Scholar’s Fraud - A Dating Disaster

For Neanderthals

The “36,000-year-old” skull fragment was the missing link between ancient Neanderthals and modern man, Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten told his scientific colleagues.

His other remarkable discoveries included the remains of a woman who lived “21,300 years ago” and a man who lived “29,400 years ago.” The carbon-14 dating specialist’s findings had long been considered proof that Neanderthals had lived in northern Europe and coexisted, as a separate species, with anatomically modern humans. There was just one problem. The professor did not know how to operate his carbon-14 dating equipment, and legitimate experts concluded that he had simply invented the dates. The skeletal remains, he had dated between “21,000 and 36,000 years old,” were dated by others as far younger. One of the skulls turned out to be from a man who had died barely 250 years ago—around AD. 1750.

On Feb. 19 The Guardian (London) reported that the Frankfurt University professor had been forced to retire due to his many “falsehoods and manipulations” over a 30-year academic career. The scandal surfaced when he was caught attempting to sell the university’s chimpanzee skull collection. In addition to fabricating data, an investigation found that he had plagiarized the work of other scientists and passed off fake fossils as authentic ones. “It’s deeply embarrassing,” said Professor Ulrich Brandt, who led the investigation. “Of course the university feels very bad about this.” As a result, “anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago,” said Professor Thomas Terberger of the University of Greifswald in eastern Germany, who discovered the hoax.

Why had Professor Protsch perpetrated the fraud? “If you find a skull that’s more than 30,000 years old, it’s a sensation,” explained Professor Terberger. “If you find three of them people notice you. It’s good for your career. At the end of the day it was about ambition.”

Regrettably, this is not the first time such an audacious fraud has been committed in this field. The infamous “Piltdown Man,” discovered in Britain in 1912 and heralded as the long-sought missing link between humans and apes, wasn’t revealed as a fake until 1953—more than 40 years later. When examined carefully, “Piltdown Man” proved to be a 600-year-old human skull combined with the jawbone of an orangutan, with both parts stained to make them appear older.

Why did it take so long for the scientific establishment to realize this? Robert Foley, director of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge University, explains in the March 15 issue of The Scientist: “One of the reasons that Piltdown man was so successful was that it fitted people’s expectations of what they thought early humans would look like.”

Since it took 30 years to expose this latest fraud, it seems history has repeated itself. It appears that the willingness of so many to believe in evolution was a major factor in fabricated evidence being uncritically accepted for so long.

From “The Good News Magazine”

The Problem of the Obvious or Common Sense

   The question of evolution versus creation is fundamentally about this question: Is life the result of random chance, or is life the result of specific intelligent design for a purpose, by a magnificent Creator?

On a very elementary level, one is faced with the obvious—that there at least appears to be intelligent design. Order and design surround us. Famous evolutionist Richard Dawkins in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker acknowledges this problem when he admits, "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."    When looking at rocks near the bank of a stream, one can obviously tell the difference between a rock that has been randomly formed by the erosion of sand and water, and an arrowhead. One is the product of natural processes; the other is the product of intelligent design.

If one asks an evolutionist if the watch he is wearing created itself, he will say no, the conclusion is obvious. But biological systems are vastly more complex than a watch. It should be equally obvious that a hand, or eye, or even an amoeba must be designed.

Likewise, when one sees a bird's nest, everyone naturally assumes that there is a bird that built it. The existence of a computer demands a computer designer. Creation demands a Creator.

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