What? My smelling salts! Oh wait. No, just Piltdown man’s back in town. The usual stuff. More paleontologists than important fossils, so …
This time from The Guardian:
“History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud”
Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous “falsehoods and manipulations”. According to experts, his deceptions may mean an entire tranche of the history of man’s development will have to be rewritten.
“Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago,” said Thomas Terberger, the archaeologist who discovered the hoax. “Prof Protsch’s work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had co-existed, and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish.” More.
Hmmm. We’d heard that the evidence that supported co-existence/intermarriage was based on a broader array of data. See also: Neanderthal symbols found in Gibraltar cave
If it all really depended on this one prof Protsch’s work, things are even worse than we are being told. Read this story before it suddenly sinks out of sight, amid a flurry of pom poms waved for “science.”
For example,
Another of the professor’s sensational finds, “Binshof-Speyer” woman, lived in 1,300 BC and not 21,300 years ago, as he had claimed, while “Paderborn-Sande man” (dated at 27,400 BC) only died a couple of hundred years ago, in 1750.
Trust News, the story gets way wilder as it goes on. Arnold Schwarzenegger? Bogus titles of nobility?
But note:
Yesterday the university admitted that it should have discovered the professor’s fabrications far earlier. But it pointed out that, like all public servants in Germany, the high-profile anthropologist was virtually impossible to sack, and had also proved difficult to pin down.
Sure. Nobody does fact-checking any more. Bummer. For now, don’t believe any of them.
See also: Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents
Added: For now, consider this – the further we get from physics and chemistry and the closer to human existence, the more the MAINSTREAM comes to depend on hype and scambo. In physics, we have the Large Hadron Collider detecting the Higgs boson (not where it was anticipated, but maybe that makes the discovery all the more authentic). We also have the multiverse crackpots, but they are not running the show, much as they’d like to. By sharp contrast, what do we hear about human evolution nowadays that is not just hype, nonsense, and scandal? Okay, a little glimmer of useful fact. No ways nearly enough for all the pom pom waving that goes on. – O’Leary for News
Added further: Thanks to Learned Hand below for pointing out that the linked story hales from 2005. (This is what comes of running around all day on unrelated matters.)
That said: It wasn’t easy to tell that the story wasn’t fresh because current human evolution theory is full of scandals and unexplainable findings. What about Bill Nye’s skulls in 2014? Or the Dmanisi findings that upended the discipline in 2013? There is a ridiculous level of uncertainty about the whole field. Okay, the 2015 scandal will be fresher. Darwin’s followers are surely welcome to that triumph. – O’Leary for News
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