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Speaker 1: Pushkin. In his office under the Great Gothic vaults of

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Speaker 1: London's Natural History Museum, Arthur Woodward was opening the mail

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Speaker 1: and found a note from his friend Charles Dawson, postmarked

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Speaker 1: the previous day Valentine's Day, nineteen twelve. Woodward was the

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Speaker 1: keeper of the museum's geology department and a notable figure

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Speaker 1: in British science. Dawson, a country lawyer, was an amateur

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Speaker 1: geologist with a growing reputation of his own. His letter

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Speaker 1: began with small talk the latest news on Sir Arthur

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Speaker 1: Conan Doyle's new book Idea. Dawson knew Conan Doyle personally,

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Speaker 1: but then Dawson turned to Moore magnificant matters. Some workmen

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Speaker 1: had been digging in the soils of Piltdown, a few

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Speaker 1: miles away from Dawson's home on the South Coast, and

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Speaker 1: they found a fossilized fragment of a human skull. It

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Speaker 1: might be something pretty special, so would Arthur Woodward care

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Speaker 1: to visit the site and take a look. He would.

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Speaker 1: Over the months that followed, Dawson and Woodward would supervise

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Speaker 1: digs in the flint beds of Piltdown, piecing together bone

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Speaker 1: fragments that would change our understanding of the world and

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Speaker 1: how humans took their place in it. The discovery became

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Speaker 1: known as Piltdown Man, the most famous, most earth shaking

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Speaker 1: missing link in the evolutionary chain connecting modern humans and

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Speaker 1: their ape like ancestors. Piltdown Man had a thick, but

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Speaker 1: otherwise human seeming skull, big cranium, steep forehead. The lower

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Speaker 1: jaw was more like that of an ape. A tooth

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Speaker 1: was found two halfway between ape and human. It was

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Speaker 1: truly an astonishing discovery. There were some doubters at the time.

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Speaker 1: Were these fragments really from the same primate or might

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Speaker 1: there somehow be a human skull and an ape jaw

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Speaker 1: in the same flinty gravel, because apart from that tooth,

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Speaker 1: it did look a bit like a human skull and

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Speaker 1: an ape jaw. But a few years later Dawson found

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Speaker 1: similar fossils a couple of miles away. They became known

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Speaker 1: as pilt Down two. Their discovery surely proved that pilt

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Speaker 1: Down one couldn't possibly be an accidental jumble of ape

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Speaker 1: and human, because how could the same accidental jumble occur

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Speaker 1: twice on two different sites. Although the amateur paleontologist Charles

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Speaker 1: Dawson had been the one to find the fossils that

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Speaker 1: pilt Down two. He died before he had a chance

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Speaker 1: to join Arthur Woodward in announcing that discovery, so Woodward

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Speaker 1: was left to carry the scientific torch and receive the

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Speaker 1: glory and glory there was. Woodward would become Sir Arthur Woodward,

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Speaker 1: a Knight Commander of the British Empire, a recipient of

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Speaker 1: the Royal Society's Gold Medal, the Liel Medal, the Lynneian Medal,

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Speaker 1: the Thompson Medal, and many other honors beside, all just

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Speaker 1: rewards for his skill, dedication, and prodigious scientific output, but

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Speaker 1: also surely rewards for his role in discovering evolution's first

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Speaker 1: true missing link, pilt Down Man. After he retired, so

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Speaker 1: Arthur Woodward mused that the discovery at Piltdown had been

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Speaker 1: the most important thing that ever happened in my life.

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Speaker 1: A lovely thought, but it wasn't a discovery, and it

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Speaker 1: didn't just happen. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to

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Speaker 1: cautionary tales. It was July nineteen fifty three when Joseph

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Speaker 1: Weiner first had a chance to handle the Piltdown Man

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Speaker 1: relics deep insid side London's Natural History Museum. It was

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Speaker 1: a breathtaking moment. Weiner was a young high flier professor

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Speaker 1: of physical anthropology at Oxford at the age of just

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Speaker 1: thirty eight, which meant that when the discovery of Piltdown

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Speaker 1: Man had been announced forty one years earlier, Weiner hadn't

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Speaker 1: even been born. But of course he knew all about

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Speaker 1: Piltdown Man. Everybody did. This was the most famous human

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Speaker 1: fossil ever found, even if it was proving ever more

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Speaker 1: of a headache to scientists. The problem was this, Dawson

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Speaker 1: and Woodward had pieced together the fragments from the Piltdown

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Speaker 1: flints to reveal a creature with a primitive jaw but

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Speaker 1: a modern skull and therefore an advanced brain. This supported

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Speaker 1: the so called brain first hypothesis that are crimate ancestors

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Speaker 1: had evolved into humans by developing large brains, other changes

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Speaker 1: such as a smaller jaw, had come later. Why was

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Speaker 1: that a problem, because every time a subsequent fossil was discovered,

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Speaker 1: it suggested the opposite pattern that proto humans had first

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Speaker 1: developed a human jaw and a human diet, and only

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Speaker 1: later had developed a human skull and a human brain.

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Speaker 1: Piltdown Man didn't fit. Young anthropologists, paleontologists, and biologists had

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Speaker 1: devoted their careers to trying to figure it out. Later

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Speaker 1: that day, at a grand summer banquet near the museum,

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Speaker 1: Weiner had the chance to sit next to Kenneth Oakley,

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Speaker 1: the man who was now the guardian of the Piltdown

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Speaker 1: Bones at the museum. There was such a mystery, mused,

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Speaker 1: and such a shame that the Piltdown bones were an

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Speaker 1: isolated discovery. In year upon year of looking, researchers had

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Speaker 1: never found another bone of interest at the Piltdown site.

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Speaker 1: Then Winer wandered out loud to Oakley, what about Piltdown two?

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Speaker 1: Why hadn't that site been more fully explored? Funny thing,

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Speaker 1: replied Oakley, nobody actually knows exactly where the pilt Down

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Speaker 1: two site is. It was common enough to keep such

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Speaker 1: matters confidential so that tourists and scavengers didn't descend on

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Speaker 1: the site and ruin it. But in this case the

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Speaker 1: details were more than confidential. They were lost to history.

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Speaker 1: Well how could that be, asked Winer? Above the hubbub

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Speaker 1: of conversation and the clinking of cutlery. Oakley explained that

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Speaker 1: Woodward presented the pilt Down two discoveries after Dawson was dead.

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Speaker 1: The precise location was never mentioned in correspondence between them.

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Speaker 1: Maybe Dawson had died without telling him. Woodward had certainly

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Speaker 1: never recorded the site's location. Strange, yes, thought Weiner, very strange.

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Speaker 1: The Piltdown discovery had been viewed with some skepticism until

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Speaker 1: pilt Down Two seemed to provide confirmation. Now it turns

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Speaker 1: out that the pilt Down two fossils simply appeared at

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Speaker 1: the Natural History Museum from well, from out of nowhere.

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Speaker 1: Convenient that that hot summer night, Weiner drove back to Oxford.

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Speaker 1: It was after midnight when he got home. He couldn't sleep.

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Speaker 1: His mind just kept turning and turning over and over.

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Speaker 1: The next morning, Winer was examining casts of built down

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Speaker 1: man in his lab. Freed from preconceptions, he tried to

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Speaker 1: look directly at what was in front of him. It

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Speaker 1: looked like a human skull and an ape jaw, and

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Speaker 1: these strange molar teeth, part ape and part human. In fact,

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Speaker 1: it was really only the teeth that suggested any link

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Speaker 1: between the jaw and skull. Under a powerful magnifying lens,

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Speaker 1: Winer examined a tooth, the pattern of where was a

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Speaker 1: bit odd. Before long he had obtained an ape tooth

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Speaker 1: from Oxford's anatomy department, grabbed a file and a clamp,

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Speaker 1: and began experimenting. It was astonishing how easy it was

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Speaker 1: to file the ape tooth down to look exactly like

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Speaker 1: the piltdown fossil. Discussed his doubts with a colleague. There's

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Speaker 1: another funny thing. The bones with a deep rich color

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Speaker 1: of dark chocolate, stained with rust from the iron rich flints.

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Speaker 1: But a few years before Oakley himself had drilled into

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Speaker 1: the bones to get a chemical sample, and had noted

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Speaker 1: in his write up that the brown stain was completely superficial.

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Speaker 1: The bones were bright white underneath. To an already suspicious Whiner,

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Speaker 1: that was odd too. No, they decided to pick up

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Speaker 1: the phone and call Kenneth Oakley in his office under

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Speaker 1: the great Gothic vaults of London's Natural History Museum. Kenneth

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Speaker 1: Oakley picked up the telephone. He was sitting not far

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Speaker 1: from where his predecessor, Arthur Woodward had opened the letter

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Speaker 1: from Charles Dawson. Dawson's letter to Woodward had begun the

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Speaker 1: remarkable story of Piltdown Man. The phone call from Oxford

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Speaker 1: to Oakley would end that story as we know it.

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Speaker 1: Winer and his colleague told Oakley that Piltdown Man was

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Speaker 1: nothing more than a fake. Oakley was stunned. Then Winer's

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Speaker 1: colleague asked him to drop everything, go down to the

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Speaker 1: museum's storerooms with a microscope and examine the Piltdown moler

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Speaker 1: for signs of artificial abrasion had it been filed down.

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Speaker 1: An hour later he called them back. They were right,

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Speaker 1: There was absolutely no doubt about it. Over the following

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Speaker 1: weeks and then months, further tests established unnatural patterns of

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Speaker 1: wear on the fossils. The latest most accurate chemical dating

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Speaker 1: test was used, demonstrating that the Piltdown skull, the Piltdown

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Speaker 1: jaw fossils from the Piltdown two site, all of them

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Speaker 1: were modern, a few hundred years old at best, and

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Speaker 1: the chocolate brown iron staining wasn't iron, It was an

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Speaker 1: artificial stain, or, in the case of the tooth, was

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Speaker 1: a layer of paint Van Dyke brown. Over the following year,

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Speaker 1: a thorough investigation scrutinized every single discovery associated with piltdown

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Speaker 1: the fossils various tools, a total of forty different specimens

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Speaker 1: from three different sites in the area, and concluded that

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Speaker 1: every single one of them was a fake. Each individual

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Speaker 1: forgery had been bold and simple. Collectively, they had been

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Speaker 1: devastatingly convincing, and the deception had been more ambitious and

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Speaker 1: elaborate than Joseph Weiner had dreamed. But who was the fraudster?

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Speaker 1: Weiner's astonishing discovery set off a frenzied cottage industry of speculation.

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Speaker 1: Had it been Dawsome, the man who claimed to find

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Speaker 1: the fossils, or Woodward, who did so much to promote

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Speaker 1: them and in doing so, reaped the glory. Or were

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Speaker 1: they both the victims of a cruel hoax by some

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Speaker 1: third party Cautionary tales will be back after the break

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Speaker 1: ten years ago, I kept bumping into policy wonks discussing

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Speaker 1: an exciting new idea. Exciting to policy wonks anyway. A

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Speaker 1: recent peer reviewed article five behavioral scientists reporting the results

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Speaker 1: of several different experiments had found that if you want

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Speaker 1: somebody to truthfully fill in a form such as a

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Speaker 1: tax return or an insurance claim. Then don't get them

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Speaker 1: to sign the form at the end saying they were honest.

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Speaker 1: Get them to sign at the beginning promising that they

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Speaker 1: will be honest, clever, and that could save real money.

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Speaker 1: Imagine collecting more taxes simply by getting people to sign

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Speaker 1: at the top of their tax return, nudging them into

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Speaker 1: telling the truth about their income. The UK's Behavioral Insights Team,

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Speaker 1: better known as the Nudge Unit, leapt into action, designing

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Speaker 1: a controlled experiment on behalf of the government of Guatemala.

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Speaker 1: Three million tax returns. Later, the idea didn't work. Researchers

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Speaker 1: at the Nudge Unit were left scratching their heads, much

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Speaker 1: like the paleontologists who kept finding fossils that would die

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Speaker 1: at first, not brain first. What had they got wrong?

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Speaker 1: And then came the Joseph Weiner moment. Three psychologists Joe Simmons,

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Speaker 1: Leif Nelson, and Uri Simonson wrote a website together under

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Speaker 1: the jokey name data Colada. Usually, they poked fun at

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Speaker 1: sloppy research methods in social science, for example, using some

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Speaker 1: dubious statistical techniques that were all too common in the field.

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Speaker 1: That data Klada team demonstrated that listening to the song

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Speaker 1: when I'm sixty four by the Beatles makes you a

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Speaker 1: year and a half younger unbelievable. Clearly, not even the

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Speaker 1: Beatles are quite that brilliant, but the point was well made.

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Speaker 1: If the standard techniques in psychology and marketing research could

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Speaker 1: produce that sort of nonsense, the standard techniques needed to

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Speaker 1: be drastically improved. Sometimes, however, the Data Colada team found

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Speaker 1: themselves dealing not with sloppy practice, but with fraud. When Simmons, Nelson,

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Speaker 1: and Simonson looked into that sign at the top academic paper,

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Speaker 1: they realized that the data behind one of the experimental

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Speaker 1: studies made no sense. The data apparently described the behavior

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Speaker 1: of insurance company customers reporting their vehicle mileage. On closer inspection,

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Speaker 1: it didn't look anything like real mileage data, and it

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Speaker 1: looked exactly like what you'd get if you used Microsoft

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Speaker 1: ex Cells randomization function. But things got weirder than that,

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Speaker 1: because the investigators also found evidence that another study conducted

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Speaker 1: by different researchers and then published in the same article,

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Speaker 1: also contained manipulated data. The Data Colada team wrote a

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Speaker 1: blog post titled Cluster Fake, exclaiming that's right, two different

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Speaker 1: people independently faked data for two different studies in a

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Speaker 1: paper about dishonesty. To make matters even more interesting, two

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Speaker 1: of the academics involved, the ones most closely associated with

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Speaker 1: the manipulated data were superstars of behavioral science Dan Arielli

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Speaker 1: and Francesca Gino. If they had committed the fraud, this

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Speaker 1: was big news. As with pilt Down Man in the

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Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, there was no doubt that somebody had faked

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Speaker 1: the evidence, or in this case, two different people. The

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Speaker 1: question was who. By nineteen fifty three, when Joseph Weiner

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Speaker 1: and his colleagues comprehensively demonstrated that piltdown Man was a fake,

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Speaker 1: Sir Arthur Woodward was dead. Charles Dawson had died decades before,

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Speaker 1: before the pilt Down two find had even been announced.

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Speaker 1: One or both of those men were the obvious people

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Speaker 1: to blame for the lie, but there were others. Over

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Speaker 1: the years, a variety of books and essays have accused

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Speaker 1: twenty different suspects of the fraud. Some of them were

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Speaker 1: acquaintances of Dawson. In Hastings, he had been feuding with

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Speaker 1: the local antiquarian society, and several knowledgeable locals had good

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Speaker 1: reason to dislike him. Perhaps one of them had faked

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Speaker 1: the bones and planted them at the Piltdown site, where

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Speaker 1: Dawson would find them and embarrass himself. Then there were

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Speaker 1: people from Woodward's world of academic paleontology, friends, rivals, subordinates.

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Speaker 1: One of them was a huge champion of Piltdown man,

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Speaker 1: had he colluded with Dawson. Perhaps another was a zoologist.

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Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy, after his death, a trunk had left

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Speaker 1: in storage at the Natural History Museum was opened. It

225
00:19:25,250 --> 00:19:31,650
Speaker 1: contained animal bones stained chocolate brown like the Piltdown's skull

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Speaker 1: and jaw. A fraudster, or perhaps a skeptic trying to

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Speaker 1: understand a fraud, just as Winer had filed down, an

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Speaker 1: aped to understand the forger's methods. The most spectacular theory

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Speaker 1: about the Piltdown fraudster was published in the magazine's Science

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Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty three. The forger was none other than

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Speaker 1: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dawson's neighbor. Doyle might have

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Speaker 1: had the opportunity to plant fakes, and as a doctor,

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Speaker 1: he had the expertise to make them, But the case

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Speaker 1: against Conan Doyle a pro pritty enough for such a

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00:20:10,450 --> 00:20:15,450
Speaker 1: gripping storyteller is nothing more than a good story. Not

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Speaker 1: only is there no evidence that he was involved, there's

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00:20:18,410 --> 00:20:22,410
Speaker 1: no plausible motive either. The theory rests on little more

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Speaker 1: than a famous man's proximity to the piltdown site. No,

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Speaker 1: it's far more likely that the fraud was not perpetrated

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Speaker 1: on the discoverers of Piltdown Man, but by one of them.

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Speaker 1: The forgery was masterminded, either by Sir Arthur Woodward or

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Speaker 1: by Charles Dawson, or by them both faced with the

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Speaker 1: two fraudulent studies on dishonesty, both published in the same article,

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00:20:54,930 --> 00:20:59,570
Speaker 1: the academic community faced a similar question. Some of the

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00:20:59,610 --> 00:21:04,090
Speaker 1: fraudulent data was managed by dan Arielli and definitely not

246
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Speaker 1: his named co authors. Does that prove he faked the data?

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Speaker 1: He says he didn't, and it must have been faked

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Speaker 1: by the insurance company he collaborated with. But the insurance

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00:21:15,930 --> 00:21:18,690
Speaker 1: company had no reason to make up data to support

250
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Speaker 1: dan Arielli's theory, and they've also denied Ariel's claim. Or

251
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Speaker 1: maybe there was some third party involved, an eager, unnamed

252
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Speaker 1: research assistant, a disgruntled insurance company analyst. It doesn't seem likely,

253
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Speaker 1: but there's no way to be sure. As for the

254
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Speaker 1: other study with fake data that was conducted by Francesca Gino,

255
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Speaker 1: did she fake the data or was it faked by

256
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Speaker 1: some other unknown party. She says she did nothing wrong.

257
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Speaker 1: Data Kalada sent a concise dossier of evidence to Gino's employer,

258
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Speaker 1: Harvard University, knowing that they would have access to detailed

259
00:22:02,930 --> 00:22:07,010
Speaker 1: data logs that might prove her guilt or her innocence.

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00:22:08,090 --> 00:22:14,610
Speaker 1: Harvard spent eighteen months investigating, then suspended Gino without pay,

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Speaker 1: stripped her of her named professorship, and began proceedings to

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Speaker 1: evoke her tenure. There had been quiet mutterings about Arielli

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Speaker 1: and Gino long before Data Callada published their forensic expose.

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Speaker 1: As then again, there were mutterings about Charles Dawson, the

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Speaker 1: discoverer of the first Piltdown bone fragments, long before Joseph

266
00:22:43,690 --> 00:22:50,130
Speaker 1: Weiner's bombshell. Among the most intriguing was the Mayor's Field Map,

267
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Speaker 1: an old map showing the area near Piltdown. It was

268
00:22:55,250 --> 00:23:00,330
Speaker 1: published in a local archaeological journal in nineteen twelve, the

269
00:23:00,490 --> 00:23:05,210
Speaker 1: year of the Piltdown discovery. It's a strange thing, a

270
00:23:05,450 --> 00:23:09,370
Speaker 1: crude forgery claiming to be from seventeen twenty five, or

271
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Speaker 1: but full of anachronisms, the wrong spellings, the wrong typefaces,

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Speaker 1: roads that didn't exist until a century later, and many

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Speaker 1: other errors. And make of this what you will. On

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Speaker 1: the map, the word one hundred is misspelled as hundred.

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Speaker 1: The O of hundred has a tiny arrow pointing to it,

276
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Speaker 1: and that O. Maybe this is mere coincidence, but the

277
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Speaker 1: O just happens to be on the spot where the

278
00:23:41,970 --> 00:23:46,650
Speaker 1: first pilt Down fossils were found. Near the O on

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Speaker 1: one side are the words pilt down near the O.

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Speaker 1: On the other side, the map notes the location of

281
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Speaker 1: Forge Pits. Strange. The map was published without explanation and

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Speaker 1: with the label made by C. Dawson FSA. It's a

283
00:24:10,250 --> 00:24:15,690
Speaker 1: kind of treasure map. Either Dawson was publishing a prank confession,

284
00:24:16,370 --> 00:24:21,690
Speaker 1: or more likely, it's an anonymous accusation in code by

285
00:24:21,730 --> 00:24:26,970
Speaker 1: a local antiquarian who dislike Dawson and suspected foul play

286
00:24:27,130 --> 00:24:33,690
Speaker 1: at Piltdown. Dawson never protested about the map's publication. That

287
00:24:33,850 --> 00:24:37,410
Speaker 1: was wise at the time. The veiled accusation in a

288
00:24:37,570 --> 00:24:43,450
Speaker 1: niche local journal passed unnoticed by the wider world. Complaining

289
00:24:43,570 --> 00:24:49,450
Speaker 1: would only have drawn attention to it. But why didn't

290
00:24:49,450 --> 00:24:54,610
Speaker 1: the whistleblower say something more direct about their suspicions. That's unclear,

291
00:24:55,370 --> 00:24:59,290
Speaker 1: but it's no mystery why they preferred to remain anonymous.

292
00:25:00,090 --> 00:25:06,050
Speaker 1: Identifying a fraud can be a dangerous business. A few

293
00:25:06,050 --> 00:25:10,210
Speaker 1: weeks after Data Callada published a detail filled four part

294
00:25:10,410 --> 00:25:16,050
Speaker 1: expose of fraudulent data in work co authored by Francesca Gino,

295
00:25:16,890 --> 00:25:22,410
Speaker 1: Geno filed a lawsuit against Harvard University and also sued

296
00:25:22,530 --> 00:25:27,650
Speaker 1: Data Collada for defamation. She asked for damages of twenty

297
00:25:27,690 --> 00:25:36,970
Speaker 1: five million dollars. Cautionary tales will return after the break

298
00:25:44,610 --> 00:25:48,730
Speaker 1: dead men can't sue, which may be why so many

299
00:25:48,770 --> 00:25:53,650
Speaker 1: different authors have accused so many long dead Edwardians of

300
00:25:53,730 --> 00:25:58,330
Speaker 1: being the Piltdown fraudster. But in truth, it's hard to

301
00:25:58,370 --> 00:26:03,490
Speaker 1: look past Charles Dawson. In the book The Piltdown Man

302
00:26:03,570 --> 00:26:08,690
Speaker 1: Hoax Case Closed, the historian Miles Russell sets out an

303
00:26:09,170 --> 00:26:15,090
Speaker 1: honishing track record of discoveries by Dawson. In eighteen ninety one,

304
00:26:15,490 --> 00:26:19,010
Speaker 1: Dawson sent a large fossil tooth to Woodward at the

305
00:26:19,090 --> 00:26:23,050
Speaker 1: Natural History Museum, who received it with the light, believing

306
00:26:23,090 --> 00:26:25,530
Speaker 1: that it was a missing link in the fossil record

307
00:26:25,890 --> 00:26:29,770
Speaker 1: one hundred million year old mammal in Europe. It was

308
00:26:29,810 --> 00:26:33,930
Speaker 1: also a fake. Modern analysis shows that it was filed

309
00:26:33,970 --> 00:26:37,690
Speaker 1: down from another tooth, just as the piltdown tooth had been.

310
00:26:38,930 --> 00:26:43,090
Speaker 1: Dawson had access to fossils he could doctor, and now

311
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Speaker 1: he had the ear of Woodward, a dupe who trusted

312
00:26:46,250 --> 00:26:50,890
Speaker 1: him and would vouch for whatever Dawson found. In eighteen

313
00:26:50,970 --> 00:26:55,490
Speaker 1: ninety three, Dawson sent a rusty little iron statuette to

314
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Speaker 1: an expert at the British Museum. It was in the

315
00:26:58,970 --> 00:27:03,650
Speaker 1: Roman style, but the exciting thing, said Dawson, was that

316
00:27:03,730 --> 00:27:07,290
Speaker 1: it had been found at a known Roman iron working

317
00:27:07,370 --> 00:27:11,250
Speaker 1: site in Sussex. Yet it was made of cast iron.

318
00:27:12,330 --> 00:27:16,050
Speaker 1: Experts had thought cast iron wasn't made in Europe until

319
00:27:16,170 --> 00:27:19,890
Speaker 1: many centuries after the Romans left Britain. So this was

320
00:27:19,930 --> 00:27:24,690
Speaker 1: another missing link, a piece of evidence that fundamentally reframed

321
00:27:24,730 --> 00:27:29,970
Speaker 1: our understanding of Roman technology. Where exactly had it been

322
00:27:29,970 --> 00:27:34,250
Speaker 1: found again and by whom? Not to worry about those details,

323
00:27:34,250 --> 00:27:38,370
Speaker 1: said Dawson. It was a workman. Couldn't remember the chap's name.

324
00:27:38,810 --> 00:27:43,730
Speaker 1: It was a few years back. More recent chemical analysis

325
00:27:43,930 --> 00:27:48,570
Speaker 1: confirms that the statue is modern in eighteen ninety four,

326
00:27:48,970 --> 00:27:53,050
Speaker 1: Dawson published a remarkable drawing of a Neolithic flint axe

327
00:27:53,410 --> 00:27:57,370
Speaker 1: attached to a wooden halft. And it wasn't just a drawing.

328
00:27:57,770 --> 00:28:01,090
Speaker 1: Dawson had based his drawing on an earlier sketch by

329
00:28:01,130 --> 00:28:05,410
Speaker 1: a local hobbyist who discovered the axe and the haft

330
00:28:06,170 --> 00:28:12,690
Speaker 1: when a few years back the halft alas had crumbled

331
00:28:12,690 --> 00:28:15,730
Speaker 1: at the touch and all attempts to save it had

332
00:28:15,770 --> 00:28:23,010
Speaker 1: proved futile. So here was yet another missing link early

333
00:28:23,090 --> 00:28:28,410
Speaker 1: evidence of halfted prehistoric tools. If you regard a drawing

334
00:28:28,850 --> 00:28:32,330
Speaker 1: of a drawing of a disintegrated piece of wood as evidence,

335
00:28:32,410 --> 00:28:36,010
Speaker 1: that is, even the flint axe head has been lost,

336
00:28:36,810 --> 00:28:42,130
Speaker 1: if indeed it ever existed. Then there was an ancient

337
00:28:42,290 --> 00:28:47,850
Speaker 1: horseshoe of an unusual design, a spur, possibly Roman, a

338
00:28:47,890 --> 00:28:51,770
Speaker 1: neolithic hammer made of deer bone, very rare. It was

339
00:28:52,010 --> 00:28:55,450
Speaker 1: carved with precision, and we now know that's because it

340
00:28:55,490 --> 00:29:00,530
Speaker 1: was carved by a modern steel chisel. A Chinese bronze

341
00:29:00,570 --> 00:29:04,490
Speaker 1: bowl from the Han dynasty two thousand years ago, found

342
00:29:04,530 --> 00:29:08,210
Speaker 1: in a medieval structure in the English coastal town of Dover,

343
00:29:09,090 --> 00:29:14,210
Speaker 1: remarkable evidence of global trade. Where exactly were these things

344
00:29:14,290 --> 00:29:20,570
Speaker 1: found mister Dawson, and by whom and when? Ah, it

345
00:29:20,690 --> 00:29:26,730
Speaker 1: was all a few years back, I could continue. Miles

346
00:29:26,770 --> 00:29:32,810
Speaker 1: Russell certainly does, detailing a long series of Dawson fakes. Dawson,

347
00:29:32,930 --> 00:29:37,850
Speaker 1: it seems, was desperate for academic recognition, and especially he

348
00:29:38,010 --> 00:29:42,090
Speaker 1: yearned to be a fellow of the Royal Society. Perhaps

349
00:29:42,130 --> 00:29:45,090
Speaker 1: if he'd lived a little longer he might have succeeded.

350
00:29:45,970 --> 00:29:50,370
Speaker 1: After all, he had an astonishing track record of repeatedly

351
00:29:50,450 --> 00:29:55,650
Speaker 1: finding novel and important discoveries, the sort of things other

352
00:29:55,690 --> 00:29:59,850
Speaker 1: researchers just couldn't find, not if they tried for a lifetime.

353
00:30:02,370 --> 00:30:04,770
Speaker 1: What we can say for certain is that many of

354
00:30:04,850 --> 00:30:09,810
Speaker 1: these Dawson fakes have traits in common. There's a missing link,

355
00:30:10,370 --> 00:30:14,290
Speaker 1: something new and surprising, yet connected to what's already known.

356
00:30:14,970 --> 00:30:18,810
Speaker 1: There's often an academic dupe, somebody who's come to trust

357
00:30:18,890 --> 00:30:22,130
Speaker 1: Dawson and speak up in support of him. And there's

358
00:30:22,130 --> 00:30:26,370
Speaker 1: a persistent vagueness about the providence of the items where

359
00:30:26,410 --> 00:30:31,650
Speaker 1: the exact time, location, and finder of the discovery are unclear.

360
00:30:33,010 --> 00:30:36,890
Speaker 1: Dawson often sat on his treasures for several years before

361
00:30:36,930 --> 00:30:42,130
Speaker 1: announcing their existence. That gave him deniability if challenged and

362
00:30:42,170 --> 00:30:45,330
Speaker 1: it also made life difficult for anyone trying to follow

363
00:30:45,410 --> 00:30:50,410
Speaker 1: the trail and what have pilled down. It's the ultimate

364
00:30:50,490 --> 00:30:54,130
Speaker 1: missing link, of course, And if Sir Arthur Woodward was

365
00:30:54,290 --> 00:30:57,810
Speaker 1: innocent of the fraud, as seems likely, he was the

366
00:30:57,930 --> 00:31:02,050
Speaker 1: ultimate dupe. And there was the vagueness again. In his fateful

367
00:31:02,130 --> 00:31:08,090
Speaker 1: letter to Woodward, Dawson provided few details. In fact, Dawson's

368
00:31:08,210 --> 00:31:11,810
Speaker 1: ambiguous areas counts imply that he acquired the first pilt

369
00:31:11,850 --> 00:31:18,010
Speaker 1: Down bone fragment sometime between one and thirteen years before

370
00:31:18,130 --> 00:31:22,690
Speaker 1: showing it to Woodward. It was, shall we say, all

371
00:31:22,730 --> 00:31:28,210
Speaker 1: a few years back. As for pilt Down two, the

372
00:31:28,250 --> 00:31:33,610
Speaker 1: discovery of another human like skull alongside another ape like jawbone,

373
00:31:33,930 --> 00:31:37,410
Speaker 1: the discovery which dispelled all the doubts back in nineteen sixteen,

374
00:31:38,370 --> 00:31:40,970
Speaker 1: we don't know where it was discovered, and we don't

375
00:31:40,970 --> 00:31:45,050
Speaker 1: know when. The overwhelming probability is that it was never

376
00:31:45,290 --> 00:31:49,850
Speaker 1: discovered at all. The bones went straight from Dawson's workbench

377
00:31:50,130 --> 00:31:55,330
Speaker 1: to Arthur Woodward's office without Dawson having bothered to bury them.

378
00:31:55,770 --> 00:31:59,930
Speaker 1: If Dawson hadn't faded away and died, presumably he would

379
00:31:59,970 --> 00:32:03,850
Speaker 1: have started to craft one of his characteristically vague stories,

380
00:32:04,730 --> 00:32:08,890
Speaker 1: but without Dawson to spin his yarns pilt down to

381
00:32:08,890 --> 00:32:12,810
Speaker 1: two who was largely forgotten, it had served its purpose.

382
00:32:16,610 --> 00:32:21,690
Speaker 1: Francesca Gino's twenty five million dollar lawsuit against Data Calada

383
00:32:21,930 --> 00:32:26,810
Speaker 1: was dismissed in September twenty twenty four, thirteen months after

384
00:32:26,890 --> 00:32:30,410
Speaker 1: it was filed. Can't have been a fun thirteen months

385
00:32:30,450 --> 00:32:35,050
Speaker 1: for Joe Simmons, Leif Nielsen, and Yuri Simonson. The suit

386
00:32:35,170 --> 00:32:40,770
Speaker 1: against Harvard continues. In August twenty twenty five, Harvard filed

387
00:32:40,770 --> 00:32:46,050
Speaker 1: a counterclaim against Gino, suing her for defamation and alleging

388
00:32:46,170 --> 00:32:52,250
Speaker 1: she falsified court evidence. Gino maintains her innocence. As for

389
00:32:52,410 --> 00:32:56,570
Speaker 1: dan Arielli, everyone agrees that he published a study containing

390
00:32:56,690 --> 00:33:00,290
Speaker 1: fabricated data, but nobody can prove that he was the

391
00:33:00,330 --> 00:33:04,890
Speaker 1: one who fabricated it. He continues to deny wrongdoing. I

392
00:33:04,930 --> 00:33:09,010
Speaker 1: would never falsify any data on any experiment, he told

393
00:33:09,250 --> 00:33:12,570
Speaker 1: New Yorker. He told me the same thing. At no

394
00:33:12,690 --> 00:33:17,290
Speaker 1: point did I knowingly use unreliable, inaccurate, or manipulated data

395
00:33:17,570 --> 00:33:22,050
Speaker 1: in our research, And there's no solid proof that he did.

396
00:33:24,730 --> 00:33:27,370
Speaker 1: It's easy to chuckle at some of this stuff, So

397
00:33:27,570 --> 00:33:30,370
Speaker 1: what if It actually makes no difference whether you sign

398
00:33:30,370 --> 00:33:32,050
Speaker 1: at the top of a form or at the end.

399
00:33:32,610 --> 00:33:36,290
Speaker 1: So what if Charles Dawson did fabricate evidence of early

400
00:33:36,370 --> 00:33:40,930
Speaker 1: humans and Cretaceous mammals, and Roman cast iron and palelithic

401
00:33:40,970 --> 00:33:46,130
Speaker 1: axes and trade between China and Kent. But it would

402
00:33:46,130 --> 00:33:50,850
Speaker 1: be wrong to categorize Piltdown as merely a prank. It

403
00:33:50,890 --> 00:33:56,290
Speaker 1: was an astonishing, brazen forgery that had led paleontologists astray

404
00:33:56,730 --> 00:34:02,650
Speaker 1: for forty years. Countless hours were wasted, entire careers were

405
00:34:02,690 --> 00:34:06,970
Speaker 1: devoted to making sense of the Piltdown discoveries and what

406
00:34:07,050 --> 00:34:11,810
Speaker 1: they told us about human evolution, all in vain, all

407
00:34:11,890 --> 00:34:14,690
Speaker 1: because of a lie that was designed to advance the

408
00:34:14,770 --> 00:34:19,090
Speaker 1: career of the fraudster. The same can be said about

409
00:34:19,130 --> 00:34:25,410
Speaker 1: fraudulent research in modern science. Three million Guatemalan taxpayers were

410
00:34:25,530 --> 00:34:28,890
Speaker 1: enrolled in an experiment to test an idea that now

411
00:34:29,050 --> 00:34:34,170
Speaker 1: seems to have been built on lies. And if that

412
00:34:34,330 --> 00:34:38,290
Speaker 1: seems bad, what about medical fraud? A few years ago,

413
00:34:38,370 --> 00:34:43,010
Speaker 1: a Dutch researcher, Don Polderman's was found by his own employer,

414
00:34:43,250 --> 00:34:48,330
Speaker 1: Erasmus Medical School, to have used fictitious and knowingly unreliable

415
00:34:48,450 --> 00:34:53,050
Speaker 1: data Polderman's himself has apologized and said that the use

416
00:34:53,090 --> 00:34:56,890
Speaker 1: of the fake data was an accident. But this wasn't

417
00:34:56,890 --> 00:35:00,490
Speaker 1: a study about signing forms. It was a study about

418
00:35:00,490 --> 00:35:06,450
Speaker 1: how to do major surgery. Polderman's had published research recommending

419
00:35:06,490 --> 00:35:10,490
Speaker 1: the use of beta blocker drugs before some surgical operations

420
00:35:10,730 --> 00:35:14,410
Speaker 1: to lower blood pressure. After the problems with his research

421
00:35:14,490 --> 00:35:18,370
Speaker 1: became known, a new analysis of the evidence concluded that

422
00:35:18,450 --> 00:35:22,050
Speaker 1: beta blockers weren't just useless as a pre surgical treatment,

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Speaker 1: but potentially deadly. They raised the risk of post surgical

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Speaker 1: death by more than a quarter. That's even worse than

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Speaker 1: it sounds. Two researchers estimated that if the confusion about

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Speaker 1: beta blockers had delayed the adoption of best practices by

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Speaker 1: five years, the consequence was eight hundred thousand additional deaths.

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Speaker 1: That's more people than died at the Battle of the Somme.

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Speaker 1: Maybe that's an alarmist number, but it certainly gives a

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Speaker 1: sense of what's at stake. Sometimes it's a matter of

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Speaker 1: life and death, a lot of death, and even if

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Speaker 1: it isn't, it's about truth and truth matters. One of

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Speaker 1: the data Collada team, Joe Simmons, has been reflecting about

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Speaker 1: the way bad science, both the fakes and the sloppy stuff,

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Speaker 1: distorts our view of reality and perverts the scientific process.

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Speaker 1: Flawed analysis tends to produce more interesting results than careful stuff.

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Speaker 1: Fake data absolutely guarantees those interesting results. Just as Dawson

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Speaker 1: seemed to be able to dig up something amazing every

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Speaker 1: time he went to a site, an influential portion of

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Speaker 1: our literature is effectively a made up story. Joe Simmons

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Speaker 1: told The New Yorker A field cannot reward truth if

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Speaker 1: it does not or cannot decipher it, so it rewards

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Speaker 1: other things instead, interestingness, novelty, speed, impact, fantasy, interestingness, novelty, fantasy.

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Speaker 1: Charles Dawson would have been right at home. Key sources

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Speaker 1: were Unraveling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh and the Piltdown

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Speaker 1: Man Hoax Case Closed by Miles Russell. For a full

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Speaker 1: list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford

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Speaker 1: dot com. Cautionary Tales as written by me, Tim Harford

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00:37:53,050 --> 00:37:57,010
Speaker 1: and Andrew Wright, Alice Vines, and Ryan Dilly. It's produced

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00:37:57,010 --> 00:38:00,770
Speaker 1: by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and

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00:38:00,810 --> 00:38:04,730
Speaker 1: original music of the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound

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00:38:04,730 --> 00:38:08,930
Speaker 1: design is by Carlos san Juan at Brain Audio. Ben

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Speaker 1: daff Haffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice

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Speaker 1: talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough and Sarah

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00:38:17,410 --> 00:38:21,050
Speaker 1: Jupp as Sam and Roe, Jamal Westman and Ruthers Wright.

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Speaker 1: The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work

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Speaker 1: of Jacob Weisberg, Gretta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,

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Speaker 1: Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Autionary Tales is

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Speaker 1: a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardore Studios

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Speaker 1: in London by Tom Barry. If you like the show,

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00:38:43,250 --> 00:38:46,330
Speaker 1: please remember to share rate band review. It really makes

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Speaker 1: a difference to us and if you want to hear

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Speaker 1: the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on

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Speaker 1: the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot Fm,

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Speaker 1: slash plus