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Speaker 1: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history

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Speaker 1: is an open book, all of these amazing tales right

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Speaker 1: there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome

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Speaker 1: to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Frederick had a dream. It

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Speaker 1: was so strong he worked as hard as he could

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Speaker 1: to achieve it, even when everybody told him it would

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Speaker 1: never happen. But Frederick wouldn't give up, and in the

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Speaker 1: end he got everything he asked for and one thing

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Speaker 1: that he didn't. Born in Australia in nineteen fifty eight,

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Speaker 1: Frederick wanted one thing to fly. When he came of age,

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Speaker 1: he tried to enlist in the Royal Australian Air Force,

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Speaker 1: but was turned away twice. In fact, it might have

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Speaker 1: been his poor educational history, or maybe he was just

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Speaker 1: a bad test taker, because no matter where he went,

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Speaker 1: no one would let him inside the cockpit of an aircraft.

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Speaker 1: After failing to join the r a a F, Frederick

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Speaker 1: attempted to work his way to a commercial pilot's license. Sadly,

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Speaker 1: he failed the five subjects that made up the exam twice.

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Speaker 1: He had also been investigated by aviation authorities for dangerous

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Speaker 1: incidents such as flying into restricted areas and through thick

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Speaker 1: cloud formations. But it wasn't Frederick's fault, at least not entirely.

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Speaker 1: According to his father, Frederick believed that he was in

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Speaker 1: danger whenever he took to the air from UFOs. He

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Speaker 1: was obsessed with them. That might have explained his insistence

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Speaker 1: to get his pilot's license so that he could get

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Speaker 1: closer to the subject that he wanted to study. However,

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Speaker 1: there was no explanation for what would happen next. On

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Speaker 1: the evening of October twenty one, twenty year old Frederick

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Speaker 1: was on a training flight over the Bass Strait in

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Speaker 1: southern Australia. He was piloting a small Cessna airplane when

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Speaker 1: he radioed traffic control around seven pm. There was something

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Speaker 1: following him, he told them, an unidentified aircraft. Traffic Control

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Speaker 1: didn't know what he was talking about. According to their readings,

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Speaker 1: there was no one else in the air at that

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Speaker 1: location or altitude. Frederick disagreed, and so did the four

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Speaker 1: bright lights at the bottom of the other craft outside

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Speaker 1: his window. He asked if there were any military planes

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Speaker 1: in the vicinity, like a fighter jet or stealth bomber

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Speaker 1: of some sort. Traffic control responded in the negative. Whatever

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Speaker 1: it was, it was a thousand feet above him and

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Speaker 1: lightning fast. Then it was on his right before it

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Speaker 1: shot above him again, like it was plane with him

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Speaker 1: or trying to scare him. As Frederick talked through the

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Speaker 1: incident with traffic control, more details came to light. The

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Speaker 1: unidentified object was shiny, metallic and long, with bright green

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Speaker 1: landing lights on its underside. As the two flew together,

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Speaker 1: the other aircraft would, in Frederick's words, orbit his plane,

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Speaker 1: first on one side and then above him, and then

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Speaker 1: on the other. Traffic control asked Frederick where he was headed.

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Speaker 1: The pilot replied King Island, roughly on nautical miles away

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Speaker 1: from his takeoff points back in Melbourne. The entire exchange

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Speaker 1: lasted seventeen seconds, and at the very end, traffic control

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Speaker 1: noticed metallic scraping sounds on Frederick's side before the line

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Speaker 1: cut out, and that was it for Frederick. The plane

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Speaker 1: had disappeared with the pilot inside. Rescue teams scoured a

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Speaker 1: thousand square miles of water looking for them both but

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Speaker 1: found nothing. Some believed that he had faked his own

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Speaker 1: death or took his own life, despite their not being

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Speaker 1: any evidence for a motive. Another theory proposed that the

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Speaker 1: pilot had found himself upside down and disoriented, confusing the

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Speaker 1: reflection of his own lights as those of an unidentified aircraft,

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Speaker 1: but his father believed it was something else, the one

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Speaker 1: thing his son was both fascinated and terrified by more

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Speaker 1: than anything else in the universe, and for those who

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Speaker 1: study UFOs all over the world, it seemed the most

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Speaker 1: plausible explanation. As well. It probably helped that Australians citizens

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Speaker 1: had called in over fifty UFO sightings on just that day.

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Speaker 1: But one piece of evidence, a photo taken by a

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Speaker 1: local plumber, would lend credibility to the otherwise incredible story.

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Speaker 1: Roy Manifold had set up a camera on the beach

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Speaker 1: near where Frederick had taken off. He'd wanted to capture

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Speaker 1: a stunning time lapse of the Australian sunset. Instead, he

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Speaker 1: caught possible evidence of what might have spirited away a

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Speaker 1: petrified pilot. Though the object in the image is blurry,

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Speaker 1: u apologists have examined the photo and concur that whatever

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Speaker 1: it was, it was traveling at a speed of at

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Speaker 1: least two hundred miles per hour, much faster than the

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Speaker 1: vanished Cessna. Could an unidentified flying object have snatched Frederick

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Speaker 1: out of the air Well, as the saying goes, the

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Speaker 1: sky's the limit on possible theories pun very much intended.

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Speaker 1: For now, the only thing we know is that Frederick's

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Speaker 1: plane disappeared over the Indian Ocean, and it was, as

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Speaker 1: they say, a photo finish. Where do we come from?

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Speaker 1: How did we get here? These are questions that have

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Speaker 1: been asked by scientists for generations. The more we dig

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Speaker 1: into our past, sometimes literally, the more we discover how

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Speaker 1: we evolve to where we are today, from Australopithecus to

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Speaker 1: Homo sapiens. We have a good idea of how human

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Speaker 1: beings changed over the millennia, but there has always been

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Speaker 1: a gap in the evolutionary chain, a missing link, as

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Speaker 1: it's often called, and one man in nineteen twelve claimed

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Speaker 1: to have found it. Charles Dawson was a lawyer by trade,

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Speaker 1: but on the side he was part of the Geological

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Speaker 1: Society of London, made up of professional and amateur geologists.

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Speaker 1: The organization provided a venue for scientists to showcase their

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Speaker 1: latest findings. Dawson came to them on December eighteenth with

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Speaker 1: one of his own. He found it while digging around

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Speaker 1: on the pilt Down gravel pits in southeastern England. A

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Speaker 1: man working in the pit had uncovered a skull fragments

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Speaker 1: and brought it to Dawson. This kicked off a series

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Speaker 1: of visits to the site, some just Dawson by himself,

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Speaker 1: and later with Arthur Smith Woodward, the head of the

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Speaker 1: geological department at the British Museum. Together the two men

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Speaker 1: worked all summer digging through rocks and dirt looking for

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Speaker 1: more fragments. What they found and where they'd found it

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Speaker 1: surprised them. Very few of the remaining pieces were located

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Speaker 1: in the ground. Almost everything that remained the skull had

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Speaker 1: been dug out and discarded into large piles along with

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Speaker 1: other pit debris. Dawson and Woodward found more pieces of

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Speaker 1: the skull, as well as half of the lower jawbone.

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Speaker 1: After they had completed their hunt for the other fragments,

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Speaker 1: they pieced together what they had collected. The skull was incomplete.

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Speaker 1: The story get told, though, would fill in the largest

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Speaker 1: gap in human history. Much of the skull was the

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Speaker 1: same or similar to the skull of a modern human.

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Speaker 1: The portion is with the greatest difference were in the brain, cavity,

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Speaker 1: the jawbone, and the base of the skull, all of

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Speaker 1: which resembled that of a chimpanzee. The British Museum also

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Speaker 1: took a stab at reconstructing the skull, which all but

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Speaker 1: proved where the creature fit on the evolutionary scale, right

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Speaker 1: between Homo neanderthalis and Homo sapiens, otherwise known as the

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Speaker 1: missing Link, but both models were heavily challenged by other

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Speaker 1: scientific groups. Depending on how the fragments were arranged, cranium

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Speaker 1: sizes could vary, and they could even be reconstructed into

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Speaker 1: the skull of a full sized modern human being. The

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Speaker 1: key was in the canine teeth, which they didn't have.

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Speaker 1: Dawson and Woodward returned to the pilt down pit to

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Speaker 1: search for the missing teeth that would confirm their hypothesis,

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Speaker 1: and this time they brought with them French paleontologist and

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Speaker 1: geologist Pierre Tajard de Chardin. The three men dug around

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Speaker 1: the same piles as before. It was Pierre who found

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Speaker 1: a canine that fit inside their jaw fragments. Unfortunately, it

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Speaker 1: wasn't the proof they were hoping for. Professor and anthropologist

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Speaker 1: Arthur Keith of the Royal College of Surgeons of England

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Speaker 1: claimed the canine could never have allowed the jaw to

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Speaker 1: move the way Woodward and Dawson had suggested to almost

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Speaker 1: everyone who saw the skull, there was no way this

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Speaker 1: was the missing link. Then, in nineteen fifteen, Dawson presented

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Speaker 1: three new fragments from a different location, two miles away

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Speaker 1: from the original pit. They fit perfectly into the original fragments,

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Speaker 1: once again giving credibility to his previous fines. The Piltdown Man,

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Speaker 1: as the skull had come to be known, was officially

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Speaker 1: a scientific wonder, and as long as its status among

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Speaker 1: the scientific elite went unchallenged, other discoveries of bones and

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Speaker 1: fossils related to Homo erectus were ignored, and Dawson kept

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Speaker 1: adding fuel to the fire. In the years following Piltdown

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Speaker 1: Man's acceptance, he managed to provide tools and artifacts to

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Speaker 1: bolster its authenticity, and it worked for almost forty years

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Speaker 1: until a group of scientists in the early nineteen fifties

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Speaker 1: got together and ransom tests on the skull fragments. As

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Speaker 1: it turned out, there had never been a pilt Down Man.

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Speaker 1: The skull that Dawson and Woodward had presented had been

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Speaker 1: comprised of pieces from three different creatures. One portion had

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Speaker 1: come from a medieval era human skull, the lower jaw

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Speaker 1: had belonged to a five year old orangutan, and the

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Speaker 1: teeth had been fossils from an ancient chimpanzee. The bones

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Speaker 1: themselves had been aged using iron sulfate and chromic acid.

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Speaker 1: There were also tool marks on the teeth meant to

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Speaker 1: wear them down in a way that would fit the

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Speaker 1: diet of the ape or person they belonged to. Whether

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Speaker 1: it was Dawson or Woodward who had come up with

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Speaker 1: the forgery remains unclear to this day, but much of

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Speaker 1: the evidence points to Dawson, especially since examination of his

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Speaker 1: private collection revealed that dozens of specimens he owned, including

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Speaker 1: the teeth of a mammal reptile hybrid, were actually fake.

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Speaker 1: Dawson only got as far as he did because technology

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Speaker 1: at the time prevented his scheme from being discovered, and

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Speaker 1: perhaps because his peers didn't want to know the truth.

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Speaker 1: After all, he'd given them exactly what they'd always wanted,

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Speaker 1: what we've always wanted for as long as modern man

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Speaker 1: has existed. Closure. It's just a shame that he had

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Speaker 1: to do it by lying through his teeth. I hope

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Speaker 1: you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

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Speaker 1: Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about

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Speaker 1: the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show

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Speaker 1: was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore,

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Speaker 1: which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and

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Speaker 1: you can learn all about it over at the World

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Speaker 1: of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Yeah,