- It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational
finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more
than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans
and Neanderthals.
-
- This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von
Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his
scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the
extremely rare skull.
-
- However, the professor's 30-year-old academic career
has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified
the dates on this and numerous other "stone age" relics.
-
- 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."
-
- The scandal only came to light when Prof Protsch was
caught trying to sell his department's entire chimpanzee skull collection
to the United States.
-
- An inquiry later established that he had also passed
off fake fossils as real ones and had plagiarised other scientists' work.
-
- His discovery appeared to show that Neanderthals had
spread much further north than was previously known.
-
- But his university inquiry was told that a crucial Hamburg
skull fragment, which was believed to have come from the world's oldest
German, a Neanderthal known as Hahnhfersand Man, was actually a mere 7,500
years old, according to Oxford University's radiocarbon dating unit. The
unit established that other skulls had been wrongly dated too.
-
- 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.
-
- "It's deeply embarrassing. Of course the university
feels very bad about this," Professor Ulrich Brandt, who led the investigation
into Prof Protsch's activities, said yesterday. "Prof Protsch refused
to meet us. But we had 10 sittings with 12 witnesses.
-
- "Their stories about him were increasingly bizarre.
After a while it was hard to take it seriously. You had to laugh. It was
just unbelievable. At the end of the day what he did was incredible."
-
- During their investigation, the university discovered
that Prof Protsch, 65, a flamboyant figure with a fondness for gold watches,
Porsches and Cuban cigars, was unable to work his own carbon-dating machine.
-
- Instead, after returning from Germany to America, where
he did his doctorate, and taking up a professorship, he had simply made
things up.
-
- In one case he had claimed that a 50 million-year-old
"half-ape" called Adapis had been found in Switzerland, an archaeological
sensation. In reality, the ape had been dug up in France, where several
other examples had already been found.
-
- Prof Terberger said that he grew suspicious about the
professor's work in 2001 after sending off the skull fragment to Oxford
for tests.
-
- Further tests revealed that all of the skulls dated by
Prof Protsch were in reality far younger than he had claimed, prompting
Prof Terberger and a British colleague, Martin Street, to write a scientific
paper last year.
-
- At the same time, German police began investigating the
professor for fraud, following allegations that he had tried to sell the
university's 278 chimpanzee skulls for $70,000 to a US dealer.
-
- Why, though, had he done it?
-
- "If you find a skull that's more than 30,000 years
old it's a sensation. If you find three of them people notice you. It's
good for your career," Prof Terberger said. "At the end of the
day it was about ambition."
-
- Other details of the professor's life also appeared to
crumble under scrutiny. Before he disappeared from the university's campus
last year, Prof Protsch told his students he had examined Hitler's and
Eva Braun's bones.
-
- He also boasted of having flats in New York, Florida
and California, where, he claimed, he hung out with Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Steffi Graf. Even the professor's aristocratic title, "von Zieten",
appears to be bogus.
-
- Far from being the descendant of a dashing general in
the hussars, the professor was the son of a Nazi MP, Wilhelm Protsch, Der
Spiegel magazine revealed last October.
-
- The university is investigating how thousands of documents
lodged in the anthropology department relating to the Nazis' gruesome scientific
experiments in the 1930s were mysteriously shredded, allegedly under the
professor's instructions.
-
- They also discovered that some of the 12,000 skeletons
stored in the department's "bone cellar" were missing their heads,
apparently sold to friends of the professor in the US and sympathetic dentists.
-
- 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.
-
- "He was perfect at being evasive," Prof Brandt
said yesterday. "He would switch from saying 'it isn't really clear'
to giving diffuse statements.
-
- "I'm not a psychologist so I can't say why he did
it. But my guess is that when he came back from the States 30 years ago
he realised he wasn't up to the job of being a professor. So he started
inventing things. It rapidly became a habit.'
-
- Yesterday the professor, who lives in Mainz with his
wife Angelina, didn't respond to emails from the Guardian asking him to
comment on the affair. But in earlier remarks to Der Spiegel he insisted
that he was the victim of an "intrigue".
-
- "All the disputed fossils are my personal property,"
he told the magazine.
-
- Missing links and planted stone age finds
-
- Piltdown Man The most infamous of all scientific frauds
was unearthed in 1912 in a Sussex gravel pit. With its huge human-like
braincase and ape-like jaw, the Piltdown Man "fossil" was named
Eoanthropus dawsoni after Charles Dawson, the solicitor and amateur archaeologist
who discovered it. For 40 years Piltdown Man was heralded as the missing
link between humans and their primate ancestors. But in 1953 scientists
concluded it was a forgery. Radiocarbon dating showed the human skull was
just 600 years old, while the jawbone was that of an orang-utan. The entire
package of fossil fragments found at Piltdown - which included a prehistoric
cricket bat - had been planted.
-
- The devil's archaeologist Japanese archaeologist Shinichi
Fujimura was so prolific at uncovering prehistoric artefacts he earned
the nickname "God's hands". At site after site, Fujimura discovered
stoneware and relics that pushed back the limits of Japan's known history.
The researcher and his stone age finds drew international attention and
rewrote text books. In November 2000 the spell was broken when a newspaper
printed pictures of Fujimura digging holes and burying objects that he
later dug up and announced as major finds. "I was tempted by the devil.
I don't know how I can apologise for what I did," he said.
-
- Piltdown Turkey The supposed fossil of Archaeoraptor,
which was to become known as the "Piltdown turkey", came to light
in 1999 when National Geographic magazine published an account of its discovery.
It seemed to show another missing link - this time between birds and dinosaurs.
Archaeoraptor appeared to be the remains of a large feathered bird with
the tail of a dinosaur. The fossil was smuggled out of China and sold to
a private collector in the US for £51,000. Experts were suspicious
and closer examination showed the specimen to be a "composite"
- two fossils stuck together with strong glue.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1418083,00.html
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