56):
stones of a peculiar sword, hidden by the author of
nature for his own pleasure, i e. They were made
by a higher power, often just out of a sense
of delight, rather than occurring via these other principles that
were in discussion at the time. And so to set
that up, uh, that kind of sets up our story,
which is, as we said, there are two versions. So
(04:18):
we're going to start with the first version, which is
kind of the legendary version. And according to this version,
again he Baringer was a professor at the time, and
on May thirty one, seventy five, two or sometimes three
depending on the source, students brought him fossil samples um
and there were three samples. One had a three dimensional
(04:39):
image of the sun and two had worms or worm
like markings on them. But they were raised up, they
weren't embedded inside the rock. They were on top of
it like extruded. So he was immediately excited and puzzled
by these stones. Um. And between the first delivery at
the end of May and November of sevent more sample
(05:00):
fossils followed. Yes, the students kept bringing him samples, and
these contained all kinds of different images, including heavenly objects
like comets with tales and moons, and then even things
like Hebraic letters. Uh, there were plants, there were insects,
there were small animals. Things that we would probably recognize
(05:21):
pretty quickly couldn't happen because a lot of them involved
soft tissue that would normally be broken down in a
fossil situation. But Berenger was just super excited by all
of these discoveries, right, and we as we've talked about before,
he was pretty arrogant and had a high opinion of
his own knowledge. So this is sort of a pride
go with before the Fall kind of situation. Yes, So
(05:45):
he allegedly received somewhere around two thousand of these stones,
which he thought were legitimate things. Yeah, So he after
studying them over the course of several months. As they
were coming in, he said about writing what he believed
would be a masterpiece in lithography study these, which lithography
is what fossils were called at the time, not the
modern meaning. Uh. And his seventeen twenty six book, The
(06:06):
Wurtzburg Lithography was this masterpiece which he thought was going
to be kind of his own scientific opus. And the
book features illustrations of the stones, and it discusses their
possible origins, including the theories that we mentioned at the
beginning of the podcast. While he was working on the book,
rumors started to circulate that the stones that he had
(06:27):
were fake contributor created by contemporary hoaxters with the goal
of seriously embarrassing him because he was pompous and pretentious.
And in his book, because these rumors did start to
(06:48):
circulate before it was complete, he actually includes an entire
chapter about the hoax rumors. UH. And I'm going to
read a passage from it. It's a little bit lengthy,
but stick with us, uh, he says. Quote then, and
when I had all but completed my work, I caught
the rumors circulating throughout the city, especially among prominent and
learned men, that every one of these stones, which on
(07:09):
the advice of wise men, I proposed to expound in
a published treatise, were quote recently sculpted by hand, made
to look as though at different periods they had been
resurrected from a very old burial and sold to me
as one indifferent to fraud and caught up in the
blind greed of curiosity. Further that I, once deceived, in
my wretched turn, was deluding the world and trying to
(07:31):
sell new hoaxes as genuine antiques to the silent laughter
of prudent souls. I was shocked beyond words to learn
that the authors of this atrocious calumny were two men,
perhaps best described as a pair of antagonists whose names
I have reason to protect at present, men with whom
I was closely associated in numerous functions former colleagues in
the academic society. He went on in this whole chapter
(07:55):
about the hoax rumors to say, our idiomorphic stones are
not the handwrought products of recent artistry, as some persons
have shamelessly pretended and attempted to pedal to the public
by widespread rumor and gossip. So the two men he
keeps referring to but not naming are a geographer, ja
(08:16):
Ignance Roderick, who was a professor of geography, algebra and
analysis at the University of Wurzburg and a historian, George
van Eckhard, who was privy counselor and librarian to the
court and the university. Uh. But the hoax rumors, of course,
were indeed true. So he became so embarrassed, according to
(08:36):
the legend, when he found a stone that had his
name carved on it just as the book was rolling
off the presses and into the hands of the public.
And he was allegedly so chagrined at this and it
having having been pranked by students, that he tried to
buy up every copy of the book in existence and
bankrupted himself and died soon after the ordeal in misery
(08:58):
and destitution. So that's sort of legendary version of the story. Yes,
that's the extremely cautionary tale of a fossil hoax, and
the real story does have some seeds of truth in
that version, but there are some wide swings into the
realm of falsehood as well. The dates for the stones
being presented to Berenger in the publication of his book
(09:19):
R and D correct, But the mock nations of the
hoax and the manner in which it was revealed and
what happened post discovery are quite different, and the real
story was actually revealed in court documents and transcripts that
were found in the Votzburg State Archives. Dr Heinrich Kirshner
is recognized as the person who discovered these items in
(09:41):
although Melvin E. Yawn and Daniel J. Wolfe, who produced
the annotated and translated work of Berenger's book, are the
people that are cited with doing so. More often, Yawn
and wolf themselves cite Kirshner's work, and the story that's
told in the transcripts is really one and of academic envy.
(10:01):
It's kind of just a drama that's playing out among
colleagues that are just kind of have vendetta's against one
another and have a jealousy at the heart of their relationship.
Uh Berenger did take students with him to dig for fossils,
and there were three in particular that were involved in
this particular episode. One was seventeen year old Christian Zonger
(10:23):
and two brothers, Nicholas who was eighteen and Valentine who
was fourteen Hayne. It turns out that the prank was
not something that they thought up themselves. It was a
plan on the parts of Jay Ignatz, Roderick, and George
vont Eckhart to use Berenger's own obstinates against him. Roderick
and Eckhart had apparently hired Zonga to polish stones for
(10:47):
them that Roderick had carved and sort of aged them
a little bit, and then Zonger would plant them in
dig sites, but some were also handed off to a
stone cutter's assistant to sell to Berenger, though he had
accidentally found them at sites, or as though he had
come into possession of them, kind of to support the
idea that it was natural by having these things come
(11:09):
from multiple sources instead of one stream of supply, which
might look suspicious, right, And part of the reason that
he was convinced that these fossil samples were the work
of God was the inclusion on some of the stones
of language that put them outside the natural imprint theory. Right.
While animals and plants happen in nature, letters don't. So
(11:31):
that's part of why Berenger, who was already a little
predisposed to think that these were divine creations, that just
supported that theory as far as he was concerned, rather
than dismissing the validity of the fossils as some people
might have approached them. Right, So, because the samples substantiated
his theories of fossils, of where fossils came from, as
(11:53):
cognitive bias kind of led him down the path of
words mean they're real instead of words mean they're fake. Yeah,
so he fell right into the trap set by his
fellow academics. And as berenger sample set grew and he
started working on his book in earnest Roderick and Eckart
apparently began circulating the hoax rumor because they were afraid
that if Berenger published the work without the hoax being revealed,
(12:16):
they could somehow be connected to the findings and would
be ruined along with their colleague. They were starting to
think that if he went ahead and published it, the
entire university would kind of be embarrassed, and they would
be embarrassed, and whether or not they were implicated as hoaxters,
it could be just a really bad scene. So they
didn't want him to publish the book. Now it was
(12:37):
partially covering their own behind. At this point. There's some
dispute as to how he was finally convinced that this
was a hoax. It is possible that he found a
rock with his name on it, but no such rock
(12:58):
has ever been recovered, and some accounts suggest that Roderick
and Eckhart had finally thought that things had gone too
far and that they outright told Berenger that the stones
were fakes, but he wouldn't believe their confession because he
was so convinced at that point. There's also a theory
that the church bishop was involved in convincing him of
the truth. This is a part of the story that
(13:20):
hasn't ever really been clear, and it's not referenced in
the court proceedings that we have to document it. Uh
And after the fraud was exposed, though, however, he was convinced,
Berenger took action, and on April thirteenth of seventeen twenty six,
there was a hearing at the Votzburg Cathedral chapter accusing
Roderick and Eckhart of trying to dop Berenger. So unlike
(13:41):
the legend story where he just is ashamed and tries
to hide the whole thing, he actually is pretty open
about trying to pursue his hoxters and bring them to justice.
Municipal trials followed all of this on April the fifteenth
and June eleventh of seventeen, twenty six. Uh. The young
aggers that were involved were questioned about their involvement, and
(14:03):
if you read the Yn and Wolf translation and annotation
of Berenger's book, the hearings are included in the appendices,
and all of the specific questions that they asked the
kids are in there, which we won't go through because
it really is kind of a long arduous Have you
ever carved a thing? Do you know how to carve?
I mean, they're really specific questions, and they go on
for quite a while. But the trial papers begin and
(14:25):
end rather abruptly. We've talked about other trials on the podcast,
and there's often like we get the opening arguments and
the discussion and the lead in this kind of just
starts with questions to the kids and ends after the
June eleven trial, which was also questions. It doesn't really
get to what happened like in deliberation and discussion. Uh,
(14:48):
it just kind of includes the questions and the answers
Roderick tried to shift the blame to the boys Berenger
had hired to help him with his digs, and the
Haynes really appeared to be innocent in the whole thing.
There was apparently a bribe that was offered to Zanger
also to blame the hang the Han brothers, but Zanger
refused to take it. Yeah, so it pretty quickly became
(15:10):
apparent that Roderick and Eckhart were in fact guilty, and
they were disgraced when that became obvious. So the very
thing they had hoped to avoid by h pointing out
the hoax and starting the hoax rumors came to fruition
in their trial. So Zonga was implicated, but it doesn't
appear that any real punishment came to him because he
didn't know that they were faking these stones. But he
(15:32):
did ask the Commission for assistance in collecting eight days
worth of wages that Roderick owed him for polishing stones,
which I just thought was sort of funny. But in
the midst of all of this, he's like, yeah, they
were faking it, and he still owes me money for
this fraud. I sort of loved it. So what was
the motivation for all of this, It's that the antagonists
(15:53):
wanted to ruin Barranger because quote, he was so arrogant
and despised them all. Yeah, it was just as simple
as that. I have seen some kind of less um
dependable sources that suggested that there may or may not
have been a love affair involved between Um, one of
(16:14):
the other academics, and someone that was connected to Berenger,
but I never found any verification of that. It really
does in most articles and discussions of it kind of
come down to you. They just thought he was an
arrogant jerk, and they just wanted to put him in
his place. Let's show that jerk face with our fake fossils. Yeah.
And while tales of Baringer's shame and demise completely colored
(16:36):
the apocryphal story, as you said, it's kind of a
cautionary tale of, like, you know, don't fall for things
that you just want to believe, because you'll end up
poor and embarrassed and and die and early death because
of your shame. He actually emerged from the hoax or
deal pretty well in his time, and he went on
to write two more books that were not about fossils. Uh,
so he really came out pretty well in the whole deal.
(17:00):
So Eckhart, on the other hand, died four years after
the trial, and he had actually been working on a
history of the Duchy of Wurtzburg for many years, but
after this all happened, he was denied access to the
library archives uh, and he never got to finish that work.
Roderick left Wurtzburg in shame. Berenger died in seventeen forty,
which was fourteen years after the hoax trial. And even
(17:23):
though the remainder of his life seems to have gone
pretty well, he has not been treated terribly well by history.
He's become kind of a symbol of gullibility and um
the foolishness of cognitive bias. In seventeen sixty seven, which
was twenty seven years after his death and forty one
years after the original publication and trial, bereng Jer's Wurtzburg
(17:45):
lithography was republished and forty four hundred thirty four of
Berenger stones, which came to be known as lugensteina, which
literally means live stones or lying stones, actually survive. There
were four hundred and ninety four were depicted in the book, UH,
and many of the collection that remains are at the
University Museum at Oxford. Berenger claimed that he had received
(18:08):
more than two thousand, but it's possible that that's a
bit of an inflated number. So you can go visit
some of these stones. Some of them are apparently in
the hands of private collectors as well, because they are
still significant in their in antiquity and continue to be
a cautionary tale. Even though he did not die in shame.
(18:28):
Immediately after he went after the people that tried to
make a fool of him, which I kind of love
about the story. Don't be a jerk or fall prey
to your own humorous is the moral of this story. Yeah.
So that is the story of Johann Berenger's Lying Stones,
which I sort of just love. It's one of the
stories that we wish there were even more records. There
(18:50):
are no like portraits of him, for example, but I
still just love that it's studied and examined and UH,
as we've said, it's become most like a fairy tale
told to archaeology students on how not to be duped.
(19:11):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday, since
this episode is out of the archive. If you heard
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at i heart radio dot com. Our old hew stuff
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(19:33):
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