Archeological discoveries have always fascinated us. They offer insights into the lives of our ancestors and the cultures of ancient civilizations, but not all finds stand up to scrutiny. Throughout history, several sensational archeological discoveries have turned out to be nothing more than elaborate hoaxes. These fraudulent artifacts deceived both scholars and the public before they were debunked. So, what are three of the most famous archeological hoaxes, and what can we learn from them?
Hoax #1: The Piltdown Man
In 1912, a man named Charles Dawson claimed to have made one of the most important archeological discoveries in history. Near the village of Piltdown in Sussex, England, Dawson had apparently found the ancient remains of a skull. According to him, this was the long-searched-for missing link between apes and humans. He called it Eoanthropus dawsoni, but it would come to be better known as the Piltdown Man.
The find was a sensation. Some of the most respected archeologists of the time were utterly convinced of its authenticity, and newspapers from all over the world spread the news of Dawson’s discovery. Of course, there were skeptics, including the famous Raymond Dart, who went on to discover the Taung Child in 1924, but they were in the minority. The vast majority of people were all too happy to accept the Piltdown Man as the genuine missing link.
That is until a group of scientists came together in 1953 and proved it was all an elaborate hoax. Rather than the skull of a new species, it was found to be a composite of the remains of three different primates. The cranium belonged to a Medieval human, the mandible came from an orangutan, and the teeth were from a fossil chimpanzee. So, how did Dawson’s Piltdown Man fool the scientific community for so long?
In 1912, the human fossil record was woefully incomplete. Apart from a few scattered remains found in Germany and Indonesia, there really was not much for archeologists of the time to go on. The scarcity of human ancestors in the fossil record meant that every new discovery had the potential to totally change everything archeologists thought they knew about the origin of our species. Therefore, many of them wanted to be “the one” responsible for making a find that would rewrite the history books and fill the gaps in archeological knowledge. So, Dawson’s discovery was embraced with open arms. Furthermore, without a robust fossil record for comparison, many archeologists and scientists in 1912 were less equipped than we are now to properly identify a fake.
But perhaps the main reason why the Piltdown Man went unchallenged for so long is because people simply wanted it to be true. Even though Charles Darwin argued in 1871 that humans likely evolved in Africa, many scientists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries held racist and colonial ideas and were reluctant to accept this. In fact, it was not until much more recently that Africa became the widely accepted birthplace of our species. So, when Dawson claimed to have found the missing link in England, he also implied that humans evolved in England. Obviously, we now know that this could not be further from the truth, but in 1912, it was a very attractive idea. This may explain why the Piltdown Man was such an instant sensation, while other finds, such as Raymond Dart’s South African “Taung Child,” were ignored and criticized.
Hoax #2: The Japanese Palaeolithic
The Paleolithic, meaning “Old Stone” in Latin, was a period (53,000-10,000 years ago) in ancient human history characterized by the use of stone technology. Homonids made tools from stone for millions of years before our species existed. However, towards the end of the Pleistocene (2.6 million years ago to 11,700 years ago), our ancestors began making artifacts out of ceramic, bone, and ivory.
For a long time, archeologists thought that there were no Paleolithic homo sapiens in Japan. The oldest evidence for hominid habitation in Japan dates to the Jomon Period, which began some 14,000 years ago and is associated with pottery. With no evidence for earlier habitation, Japanese archeologists had no reason to believe that they would find anything if they excavated deeper than the Jomon layers.
All that changed when stone artifacts dating to 40,000 years ago were discovered. These finds rewrote history, showing that Japan had been inhabited for tens of thousands of years longer than anyone had realized. Because they were so important, they brought the researchers involved a great deal of attention and prestige.
Among these researchers was an amateur archeologist named Shinichi Fujimura. Despite his lack of formal training, his colleagues said that he had “divine hands” because of how often he made important discoveries. By 2000, he was practically a celebrity and was part of an excavation team at Kamitakamori, an archeological site to the Northeast of Tokyo. It was here that Fujimura dug up a number of stone artifacts that were older than anything ever discovered in Japan. If the dates were to be believed, they were created before our species had even evolved. This would mean an earlier human species, such as Homo erectus, had once lived in Japan.
As with the Piltdown Man in 1912, the archeological community was quick to sensationalize the news, but for many geologists and anthropologists, things just did not add up. For one, the artifacts Fujimura claimed were hundreds of thousands of years old looked suspiciously like tools from the Jomon Period. It did not seem possible that these kinds of tools existed so far back in time and that Japanese stone technology had changed so little through the millennia.
Eventually, a group of journalists from a Japanese newspaper, the Mainichi Shimbun, secretly set up hidden cameras around the site where Fujimura was working and caught him red-handed. The footage clearly showed Fujimura sneaking onto the site while no one else was around and burying a number of stone artifacts so that he could dig them up later.
Fujiimura confessed all. In an interview with the newspaper, he said that he had been “possessed by an uncontrollable urge” and that he had just wanted to be the one who found the oldest stone artifacts in Japan. Hoaxes like this reveal that even the most successful and respected archeologists can be so consumed with the desire to make new discoveries that they can be driven to exaggerate and even falsify evidence.
Hoax #3: The Vinland Map
Everybody knows that Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas, right? That is certainly what most of us are taught in school, but it turns out that many other non-indigenous people explored the shores of the New World long before Columbus. For instance, voyagers from Polynesia are thought to have had contact with Native South Americans in the 13th century, and in 1960, a Norse settlement dating to the 11th century was discovered in Newfoundland.
Prior to their arrival in Newfoundland, the Norse, led by Erik the Red, had established a colony in Greenland, but until the discovery in 1960, archeologists lacked definitive evidence that the Norse had ever made it onto North America’s mainland. Even after 1960, dating methods were much less advanced than they are today, so it was hard to tell how old the Newfoundland site was without some form of written evidence.
In 1957, three years before the discovery in Newfoundland, an American antiques dealer named Lawrence Witten offered to sell a mysterious map to his alma mater, Yale University. He had bought it from a Spanish-Italian who told him it was a genuine 15th-century artifact that provided proof that the Norsemen had reached North America before Columbus.
At the time, Yale could not afford Witten’s asking price, so they contacted another alumnus, Paul Mellon, who agreed to buy the map and donate it to the university. His one stipulation was that Yale should keep the map a secret until it could be properly studied. Once a book about the map was published, he would happily donate it to Yale.
The book was published in 1965, but doubts about the map, which was referred to as the Vinland Map, immediately began to pop up. The map certainly looked genuine initially, but the longer you look, the more mistakes you notice. For one, the geography was all wrong for the knowledge of the time. The Vinland Map depicted Greenland as an island, which it is, but there is no evidence that the Norse would have known that when they settled there. In fact, Greenland was not fully circumnavigated until the 20th century, so it made little sense for the Vinland Map‘s depiction of it to be so accurate. Furthermore, one of the strangest things about the map was that Norway, the homeland of the Norse, looked wildly inaccurate.
A 1972 study accused the Vinland Map of being a fake, but because of the technological limitations of the time, it could not be proven beyond doubt. The study used chemical analysis to determine what kind of ink was used to draw the map and revealed that the Vinland Map contained traces of ink from the 20th century. Some argued that modern ink could have accidentally mixed with the genuine 15th-century ink, so Yale concluded that they couldn’t say for sure whether the map was a hoax or not.
By the 1990s, archeological dating techniques had vastly improved, and radiocarbon dating was used to discover the age of the parchment. It turned out that the parchment really was as old as it claimed to be, having been made between 1423 and 1445. And yet, many people were unable to shake the conviction that there was something not quite right about the Vinland Map.
Finally, in 2018, Richard Hark, a conservation scientist at Yale, announced that a global chemical analysis of the map had taken place. The study’s results were irrefutable: The Vinland Map was a fake. Although the parchment was indeed from the 15th century, the traces of modern ink that had been found in the 1970s turned out to be all over the map, proving that whoever forged it had used modern ink on old paper. It was a clever hoax, but a hoax nonetheless.
Hoaxes and Wishful Thinking
These three hoaxes demonstrate one of the key flaws of archeology as a discipline. Sometimes, we are just too excited about a new discovery to critically evaluate it. In other words, we can be easy to fool when we really want something to be true. Perhaps the main lesson we can learn from these hoaxes is that interdisciplinary research is our most important defense against archeological forgeries.
