December 26, 2016 • 35 mins
The Piltdown Man is one of the world’s most infamous instances of scientific fraud, and it derailed the study of evolution for decades. How exactly did scientists in 1912 fall so completely for a hoax?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tray, Steve Wilson, and I'm Holly Frying. So the
Piltdown Man one of the world's most infamous instances in
(00:24):
scientific fraud, and in August of which is this year,
researchers published a paper in Royal Society Open Science that
concluded that it was the work of a single hoaxer.
So rather than rolling that into our Unearthed episodes, which
are just around the corner, we are doing an entire
(00:45):
Unearthed episode just on this. Uh. We're going to talk
about the pilt Down Man, how this hoax played out,
and what exactly was unearthed in this newly published paper
that inspired us to do the episode. Yeah. So that
we've gotten lots of requests for over the years. Yeah,
And for me, I've sort of had it on the
(01:06):
I'll get to that one day maybe list. And now
this is a time when I can be proud of
my procrastination because it enabled this cool thing to come out.
Well what what is? Uh? One of the things that's
intriguing to me is that I literally wrote this on
the list in August right that it has. I have
been planning to do this episode right now as of August,
(01:30):
and now it seems particularly relevant because it is such
a cautionary tale about not just uncritically observing absorbing things
that are announced as news. The whole time I was
working on this outline, I was like, this is this
feels like we just need a reminder so it makes
(01:54):
sense of why the pilt down hoax even happened in
the first place. We actually need to go all the
way back to Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin
of Species in eighteen fifty nine. The full title of
that particular writing is on the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of favored races
in the Struggle for Life, and this details Darwin's theories
(02:18):
of evolution by natural selection, which are at the foundation
of evolutionary biology. When he published this book, Darwin knew
that one type of evidence that would really support his
theories was in relatively short supply, and that is transitional fossils.
These are fossils that have some traits belonging to an
older species and some belonging to a more modern species.
(02:41):
And transitional fossils are physical evidence of an intermediary evolutionary
step that demonstrates how life is changing over time. One
famous example of a transitional fossil is archaeopterics. It's got
some features that are more like a reptile and others
that are more like a bird, and today it's viewed
(03:01):
as a transitional fossil between non avian dinosaurs and modern birds.
Darwin knew that people would try to discredit his work
because at that point in history, not that many transitional
fossils had been found. Archaeotrics, for example, would not even
be discovered until eighteen sixty, and a lot of people
(03:22):
at that point described it more as the first bird
rather than as a transitional fossil. Six of course, was
after his book had already been published, but Darwin actually
anticipated actually these exact source of discoveries. He explained in
the Origin of Species that this lack of evidence was
probably due to an incomplete geological record and not to
(03:45):
an actual absence of the fossils that would prove him Right.
After Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species, there
was a big focus on finding more transitional fossils. In particular,
people were hoping to find the missing link, that single
fossil that would conclusively demonstrate a connection between ancient apes
(04:06):
and modern humans. Today, we know about lots of transitional
fossils that detailed the progression of all kinds of life.
We have transitional fossils and the evolutionary family trees of
birds and fish and whales and horses and elephants and
on and on. I literally could just randomly name animals.
(04:27):
That's the thirty minute podcast episode is just Tracy saying
animal words. It starts to sound like the list of
what they were eating in Monty Python in the Holy Grail.
So in terms of human life, the idea of a
single missing link between ancient hominids and modern humans has
really vanished under the weight of a lot of individual
(04:49):
transitional fossils that add up to a human family tree
that's full of forks and branches. It is not a
single linear, one lane road that starts on a and
ends on human connected with one magical quote missing link fossil.
It's a lot more complicated than that. Yeah. Uh. In
nineteen twelves, though, the missing link would have been an
(05:11):
earth shattering, groundbreaking and career making discovery, and that is
what brings us to pilt Down Man. In February of
nineteen twelve, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at
the British Museum now called the Natural History Museum, got
a letter from Charles Dawson. In addition to being a solicitor,
Dawson was an amateur archaeologist, and he said he had
(05:34):
found something very exciting in some gravel beds and pilt Down, Sussex.
According to Dawson's account, he had noticed that a road
where he lived had been repaired with some odd flints,
and he traced the flints to their source, which turned
out to be a shallow gravel bed. While talking the
workers there, he learned that they dug up something they
described as quote like a coconut, and that they'd thrown
(05:57):
the pieces away. Dawson dug these fragments out of the
trash and found that they were part of a skull,
and over the next couple of years he'd gone back
to the pit and found several other pieces of skull
and jaw bone before finally writing his letter to Smith Woodward.
Uh these skull fragments and jaw bone, he described, looked
(06:17):
somewhat human, but not exactly, and his letter he compared
his discovery to a jaw bone that had been discovered
by a workman in a sand pit near Heidelberg, Germany,
in nineteen oh seven, which had been named Homo heidelberg insis.
In Homo heidelberg insis had some features in common with
Homo erectus and others in common with modern humans or
(06:40):
Homo sapiens. Dawson said his discovery quote would quote rival
h heidelberg Insis in solidity. Dawson and Smith Woodward kept
quiet about this find at first as they did some
more digging at the pit, and then they presented their
findings to a packed meeting of the Geological Society of
London on December eighteenth of nineteen twelve. They had an
(07:03):
ape like mandible or jawbone. Two of its molars were
in place and had significant wear, and then there were
pieces of the brain case of a skull, which seemed
a lot more human than the mandible did. They had
also found some stone tools and fragments of other non
human mammal fossils. Their coloring was comparable to that of
(07:24):
the gravel bed, and the conclusion was that these fossils
were at least five hundred thousand years old. Regarding their presentation, A. C. Hadn't,
writing in the journal Science, said quote Mr Dawson gave
an account of the finding of the specimens, the nature
and geographical and geological position of the gravel bed, and
Dr Smith Woodward described the remains in a most excellent manner.
(07:48):
Hadn't went on to write, quote, there could be no
doubt that this is a discovery of the greatest importance
and will give rise to much discussion. It is the
nearest approach we have yet reached to a missing link.
Probably few will deny that EU Anthropist Dawson I is almost,
if not quite, as much human as Simian. I'm just
gonna say we are guessing on how that is pronounced,
(08:09):
because it seems like no one knows. So your Anthropist
Dawson I is what they've named their find, and that
means Dawson's dawn Man, which is not self congratulatory at all.
I mean, I know, often scientific names of things are
named after the person who found or discovered or put
(08:32):
them in a taxonomy or whatever, but like Dawson's dawn Man,
it just seems particularly back Patty Yeah uh in nineteen
thirteen and nineteen fourteen, excavations continued at the gravel pit
where these first fossils had reportedly been recovered, and these
excavations unearthed some other evidence as well. There was a
(08:53):
canine tooth which had some features in common with ape
teeth and others in common with modern human teeth. They
also found a carved slab of bone that became known
as the cricket bat because it was roughly shaped like one.
Although Dawson did keep excavating, or at least saying he
was excavating, the start of World War One meant that
it took place on a much smaller scale. He sent
(09:15):
a couple of postcards to Smith Woodward saying that he
had found some other fossils and other sites not far
away from that first find, but otherwise this was really
the end of the discoveries that pilt Down, and then
Dawson died in nineteen sixteen. A lot of scientists were
very excited about the pilt Down discoveries. Understandably, not only
(09:36):
were they put forth as the missing link that was
so important to evolutionary science at the time, but they
had also been found in Britain, which meant that the
British Isles had played an important part in the evolution
of all of humanity. The British Empire was at this
point the largest empire and human history, controlling almost one
quarter of all of the land on Earth. So the
(09:57):
idea that Britain had also been a key stone and
human evolution carried this mix of pride and of wealth. Obviously,
these people were quite ready to believe that Britain was
actually the birthplace of the human at the human species.
So although it was not universally accepted, the pilt Down
Man played a major role in scientific thought about human
(10:20):
evolution for about the next forty years. More than two
d and fifty papers and monographs were published about it,
and it was cited in more than seventy publications. So
it was a pretty big deal. And it was also
completely made up. We're going to talk about after a
sponsor break. So after this announcement, many in the scientific
(10:45):
community just took Dawson and Smith Woodward's report to the
Geological Society of London at face value. The original pieces
of these specimens were locked away in storage for safekeeping,
but casts of them were made to share with researchers
who wanted to do further stuff. A A lot of
the early scientific debate about these specimens didn't even consider
(11:05):
the basic question of whether they were authentic at all. Instead,
it was about things like whether smith Wouldwards interpretation of
the skull was correct. He had made a reconstruction of
the skull based on nine fragments that had initially been found.
The resulting skull had a capacity of about one thousand
and seventy six cubic centimeters to other anatomists and anthropologists
(11:28):
disagreed about whether Smith Wouldwards reconstruction was accurate. Sir Arthur
Keith of Scotland was on one side of this debate,
and Sir Grafton Elliott Smith of Australia was on the other.
Keith made his own reconstruction, which had a capacity of
about fifteen hundred cubic centimeters, or about the same as
a modern human skull, which prompted Smith Woodward to revise
(11:49):
his original reconstruction. Smith, on the other hand, came to
different conclusions, insisting that the original one thousand, seventy six
cubic centimeters was a lot more correct. These all had
to do with basically how the skull pieces were lined up.
And what parts of the skull bones people thought they
were from. Like you think of your skull as one
(12:10):
solid piece, but it's actually several pieces connected by sutures.
So the question was whether these nine fragments of skull
were being correctly used to make a reconstruction, not whether
they were actually from a prehistoric human. There was also
a lot of talk about whether the canine tooth that
was found later was really part of the same mandible
(12:31):
or not, but there was no talk about whether any
of these pieces were actually genuine. Basically, a big chunk
of the scientific literature surrounding this fine just was credulous
and uncritical from the start. And to be fair, many
of the technologies that we used to authenticate the age
of fossils today were not invented yet and they would
(12:52):
not be for more than twenty years. And also a
lot of the other fossil evidence today that we know
about that shows that hominids developed more humanlike jaws before
they developed developed bigger brain cases, those had not been
discovered yet either, so they didn't really have things to
compare them to you. But even so, a lot of
(13:12):
people studying this fine simply took for granted from the
beginning that it was legitimate, and they framed their study
from there, Like the quote popularized by Carl Sagan, Extraordinary
claims like I found the missing link in a gravel
pit and pilt down require extraordinary evidence, and that just
was not present here. This uncritical acceptance that the piltd
(13:34):
Down Man was real was certainly not completely universal, especially
as time passed and people had more opportunities to study it.
For example, American zoologist Garrett Smith Miller published quote the
Jaw of the Piltdown Man in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections in
nineteen fifteen, and which he concluded that the skull fragments
did come from a real human skull, but that the
(13:56):
mandible came from an extinct species of chimpanzee. Writing an
American anthropologist, William K. Gregory later published an analysis the
molars which concluded quote, I believe that Mr. Miller is
fully justified in holding that the lower molars of the
pilt down jaw are those of a chimpanzee and not
of an extinct genus of hominity. As more analysis emerged,
(14:21):
there were also people who not only questioned whether this
work was quote scientifically justifiable, but also warned that all
this buzz and heightened expectations were dangerous. George Grant mcgurdy
had published a fairly credulous overview of the pilt Down
findings in nineteen fourteen, but by nineteen sixteen he had
not only revised his own opinions, but was also alarmed
(14:43):
at the state of scientific inquiry around the pilt Down Man.
In the journal Science, mcgourty outlined a range of doubts, criticisms,
and skeptical inquiries that had come in from the United States, Britain, France,
and Italy, among other places, and he included this warning quote.
Has not this dazzling combination blinded the discoverers and indirectly
(15:04):
some of their colleagues, even at a distance, because of
the high pitch of expectancy to which recent discoveries in
the prehistoric field have not, without reason contributed. Under the circumstances,
such blindness, if only temporary, would be pardonable in comparatively harmless,
but serious danger lurks in the possibility of its persisting
(15:27):
long enough to become an obsession and a hindrance to
future progress in this particular field, and that's exactly what
was happening. In spite of the growing body of skepticism
and criticism, the pilt Down man became a widely accepted
part of a body of scientific literature. Things started to
unravel a little about a decade after the pilt Down discovery. First,
(15:50):
in it was discovered that these gravel beds where the
fossils were found were not old enough to contain five
hundred thousand year old fossils. Whoops uh. Then, starting in
the nineteen thirties, paleontologists started finding other hominid fossils in
other parts of the world, and they seemed to suggest
(16:11):
an evolution of human life that was taking place primarily
in Africa and Asia. And as we noted earlier that
the jaws were becoming more human like before the brain
cases and not the other way around, it made less
and less sense that some critical moment in human evolution
had happened on some tiny islands off the northwest coast
of Europe, following a totally different pattern from what was
(16:33):
being discovered elsewhere. But even so, a sizeable chunk of
the scientific community carried on believing that the pilt Down
specimens were genuine. A number of chemical and Isotopic dating
methods started to be developed in the nineteen forties, and
in nineteen fifty three, Kenneth Oakley, then head of anthropology
at the British Museum, analyze the pilt Down Man's skull
(16:56):
fragments through fluorine dating, and the fragments were definitely much
newer than Dawson and Smith Woodward had said, and they
were way way too new to be the missing link.
The first test suggested that it was only fifty thousand
years old, not ten times that. Following Oakley's discovery, the
British Museum publicly announced that the pilt Down Man was
(17:19):
a fraud. And these flooring tests definitely were not perfect.
They showed that all the skull pieces were the same age,
whereas later analysis would show that in fact they were not,
and later on more refined dating methods would also determine
that the pieces were only about six hundred years old,
certainly not fifty thousand. But in spite of those shortcomings,
(17:42):
they were definite proof that the pilt Down Man was
not a real hominid fossil. Yeah. As our ability to
test things got better over time because we learned, so
did our ability to point out just how fake these
things really were. Further analysis showed the mandible was really
from a juvenile orangutan, and that all these pieces that
(18:05):
had been purported to be a person's remains were actually
meticulously altered to look genuine. They had been stained to
match the material in the gravel beds, but the stains
were not made of substances that were local to the area.
The molars had also been artificially worn down to like
natural and then other mammal fossils that were found in
(18:28):
the same area were actual genuine fossils, but they were
not from species that actually lived in pilt Down. So
this was not a case of somebody accidentally finding some
human bones near on a rangutan bone for some reason
and then drawing of logical but incorrect conclusion. It was
a deliberate hoax. The good news was, with the pilt
(18:51):
Down man out of the way, all of the other
fossil evidence that had been discovered in Africa and Asia
in the decades since then made a lot more sense.
There was no longer any lingering question of, well, if
humanity's origins are in this part of the world and
evolving this way, traveling in this pattern, what is this
other fossil doing way over here following a completely different model.
(19:15):
This was incredibly important in terms of the study of
human evolution. The pilt Down Man had become such a
dominant presence in the field that people were using its
existence to totally disregard legitimate fossil findings that strongly suggested
human origins in Africa. One of the foundations of scientific
progress is the ability to reassess your conclusions when you're
(19:38):
faced with new, compelling evidence. But the pilt Down Man
was such a juggernaut that people were disregarding that new
evidence instead. This was probably complicated by a conscious or
unconscious reluctance among at least some scientists to believe that
modern humanity rose in Africa, not in Britain. But the
(19:59):
bad news was that a lot of the world had
fallen for this hoax. It had impeded progress and perpetuated
inaccurate information for decades. On top of that, the revelation
that it wasn't real eroded the general public's belief in science.
In the words of Ernest A. Houghton of Harvard, writing
an American Anthropologists in ninety four, quote, what really worries
(20:23):
me is the revelation to a lady that is often
hostile to biological science, of calculated dishonesty on the part
of someone intimately concerned with a discovery of supposedly great
importance to the history of man. It is as shocking
is the proof that men in high places of our
own government have betrayed their country. Already, the press is
(20:44):
flooded with accusations by anti evolutionists that all of the
other evidence of man's origin from an ape like ancestry
has been deliberately faked by unscrupulous scientists. The fact that
the pilt down fraud is possibly and even probably unique,
will be very difficult for the public to accept. Before
you get too attached to the wise words of Ernest here,
(21:07):
I mean they really touched me. I feel like they
are applicable even still today. Uh. He also did a
lot of work combining race in criminology that was influenced
by the eugenics movement, and the a lot of that
work was pretty definitely racist. So as much as I
love these words that he has to say about how
(21:28):
damaging it was for this to be revealed as a fraud,
there are other factors of his work. So this is
not a uh an endorsement of him as a scientist
by us as podcasters who are not scientists. Uh. Yeah,
we can appreciate his insight in that moment without applauding
the rest of his body of work, for sure. Uh.
(21:51):
And with this finding now unquestionably shown to be fraudulent,
the focus then turned to piecing together who had done
it and why, And we're going to talk about that
after we first paused for a word from one of
our sponsors. In the years after the Piltdown Man was
shown to be a hoax, many many theories were put
(22:15):
forth about the potential culprits. A lot of the attention
has been on Dawson himself. After all, he was the
one who reported the findings of the first place, and
he was instrumental in the announcement and the initial investigations.
He may have hoped that such a profound discovery would
earn him admission into the Royal Society. A couple of
(22:35):
people who either knew or worked with Dawson were siting
side of his possibilities as well, including Samuel Woodhead and
Pierre Taliard de Chardins. The latter was the one who
actually found that canine tooth. Even though he played such
a huge role, most people did not suspect Sir Arthur
Smith Woodward, believing him to have been an unwilling dupe
(22:58):
or one of the intended targets to His reputation would
have been ruined if word had gotten out while he
was still alive. Sir Arthur Keith, whose paper on the
skull reconstruction we talked about earlier, was also suggested as
a suspect. One of the most famous suspects, at least
outside of the world of scientists, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
(23:19):
who knew Dawson had an interest in this type of
thing and lived nearby. In nine weird set of criteria
to say somebody is a suspect, I mean there were like,
apparently there were people who were like, he just wants
to destroy the evolutionists, right, that's some seriously circumstantial stuff
that's getting piece together. Flimsy circumstantial stuff. Uh in n s.
(23:42):
A trunk found in storage in the British Museum was
discovered to contain a number of bones, including some that
had been stained in a similar manner to the piltdown Man.
This trunk marked with the initials M. A. C. H
apparently belonged to Martin A. C. Hinton, who also amassed
quite a collection of other bones, fossils, and specimens. He
(24:04):
had been working as a volunteer at the museum in
nineteen twelve, and he became its keeper of Zoology in
nineteen thirty six. So naturally this brought up lots of
theories about what was going on with what was in
this trunk. One of the theories was that these bones
were Hinton's trial run, and that he had done this
and then planted the fossils in quotation marks to get
(24:25):
revenge on Smith Woodward, who had turned him down when
he tried to move his volunteer position back in nineteen
twelve into a paid one. However, not all of this
quite adds up. I had a hard time pending down
exactly why this was later debunked as being who had
orchestrated this, But his time at the museum started after
(24:49):
the first discovery at pilt Down, and he also had
expressed some skepticism at the fine being authentic. So another
school of ought is that the way these stained bones
that looked very similar to the pilt Down specimens came
to be in his suitcase is that he was trying
to replicate the coloring it pilt down to prove that
(25:12):
it was a fraud. The paper, published in Royal Society
Open Science this year, is an attempt to conclusively solve
this whole puzzle once and for all. The study involved
DNA analysis, dating analysis, spectroscopy, and high precision measurements of
the specimens, as well as studying three dimensional representations of them,
(25:34):
which is known as virtual anthropology. The DNA analysis confirmed
that teeth and the mandible were from an orangutan, probably
one born in Borneo, and that all of the orangutan
specimens that were part of this hoax probably came from
the same individual animal. Attempts to figure out whether there
(25:54):
are any missing orangutan specimens and local museum collections have
so far been unsuccessful, but it's also possible that somebody
could have bought an orangutan skull in an antiquarian shop.
A minimum of two, possibly three different human skulls were
used in the production of the skull fragments, and while
(26:14):
tests to figure out whether they were all the same
age were inconclusive, they were all subjected to the same
m O to make them look like fossils that could
have come from that gravel bed, and there was dental
putty used to hold the teeth in place and the
mandible and to hold the gravel and pebble plugs in place,
(26:35):
with these materials being similar to the sediment that was
at the pilt Down dig site, that this discovery of
dentil putty was not new to this research that was
just published, like people knew about the dentil putty way before,
which like continues to make me question why in n
(26:56):
nobody was like this looks glued on, right. I mean,
maybe it was just some really really skillful dentil putty use,
but I don't know. That's one of the many things
that makes me go, how ready were you all to
believe that the missing link was from Britain? Because that's
(27:18):
the only way all this works. And I think the
answer is very ready, extremely ready. The team concludes that,
given the consistencies in the m O and the limited
number of total specimens, the pilt Down Man was probably
the work of one forger, most likely Charles Dawson, possibly
trying to further his own scientific career, which given that
he died in nineteen sixteen, at the age of fifty two,
(27:41):
just four years after the first announcement clearly did not
quite work out for him. I had a whole conversation
about this episode with with my husband in the car
over the weekend about how, like, you know, a lot
of these different people have been put forth as potential suspects,
and a lot of them are are sort of dismissed,
and really all of these things are really circumstantial, Like
(28:03):
there's just there's even with all of this analysis, there's
still a lot of circumstantial evidence and guesswork and stuff
like that. But to me, the biggest strike against Charles
Dawson is the fact that he did die only four
years after this whole thing started, so any like many
of these other people who have been pointed out as
(28:23):
suspects lived for a whole lot longer, and and that
sort of raises the question of, Okay, what were they
after that never came to fruition? Right, Like Charles Dawson's
relatively early death makes it seem like whatever he was
after he didn't get and then he was never he
wasn't around to either further perpetuate it or be like,
(28:46):
you know what I made that up like that's it's
yet another piece of circumstantial evidence, uh in in the
Charles Dawson column. So all of that, though, may raise
the question why spend so much time and effort just
trying to get the bottom of who did this? And so,
in the words of the papers authors quote, solving the
(29:09):
pilt down hoax is still important now. It stands as
a cautionary tale to scientists not to see what they
want to see, but to remain objective and to subject
even their own findings to the strongest scientific scrutiny. That's
a piltdown, man. I love that episode. Thank you, Tracy. Oh,
(29:31):
you're very welcome. I'm I'm gonna totally admit I had
a very good time reading the vastly incorrect papers published
in the early nineteen teens about this finding from people
who were flat out wrong, and at the same time
I was really bad about it, Like uh we I
(29:55):
have often when we've done episodes about old medical history
or something like that, read you know, the old papers
from the time that that were published, and these, you know,
people very confidently espousing stuff that's wrong, just really wrong,
and that it makes me a lot matter this time
because it was wrong, and somebody did it on purpose
and it stood in the way of scientific progress for decades.
(30:20):
Makes me real mad. Yeah, we uh you and I
talked about off Mike, the fact that forty years is
a really long time when you consider like that is
the length of a career for a scientist in some cases.
And so there were probably people who were not willingly
even party to this sort of blindness. But we're proceeding
(30:41):
along on a career path that was basically complete blunder,
and they wasted their time and their scientific minds and yeah,
and wasted the greater whole of humanity's ability to learn
more about where we came from. And then it's by
total coincidence that between the day when I wrote this
(31:03):
on the calendar however many month months ago, and now
like now, there is such a renewed focus on like
the the putting out there of just fake wrong information
that is demonstrably wrong and it being accepted as fact. Ah,
(31:26):
do you have listener mail? I do, And it's also
about science. It is from Sarah. Here's what she says.
Sarah says, Dear Holly and Tracy, longtime listener, first time caller.
I love your podcast, But yesterday was downright spooky. I'm
a graduate student at the University of Washington, and I
was in my dungeon I mean sub basement lab, happily
listening to my backlog podcasts when your podcast about the
(31:47):
Orphans tsunami began. The reason this is spooky is that
I was collecting data about a landslide I think was
triggered by the earthquake. Right now, I am doing a
green size analysis of my slide and comparing it to
the devastated landslide that killed fifty people I have. I
have attached some pictures of my sieves and oven and
(32:07):
the field work back ho and my mentor where it
samples were collected. I continued with my work, which involved
running some errands well low and Behold, just as I'm
getting into the car to take my radio carbon samples
to the lab, you talk about radio carbon dating. I
would like to respectfully request that you, lovely ladies, please
remove the cameras you have following me around. This connection
(32:30):
between landslides and earthquakes makes sense when you think about it.
The shaking cause by an earthquake can destabilize otherwise safe slopes,
high topography, can also amp amplify and earthquakes waves, creating
an even stronger shaking north Widge north Ridge earthquake at
six point seven on the moment magnitude, we don't use
rictor anymore cause and estimated fifty thousand uh. It's the earthquakes,
(32:53):
but I think it might mean landslides. Here in the
Pacific Northwest, we are especially landslide prone at glaciers occupied
the area until very recently geologically, and glaciers tend to
leave very steep slopes because of the immense weight and
pressure inherent in a mile thick layer of ice. The
glaciers Impuget Sound especially contribute to our risk and because
(33:15):
of the large amount of loose sediment deposited, Combining loose
glacial sediment over steep in slopes and earthquakes could be
a recipe for disaster. You also mentioned in the episode
the silt deposits and tide flats that helped us identify
the tsunami events this summer. I had the good fortune
to get to examine some of these deposits with one
of the main authorities I believe he wrote the book
(33:36):
you mentioned in the podcast. Even with a group of
twenty trained geologists, and we cut into the tide flat deposits.
The tiny silt deposits were hard to see. I've attached
a picture. Then she describes what's in the picture. These
deposits are only centimeters thick in some places and not
well distributed. Digging a whole meter away from the original
had very different thicknesses and layering. The silt, which comes
(33:57):
from a few kilometers out to see, is carried in
suspense and by the tsunami wave and deposited inland as
the wave loses energy. The tide flats are a great
place to look for this deposit because they are well preserved.
Storms can create similar deposits as well. I understand if
you can distinguish storms from tsunammies because storm deposits are thicker,
because storms into last days. For us, adunamist into the
(34:17):
last hours. Don't quote me on that, which I just did.
And then she goes on to write about some uh,
some territory we've covered in other listener male about the
um the threat of earthquake in Seattle, and she thanks
us and gives us some episode suggestions. Thank you so much, Sarah.
I love when we hear from scientists about our scientific
(34:37):
episodes with more science information, because that's awesome. Uh. If
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast where history podcasts at how stuffworks dot com.
We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash mss
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(34:59):
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to find all kinds of information about anything your heart
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which is missing history dot com, where we will put
for example, we linked to the original paper that was
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that in a whole lot more at how stuff works
dot com or miss in history dot com for more
(35:25):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tray, Steve Wilson, and I'm Holly Frying. So the
Piltdown Man one of the world's most infamous instances in
(00:24):
scientific fraud, and in August of which is this year,
researchers published a paper in Royal Society Open Science that
concluded that it was the work of a single hoaxer.
So rather than rolling that into our Unearthed episodes, which
are just around the corner, we are doing an entire
(00:45):
Unearthed episode just on this. Uh. We're going to talk
about the pilt Down Man, how this hoax played out,
and what exactly was unearthed in this newly published paper
that inspired us to do the episode. Yeah. So that
we've gotten lots of requests for over the years. Yeah,
And for me, I've sort of had it on the
(01:06):
I'll get to that one day maybe list. And now
this is a time when I can be proud of
my procrastination because it enabled this cool thing to come out.
Well what what is? Uh? One of the things that's
intriguing to me is that I literally wrote this on
the list in August right that it has. I have
been planning to do this episode right now as of August,
(01:30):
and now it seems particularly relevant because it is such
a cautionary tale about not just uncritically observing absorbing things
that are announced as news. The whole time I was
working on this outline, I was like, this is this
feels like we just need a reminder so it makes
(01:54):
sense of why the pilt down hoax even happened in
the first place. We actually need to go all the
way back to Charles Darwin's publication of On the Origin
of Species in eighteen fifty nine. The full title of
that particular writing is on the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of favored races
in the Struggle for Life, and this details Darwin's theories
(02:18):
of evolution by natural selection, which are at the foundation
of evolutionary biology. When he published this book, Darwin knew
that one type of evidence that would really support his
theories was in relatively short supply, and that is transitional fossils.
These are fossils that have some traits belonging to an
older species and some belonging to a more modern species.
(02:41):
And transitional fossils are physical evidence of an intermediary evolutionary
step that demonstrates how life is changing over time. One
famous example of a transitional fossil is archaeopterics. It's got
some features that are more like a reptile and others
that are more like a bird, and today it's viewed
(03:01):
as a transitional fossil between non avian dinosaurs and modern birds.
Darwin knew that people would try to discredit his work
because at that point in history, not that many transitional
fossils had been found. Archaeotrics, for example, would not even
be discovered until eighteen sixty, and a lot of people
(03:22):
at that point described it more as the first bird
rather than as a transitional fossil. Six of course, was
after his book had already been published, but Darwin actually
anticipated actually these exact source of discoveries. He explained in
the Origin of Species that this lack of evidence was
probably due to an incomplete geological record and not to
(03:45):
an actual absence of the fossils that would prove him Right.
After Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species, there
was a big focus on finding more transitional fossils. In particular,
people were hoping to find the missing link, that single
fossil that would conclusively demonstrate a connection between ancient apes
(04:06):
and modern humans. Today, we know about lots of transitional
fossils that detailed the progression of all kinds of life.
We have transitional fossils and the evolutionary family trees of
birds and fish and whales and horses and elephants and
on and on. I literally could just randomly name animals.
(04:27):
That's the thirty minute podcast episode is just Tracy saying
animal words. It starts to sound like the list of
what they were eating in Monty Python in the Holy Grail.
So in terms of human life, the idea of a
single missing link between ancient hominids and modern humans has
really vanished under the weight of a lot of individual
(04:49):
transitional fossils that add up to a human family tree
that's full of forks and branches. It is not a
single linear, one lane road that starts on a and
ends on human connected with one magical quote missing link fossil.
It's a lot more complicated than that. Yeah. Uh. In
nineteen twelves, though, the missing link would have been an
(05:11):
earth shattering, groundbreaking and career making discovery, and that is
what brings us to pilt Down Man. In February of
nineteen twelve, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at
the British Museum now called the Natural History Museum, got
a letter from Charles Dawson. In addition to being a solicitor,
Dawson was an amateur archaeologist, and he said he had
(05:34):
found something very exciting in some gravel beds and pilt Down, Sussex.
According to Dawson's account, he had noticed that a road
where he lived had been repaired with some odd flints,
and he traced the flints to their source, which turned
out to be a shallow gravel bed. While talking the
workers there, he learned that they dug up something they
described as quote like a coconut, and that they'd thrown
(05:57):
the pieces away. Dawson dug these fragments out of the
trash and found that they were part of a skull,
and over the next couple of years he'd gone back
to the pit and found several other pieces of skull
and jaw bone before finally writing his letter to Smith Woodward.
Uh these skull fragments and jaw bone, he described, looked
(06:17):
somewhat human, but not exactly, and his letter he compared
his discovery to a jaw bone that had been discovered
by a workman in a sand pit near Heidelberg, Germany,
in nineteen oh seven, which had been named Homo heidelberg insis.
In Homo heidelberg insis had some features in common with
Homo erectus and others in common with modern humans or
(06:40):
Homo sapiens. Dawson said his discovery quote would quote rival
h heidelberg Insis in solidity. Dawson and Smith Woodward kept
quiet about this find at first as they did some
more digging at the pit, and then they presented their
findings to a packed meeting of the Geological Society of
London on December eighteenth of nineteen twelve. They had an
(07:03):
ape like mandible or jawbone. Two of its molars were
in place and had significant wear, and then there were
pieces of the brain case of a skull, which seemed
a lot more human than the mandible did. They had
also found some stone tools and fragments of other non
human mammal fossils. Their coloring was comparable to that of
(07:24):
the gravel bed, and the conclusion was that these fossils
were at least five hundred thousand years old. Regarding their presentation, A. C. Hadn't,
writing in the journal Science, said quote Mr Dawson gave
an account of the finding of the specimens, the nature
and geographical and geological position of the gravel bed, and
Dr Smith Woodward described the remains in a most excellent manner.
(07:48):
Hadn't went on to write, quote, there could be no
doubt that this is a discovery of the greatest importance
and will give rise to much discussion. It is the
nearest approach we have yet reached to a missing link.
Probably few will deny that EU Anthropist Dawson I is almost,
if not quite, as much human as Simian. I'm just
gonna say we are guessing on how that is pronounced,
(08:09):
because it seems like no one knows. So your Anthropist
Dawson I is what they've named their find, and that
means Dawson's dawn Man, which is not self congratulatory at all.
I mean, I know, often scientific names of things are
named after the person who found or discovered or put
(08:32):
them in a taxonomy or whatever, but like Dawson's dawn Man,
it just seems particularly back Patty Yeah uh in nineteen
thirteen and nineteen fourteen, excavations continued at the gravel pit
where these first fossils had reportedly been recovered, and these
excavations unearthed some other evidence as well. There was a
(08:53):
canine tooth which had some features in common with ape
teeth and others in common with modern human teeth. They
also found a carved slab of bone that became known
as the cricket bat because it was roughly shaped like one.
Although Dawson did keep excavating, or at least saying he
was excavating, the start of World War One meant that
it took place on a much smaller scale. He sent
(09:15):
a couple of postcards to Smith Woodward saying that he
had found some other fossils and other sites not far
away from that first find, but otherwise this was really
the end of the discoveries that pilt Down, and then
Dawson died in nineteen sixteen. A lot of scientists were
very excited about the pilt Down discoveries. Understandably, not only
(09:36):
were they put forth as the missing link that was
so important to evolutionary science at the time, but they
had also been found in Britain, which meant that the
British Isles had played an important part in the evolution
of all of humanity. The British Empire was at this
point the largest empire and human history, controlling almost one
quarter of all of the land on Earth. So the
(09:57):
idea that Britain had also been a key stone and
human evolution carried this mix of pride and of wealth. Obviously,
these people were quite ready to believe that Britain was
actually the birthplace of the human at the human species.
So although it was not universally accepted, the pilt Down
Man played a major role in scientific thought about human
(10:20):
evolution for about the next forty years. More than two
d and fifty papers and monographs were published about it,
and it was cited in more than seventy publications. So
it was a pretty big deal. And it was also
completely made up. We're going to talk about after a
sponsor break. So after this announcement, many in the scientific
(10:45):
community just took Dawson and Smith Woodward's report to the
Geological Society of London at face value. The original pieces
of these specimens were locked away in storage for safekeeping,
but casts of them were made to share with researchers
who wanted to do further stuff. A A lot of
the early scientific debate about these specimens didn't even consider
(11:05):
the basic question of whether they were authentic at all. Instead,
it was about things like whether smith Wouldwards interpretation of
the skull was correct. He had made a reconstruction of
the skull based on nine fragments that had initially been found.
The resulting skull had a capacity of about one thousand
and seventy six cubic centimeters to other anatomists and anthropologists
(11:28):
disagreed about whether Smith Wouldwards reconstruction was accurate. Sir Arthur
Keith of Scotland was on one side of this debate,
and Sir Grafton Elliott Smith of Australia was on the other.
Keith made his own reconstruction, which had a capacity of
about fifteen hundred cubic centimeters, or about the same as
a modern human skull, which prompted Smith Woodward to revise
(11:49):
his original reconstruction. Smith, on the other hand, came to
different conclusions, insisting that the original one thousand, seventy six
cubic centimeters was a lot more correct. These all had
to do with basically how the skull pieces were lined up.
And what parts of the skull bones people thought they
were from. Like you think of your skull as one
(12:10):
solid piece, but it's actually several pieces connected by sutures.
So the question was whether these nine fragments of skull
were being correctly used to make a reconstruction, not whether
they were actually from a prehistoric human. There was also
a lot of talk about whether the canine tooth that
was found later was really part of the same mandible
(12:31):
or not, but there was no talk about whether any
of these pieces were actually genuine. Basically, a big chunk
of the scientific literature surrounding this fine just was credulous
and uncritical from the start. And to be fair, many
of the technologies that we used to authenticate the age
of fossils today were not invented yet and they would
(12:52):
not be for more than twenty years. And also a
lot of the other fossil evidence today that we know
about that shows that hominids developed more humanlike jaws before
they developed developed bigger brain cases, those had not been
discovered yet either, so they didn't really have things to
compare them to you. But even so, a lot of
(13:12):
people studying this fine simply took for granted from the
beginning that it was legitimate, and they framed their study
from there, Like the quote popularized by Carl Sagan, Extraordinary
claims like I found the missing link in a gravel
pit and pilt down require extraordinary evidence, and that just
was not present here. This uncritical acceptance that the piltd
(13:34):
Down Man was real was certainly not completely universal, especially
as time passed and people had more opportunities to study it.
For example, American zoologist Garrett Smith Miller published quote the
Jaw of the Piltdown Man in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections in
nineteen fifteen, and which he concluded that the skull fragments
did come from a real human skull, but that the
(13:56):
mandible came from an extinct species of chimpanzee. Writing an
American anthropologist, William K. Gregory later published an analysis the
molars which concluded quote, I believe that Mr. Miller is
fully justified in holding that the lower molars of the
pilt down jaw are those of a chimpanzee and not
of an extinct genus of hominity. As more analysis emerged,
(14:21):
there were also people who not only questioned whether this
work was quote scientifically justifiable, but also warned that all
this buzz and heightened expectations were dangerous. George Grant mcgurdy
had published a fairly credulous overview of the pilt Down
findings in nineteen fourteen, but by nineteen sixteen he had
not only revised his own opinions, but was also alarmed
(14:43):
at the state of scientific inquiry around the pilt Down Man.
In the journal Science, mcgourty outlined a range of doubts, criticisms,
and skeptical inquiries that had come in from the United States, Britain, France,
and Italy, among other places, and he included this warning quote.
Has not this dazzling combination blinded the discoverers and indirectly
(15:04):
some of their colleagues, even at a distance, because of
the high pitch of expectancy to which recent discoveries in
the prehistoric field have not, without reason contributed. Under the circumstances,
such blindness, if only temporary, would be pardonable in comparatively harmless,
but serious danger lurks in the possibility of its persisting
(15:27):
long enough to become an obsession and a hindrance to
future progress in this particular field, and that's exactly what
was happening. In spite of the growing body of skepticism
and criticism, the pilt Down man became a widely accepted
part of a body of scientific literature. Things started to
unravel a little about a decade after the pilt Down discovery. First,
(15:50):
in it was discovered that these gravel beds where the
fossils were found were not old enough to contain five
hundred thousand year old fossils. Whoops uh. Then, starting in
the nineteen thirties, paleontologists started finding other hominid fossils in
other parts of the world, and they seemed to suggest
(16:11):
an evolution of human life that was taking place primarily
in Africa and Asia. And as we noted earlier that
the jaws were becoming more human like before the brain
cases and not the other way around, it made less
and less sense that some critical moment in human evolution
had happened on some tiny islands off the northwest coast
of Europe, following a totally different pattern from what was
(16:33):
being discovered elsewhere. But even so, a sizeable chunk of
the scientific community carried on believing that the pilt Down
specimens were genuine. A number of chemical and Isotopic dating
methods started to be developed in the nineteen forties, and
in nineteen fifty three, Kenneth Oakley, then head of anthropology
at the British Museum, analyze the pilt Down Man's skull
(16:56):
fragments through fluorine dating, and the fragments were definitely much
newer than Dawson and Smith Woodward had said, and they
were way way too new to be the missing link.
The first test suggested that it was only fifty thousand
years old, not ten times that. Following Oakley's discovery, the
British Museum publicly announced that the pilt Down Man was
(17:19):
a fraud. And these flooring tests definitely were not perfect.
They showed that all the skull pieces were the same age,
whereas later analysis would show that in fact they were not,
and later on more refined dating methods would also determine
that the pieces were only about six hundred years old,
certainly not fifty thousand. But in spite of those shortcomings,
(17:42):
they were definite proof that the pilt Down Man was
not a real hominid fossil. Yeah. As our ability to
test things got better over time because we learned, so
did our ability to point out just how fake these
things really were. Further analysis showed the mandible was really
from a juvenile orangutan, and that all these pieces that
(18:05):
had been purported to be a person's remains were actually
meticulously altered to look genuine. They had been stained to
match the material in the gravel beds, but the stains
were not made of substances that were local to the area.
The molars had also been artificially worn down to like
natural and then other mammal fossils that were found in
(18:28):
the same area were actual genuine fossils, but they were
not from species that actually lived in pilt Down. So
this was not a case of somebody accidentally finding some
human bones near on a rangutan bone for some reason
and then drawing of logical but incorrect conclusion. It was
a deliberate hoax. The good news was, with the pilt
(18:51):
Down man out of the way, all of the other
fossil evidence that had been discovered in Africa and Asia
in the decades since then made a lot more sense.
There was no longer any lingering question of, well, if
humanity's origins are in this part of the world and
evolving this way, traveling in this pattern, what is this
other fossil doing way over here following a completely different model.
(19:15):
This was incredibly important in terms of the study of
human evolution. The pilt Down Man had become such a
dominant presence in the field that people were using its
existence to totally disregard legitimate fossil findings that strongly suggested
human origins in Africa. One of the foundations of scientific
progress is the ability to reassess your conclusions when you're
(19:38):
faced with new, compelling evidence. But the pilt Down Man
was such a juggernaut that people were disregarding that new
evidence instead. This was probably complicated by a conscious or
unconscious reluctance among at least some scientists to believe that
modern humanity rose in Africa, not in Britain. But the
(19:59):
bad news was that a lot of the world had
fallen for this hoax. It had impeded progress and perpetuated
inaccurate information for decades. On top of that, the revelation
that it wasn't real eroded the general public's belief in science.
In the words of Ernest A. Houghton of Harvard, writing
an American Anthropologists in ninety four, quote, what really worries
(20:23):
me is the revelation to a lady that is often
hostile to biological science, of calculated dishonesty on the part
of someone intimately concerned with a discovery of supposedly great
importance to the history of man. It is as shocking
is the proof that men in high places of our
own government have betrayed their country. Already, the press is
(20:44):
flooded with accusations by anti evolutionists that all of the
other evidence of man's origin from an ape like ancestry
has been deliberately faked by unscrupulous scientists. The fact that
the pilt down fraud is possibly and even probably unique,
will be very difficult for the public to accept. Before
you get too attached to the wise words of Ernest here,
(21:07):
I mean they really touched me. I feel like they
are applicable even still today. Uh. He also did a
lot of work combining race in criminology that was influenced
by the eugenics movement, and the a lot of that
work was pretty definitely racist. So as much as I
love these words that he has to say about how
(21:28):
damaging it was for this to be revealed as a fraud,
there are other factors of his work. So this is
not a uh an endorsement of him as a scientist
by us as podcasters who are not scientists. Uh. Yeah,
we can appreciate his insight in that moment without applauding
the rest of his body of work, for sure. Uh.
(21:51):
And with this finding now unquestionably shown to be fraudulent,
the focus then turned to piecing together who had done
it and why, And we're going to talk about that
after we first paused for a word from one of
our sponsors. In the years after the Piltdown Man was
shown to be a hoax, many many theories were put
(22:15):
forth about the potential culprits. A lot of the attention
has been on Dawson himself. After all, he was the
one who reported the findings of the first place, and
he was instrumental in the announcement and the initial investigations.
He may have hoped that such a profound discovery would
earn him admission into the Royal Society. A couple of
(22:35):
people who either knew or worked with Dawson were siting
side of his possibilities as well, including Samuel Woodhead and
Pierre Taliard de Chardins. The latter was the one who
actually found that canine tooth. Even though he played such
a huge role, most people did not suspect Sir Arthur
Smith Woodward, believing him to have been an unwilling dupe
(22:58):
or one of the intended targets to His reputation would
have been ruined if word had gotten out while he
was still alive. Sir Arthur Keith, whose paper on the
skull reconstruction we talked about earlier, was also suggested as
a suspect. One of the most famous suspects, at least
outside of the world of scientists, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
(23:19):
who knew Dawson had an interest in this type of
thing and lived nearby. In nine weird set of criteria
to say somebody is a suspect, I mean there were like,
apparently there were people who were like, he just wants
to destroy the evolutionists, right, that's some seriously circumstantial stuff
that's getting piece together. Flimsy circumstantial stuff. Uh in n s.
(23:42):
A trunk found in storage in the British Museum was
discovered to contain a number of bones, including some that
had been stained in a similar manner to the piltdown Man.
This trunk marked with the initials M. A. C. H
apparently belonged to Martin A. C. Hinton, who also amassed
quite a collection of other bones, fossils, and specimens. He
(24:04):
had been working as a volunteer at the museum in
nineteen twelve, and he became its keeper of Zoology in
nineteen thirty six. So naturally this brought up lots of
theories about what was going on with what was in
this trunk. One of the theories was that these bones
were Hinton's trial run, and that he had done this
and then planted the fossils in quotation marks to get
(24:25):
revenge on Smith Woodward, who had turned him down when
he tried to move his volunteer position back in nineteen
twelve into a paid one. However, not all of this
quite adds up. I had a hard time pending down
exactly why this was later debunked as being who had
orchestrated this, But his time at the museum started after
(24:49):
the first discovery at pilt Down, and he also had
expressed some skepticism at the fine being authentic. So another
school of ought is that the way these stained bones
that looked very similar to the pilt Down specimens came
to be in his suitcase is that he was trying
to replicate the coloring it pilt down to prove that
(25:12):
it was a fraud. The paper, published in Royal Society
Open Science this year, is an attempt to conclusively solve
this whole puzzle once and for all. The study involved
DNA analysis, dating analysis, spectroscopy, and high precision measurements of
the specimens, as well as studying three dimensional representations of them,
(25:34):
which is known as virtual anthropology. The DNA analysis confirmed
that teeth and the mandible were from an orangutan, probably
one born in Borneo, and that all of the orangutan
specimens that were part of this hoax probably came from
the same individual animal. Attempts to figure out whether there
(25:54):
are any missing orangutan specimens and local museum collections have
so far been unsuccessful, but it's also possible that somebody
could have bought an orangutan skull in an antiquarian shop.
A minimum of two, possibly three different human skulls were
used in the production of the skull fragments, and while
(26:14):
tests to figure out whether they were all the same
age were inconclusive, they were all subjected to the same
m O to make them look like fossils that could
have come from that gravel bed, and there was dental
putty used to hold the teeth in place and the
mandible and to hold the gravel and pebble plugs in place,
(26:35):
with these materials being similar to the sediment that was
at the pilt Down dig site, that this discovery of
dentil putty was not new to this research that was
just published, like people knew about the dentil putty way before,
which like continues to make me question why in n
(26:56):
nobody was like this looks glued on, right. I mean,
maybe it was just some really really skillful dentil putty use,
but I don't know. That's one of the many things
that makes me go, how ready were you all to
believe that the missing link was from Britain? Because that's
(27:18):
the only way all this works. And I think the
answer is very ready, extremely ready. The team concludes that,
given the consistencies in the m O and the limited
number of total specimens, the pilt Down Man was probably
the work of one forger, most likely Charles Dawson, possibly
trying to further his own scientific career, which given that
he died in nineteen sixteen, at the age of fifty two,
(27:41):
just four years after the first announcement clearly did not
quite work out for him. I had a whole conversation
about this episode with with my husband in the car
over the weekend about how, like, you know, a lot
of these different people have been put forth as potential suspects,
and a lot of them are are sort of dismissed,
and really all of these things are really circumstantial, Like
(28:03):
there's just there's even with all of this analysis, there's
still a lot of circumstantial evidence and guesswork and stuff
like that. But to me, the biggest strike against Charles
Dawson is the fact that he did die only four
years after this whole thing started, so any like many
of these other people who have been pointed out as
(28:23):
suspects lived for a whole lot longer, and and that
sort of raises the question of, Okay, what were they
after that never came to fruition? Right, Like Charles Dawson's
relatively early death makes it seem like whatever he was
after he didn't get and then he was never he
wasn't around to either further perpetuate it or be like,
(28:46):
you know what I made that up like that's it's
yet another piece of circumstantial evidence, uh in in the
Charles Dawson column. So all of that, though, may raise
the question why spend so much time and effort just
trying to get the bottom of who did this? And so,
in the words of the papers authors quote, solving the
(29:09):
pilt down hoax is still important now. It stands as
a cautionary tale to scientists not to see what they
want to see, but to remain objective and to subject
even their own findings to the strongest scientific scrutiny. That's
a piltdown, man. I love that episode. Thank you, Tracy. Oh,
(29:31):
you're very welcome. I'm I'm gonna totally admit I had
a very good time reading the vastly incorrect papers published
in the early nineteen teens about this finding from people
who were flat out wrong, and at the same time
I was really bad about it, Like uh we I
(29:55):
have often when we've done episodes about old medical history
or something like that, read you know, the old papers
from the time that that were published, and these, you know,
people very confidently espousing stuff that's wrong, just really wrong,
and that it makes me a lot matter this time
because it was wrong, and somebody did it on purpose
and it stood in the way of scientific progress for decades.
(30:20):
Makes me real mad. Yeah, we uh you and I
talked about off Mike, the fact that forty years is
a really long time when you consider like that is
the length of a career for a scientist in some cases.
And so there were probably people who were not willingly
even party to this sort of blindness. But we're proceeding
(30:41):
along on a career path that was basically complete blunder,
and they wasted their time and their scientific minds and yeah,
and wasted the greater whole of humanity's ability to learn
more about where we came from. And then it's by
total coincidence that between the day when I wrote this
(31:03):
on the calendar however many month months ago, and now
like now, there is such a renewed focus on like
the the putting out there of just fake wrong information
that is demonstrably wrong and it being accepted as fact. Ah,
(31:26):
do you have listener mail? I do, And it's also
about science. It is from Sarah. Here's what she says.
Sarah says, Dear Holly and Tracy, longtime listener, first time caller.
I love your podcast, But yesterday was downright spooky. I'm
a graduate student at the University of Washington, and I
was in my dungeon I mean sub basement lab, happily
listening to my backlog podcasts when your podcast about the
(31:47):
Orphans tsunami began. The reason this is spooky is that
I was collecting data about a landslide I think was
triggered by the earthquake. Right now, I am doing a
green size analysis of my slide and comparing it to
the devastated landslide that killed fifty people I have. I
have attached some pictures of my sieves and oven and
(32:07):
the field work back ho and my mentor where it
samples were collected. I continued with my work, which involved
running some errands well low and Behold, just as I'm
getting into the car to take my radio carbon samples
to the lab, you talk about radio carbon dating. I
would like to respectfully request that you, lovely ladies, please
remove the cameras you have following me around. This connection
(32:30):
between landslides and earthquakes makes sense when you think about it.
The shaking cause by an earthquake can destabilize otherwise safe slopes,
high topography, can also amp amplify and earthquakes waves, creating
an even stronger shaking north Widge north Ridge earthquake at
six point seven on the moment magnitude, we don't use
rictor anymore cause and estimated fifty thousand uh. It's the earthquakes,
(32:53):
but I think it might mean landslides. Here in the
Pacific Northwest, we are especially landslide prone at glaciers occupied
the area until very recently geologically, and glaciers tend to
leave very steep slopes because of the immense weight and
pressure inherent in a mile thick layer of ice. The
glaciers Impuget Sound especially contribute to our risk and because
(33:15):
of the large amount of loose sediment deposited, Combining loose
glacial sediment over steep in slopes and earthquakes could be
a recipe for disaster. You also mentioned in the episode
the silt deposits and tide flats that helped us identify
the tsunami events this summer. I had the good fortune
to get to examine some of these deposits with one
of the main authorities I believe he wrote the book
(33:36):
you mentioned in the podcast. Even with a group of
twenty trained geologists, and we cut into the tide flat deposits.
The tiny silt deposits were hard to see. I've attached
a picture. Then she describes what's in the picture. These
deposits are only centimeters thick in some places and not
well distributed. Digging a whole meter away from the original
had very different thicknesses and layering. The silt, which comes
(33:57):
from a few kilometers out to see, is carried in
suspense and by the tsunami wave and deposited inland as
the wave loses energy. The tide flats are a great
place to look for this deposit because they are well preserved.
Storms can create similar deposits as well. I understand if
you can distinguish storms from tsunammies because storm deposits are thicker,
because storms into last days. For us, adunamist into the
(34:17):
last hours. Don't quote me on that, which I just did.
And then she goes on to write about some uh,
some territory we've covered in other listener male about the
um the threat of earthquake in Seattle, and she thanks
us and gives us some episode suggestions. Thank you so much, Sarah.
I love when we hear from scientists about our scientific
(34:37):
episodes with more science information, because that's awesome. Uh. If
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast where history podcasts at how stuffworks dot com.
We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash mss
in history and on Twitter at this in History. Our
tumbler as miss industry dot tumbler dot com, or on
Pinterest and Instagram at misston History. You can come to
(34:59):
our parents company's website, which is missing history dot com
to find all kinds of information about anything your heart
desires just about. And then you can come to our website,
which is missing history dot com, where we will put
for example, we linked to the original paper that was
published that inspired this episode, so you can do all
that in a whole lot more at how stuff works
dot com or miss in history dot com for more
(35:25):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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