Dana Schwartz (2:09)

You're listening to Hoax, a production of iHeart podcasts, folks. It's a hoax Alpha.

Lizzie Logan (2:18)

No one ever seems to believe me.

Dana Schwartz (2:20)

When I swear I never was deceiving a bless. Welcome to Hoax, a podcast about the lies we wish were true and truths.

Lizzie Logan (2:33)

That sound like lies.

Dana Schwartz (2:35)

I'm the ghost of Dana Schwartz.

Lizzie Logan (2:36)

And I'm the evil twin of Lizzy Logan.

Dana Schwartz (2:38)

Welcome to the show, Lizzie. Are you a biology person? Did you like biology in school?

Lizzie Logan (2:46)

I liked it.

Dana Schwartz (2:47)

Okay.

Lizzie Logan (2:48)

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

Dana Schwartz (2:50)

The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. I mean, that's really all we need for this episode.

Lizzie Logan (2:54)

That'll get you to college.

Dana Schwartz (2:56)

I love biology. I was a big. I was pre med in college.

Lizzie Logan (3:00)

This is a fact I remember from your memoir.

Dana Schwartz (3:02)

This is a fact we know. I worked at the Adler Planetarium when I was in high school, which is the Chicago Planetarium.

Lizzie Logan (3:10)

Is that biology? That's planets.

Dana Schwartz (3:11)

It's planets. But I did also almost get a summer internship at the Field Museum back in my pre med day.

Lizzie Logan (3:17)

I'm almost proud of you.

Dana Schwartz (3:19)

Thank you. I instead made the decision to take an internship at Conan and move out to Los Angeles and do an entirely different career path. So that was really a moment that could have been. But I'm much happier now.

Lizzie Logan (3:33)

And now you know me.

Dana Schwartz (3:35)

That's true. But I am someone who really likes biology and evolutionary biology. And so this is a story I have known about for a very long time, and I'm excited to sort of dive into it.

Lizzie Logan (3:47)

Wait, is this. Am I about to find out that the hoax is evolution?

Dana Schwartz (3:51)

Oh, Lizzy.

Lizzie Logan (3:52)

Because God created the world in six days, and then on the seventh day, he rested.

Dana Schwartz (3:56)

Yeah. He made men perfectly exactly as we are. We've never changed.

Lizzie Logan (4:00)

And then he made woman out of a rib.

Dana Schwartz (4:02)

Yeah.

Lizzie Logan (4:02)

Oh, okay, great.

Dana Schwartz (4:03)

No, but it is a hoax. That is a pretty popular hoax. But I was very excited as I dove into it to find layers about why it maintained for so long and sort of understand the historical context around it. So with that. Lizzie, do you know the phrase missing link? Yes.

Lizzie Logan (4:27)

So it's the proverbial or, like, mythical step between not apes, but, like, the prehistoric ancestor that we share in common with apes and cavemen.

Dana Schwartz (4:43)

Yeah.

Lizzie Logan (4:43)

And I think there's a joke about this in the TV show, like, the Wild Thornberrys maybe, where, like, they maybe adopt a kid who's the missing link, and he's, like, very wild.

Dana Schwartz (5:00)

Donnie. Donnie. Yeah.

Lizzie Logan (5:01)

I think there's a joke about that. But I might be, like, confusing different things from my childhood, but that's. That's what I know it to be.

Dana Schwartz (5:10)

You're exactly right. Oh. But what I will say.

Lizzie Logan (5:13)

Great.

Dana Schwartz (5:14)

The term missing link isn't actually really useful, and it's considered in biology an outdated term because there's a very sort of primitive view of evolution that's like. Can you picture in your mind's eye that, like, diagram of, like, a fish and Then it, like, starts walking and then it's a man. So that's sort of a view of evolution that's known as orthogenesis, which is like a very linear model of evolution, which is just like, 1, 2, 3, blah, blah, blah. That image is called the March of Progress, and it sort of is a version of evolution that kind of has, like, religious overtones because it's like we're being perfected. We're going from simple organisms to complex organisms.

Lizzie Logan (5:54)

It's intelligent design vibes a little bit.

Dana Schwartz (5:57)

Like, even though it is still evolution, it's a very basic understanding of evolution, and it's just not right. Like, we don't go from worse to bad, better species. That's just not how it works. Orthogenesis is like one after another. And then the idea was something called phylogeny, which is, like, of evolution. That's like a branching tree. That's like we and apes have a common ancestor. Yes. And so you're like, okay, that's pretty complicated. But, you know, apes, seven. Anywhere from 7 to 13 million years ago, we diverged from apes and then became different species. But now evolutionary historians refer to evolution as a braided stream because it turns out there are, like, a ton of early human versions that then interacted and bred together and intermingled. Like, there's Neanderthal DNA in Homo sapiens and vice versa.

Lizzie Logan (6:50)

Like, you're using a lot of euphemisms for, like, early man, fucking apes, early, like, fucking ape type people.

Dana Schwartz (6:59)

They're just going back and forth. Like, if you actually look at a diagram of, like, all the different subversions of humans that existed, you know, millions of years ago, it's like a very dense tree, like a bush with. With branches going back and forth. So missing link doesn't really make sense because there would be, like, so many missing links. Because you can just be like, okay, well, where on this point does that fossil go? And it could be anywhere on that map. There's not just, like, one linear progression where we're actually missing anything. Because we do have all those fossil records, but we don't have a lot of fossils. When, you know, people are like, oh, do you have every single fossil? Like, no. And they did not have a lot of fossils. You know, 100 years ago, they had even fewer. Because finding fossils is hard.

Lizzie Logan (7:55)

Yeah. I mean, when you were like, do we have every fossil? I'm like, I would say we probably have almost none of the fossils.

Dana Schwartz (8:02)

Yeah. Only a tiny percentage of living organisms become fossils. Like, if you Die and you're buried. You don't become a fossil. There has to be, like, a very specific geoprocess, like the La Brea Tar Pits, you know, being buried under sediment or, like, specific weather conditions, like a really dry desert. So, like, fossils are really rare. But after Darwin published On the Origin of species in 1859, people wanted fossils to go prove what he was talking about. Particularly at that time, they wanted the missing link, which would be ideal. But again, we now know there are millions of missing links. It doesn't actually matter, but back then, it would be like the find of a lifetime.

Lizzie Logan (8:46)

Cool. Can I ask a question that probably we're gonna cut because. But I'm just curious.

Dana Schwartz (8:52)

Yeah.

Lizzie Logan (8:53)

Is anyone looking for, like, a racial missing link?

Dana Schwartz (8:57)

Yeah, that is actually a really big and important question that we should not cut because we get to it in this episode.

Lizzie Logan (9:03)

Okay. Because, like, I don't know if that was like, just, like. I just don't want to sound super ignorant because I'm like, we all come from an ancestor, but I know that genotypically, which is what's on the inside. All of humankind is one race, the human race. But phenotypically, which is what's on the outside. There are clear categories of people based on where your ancestors are from. Like, yeah, all the people from one part of the world look really alike in one certain way, and all the people from another part of the world look really alike in another certain way. And I'm like, clearly, somewhere the family tree, there's gotta be someone who looks halfway between these people.

Dana Schwartz (9:44)

Right.

Lizzie Logan (9:45)

And at some point, one brother went to one part and one brother went to a different part, and then they ended up looking different. And I'm like, how did this happen?

Dana Schwartz (9:52)

Well, Lizzy, I am going to blow your mind and say, if you believe it, in the early 20th century, people were really fixated on why different people look differently. Yeah, I believe it.

Lizzie Logan (10:03)

And I don't want to be. I don't want to. I don't want anyone to think that I am fixated on that.

Dana Schwartz (10:09)

No, it's interesting. It's a question that I don't think.

Lizzie Logan (10:12)

That your race is the most important thing about you. I'm not fixated on race as a person, but I am fascinated by humans.

Dana Schwartz (10:19)

The spoiler alert answer, which is not a spoiler alert because it's science, is. It turns out we evolved separately much later than people think, less than 100,000 years ago. And at the time was a theory called, like, the out of Africa theory. Is correct. We all evolved in Africa. And then. And then more recently than they believed at the time, the different, you know, races and ethnicities formed.

Lizzie Logan (10:48)

Okay.

Dana Schwartz (10:48)

But they didn't know that at the time.

Lizzie Logan (10:49)

Just like green eyed people just kind of showed up in a couple spots.

Dana Schwartz (10:52)

Okay. But we're in the early 20th century right now. We're going to start Our story in 1912 when a man named Charles Dawson, not Charles Darwin. Unrelated.

Lizzie Logan (11:05)

And not Charles Dickens.

Dana Schwartz (11:06)

And not Charles Dickens. Our main character, Charles Dawson, is a solicitor from Sussex. He's a lawyer. Okay. But he's also an amateur geologist and archaeologist who just does it as a hobby. Loves it for the love of the game.

Lizzie Logan (11:21)

Great.

Dana Schwartz (11:21)

He wants to get in. You know, he loves the Geographical Society and wants to rub elbows with them, but he's not a professional.

Lizzie Logan (11:28)

Is paleontologist like a job at this point?

Dana Schwartz (11:31)

Yeah, I mean, well, he's friends with a man named Arthur Smith Woodward, who's the keeper of geology at the then the British Museum of Natural History. Now it's a separate museum known as the Natural History Museum. So that guy's a professional.

Lizzie Logan (11:45)

Okay, cool.

Dana Schwartz (11:46)

Charles Dawson writes to this professional and says, I found something that might be kind of interesting. According to Charles Dawson, a few years back he had seen workmen digging in the Piltdown gravel pit near where he lived. And one of them, one of the workmen had mentioned that he found something that he thought was a fossilized coconut. And Dawson went to investigate and it turns out this coconut, what looked like a coconut, was just like a dark brown stained skull. And it was dark brown because it was incredibly, incredibly old. So then Dawson goes back to like the scrap piles of this gravel pit and finds the rest of this skull. And he's writing to Arthur Smith Woodward and saying this might be interesting. Do you want to come take a look?

Lizzie Logan (12:35)

Yeah.

Dana Schwartz (12:35)

So a bit about Dawson before we introduce Smith Woodward. Even though Dawson is not a professional, he has made several pretty impressive finds. He's like found teeth of early mammals. He found a stone axe. He found bricks from Roman Britain, this hybrid iron Roman statuette. So things that aren't like, you know, we don't know about them today, but for an amateur geologist in Sussex, he's doing really well. People actually call him the wizard of Sussex. So he's someone that Arthur Smith Woodward considers a friend. Arthur Smith Woodward, first of many Arthurs in this episode, comes to the site to dig because if you find an old skull, you might find more things. And they dig together June through September in 1912. And they find more skull fragments, a jawbone and a set of teeth. There's also. I just want to plant this cameo. This French Jesuit geologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who also, like, stops by and he actually is just like, I want to see what's what. And he finds some of the teeth.

Lizzie Logan (13:43)

And this is in a local tar pit.

Dana Schwartz (13:45)

This is in a gravel pit.

Lizzie Logan (13:47)

This is in a gravel pit in Sussex, which is. Nobody cares what they're doing in the gravel pit. Like, it doesn't belong to anybody.

Dana Schwartz (13:53)

No, it's workmen who are digging out gravel to, like, pave things.

Lizzie Logan (13:57)

Oh, okay. But I'm just saying, like, this isn't somebody's property.

Dana Schwartz (14:01)

No, I don't think anyone cares about it.

Lizzie Logan (14:03)

Okay. Like, they're not getting in anybody's way.

Dana Schwartz (14:05)

They're also. They're going through the scrap piles.

Lizzie Logan (14:08)

Okay.

Dana Schwartz (14:08)

They're going through. The men, the workers had also had already excavated, and they're going through the piles.

Lizzie Logan (14:14)

Interesting.

Dana Schwartz (14:16)

So Woodward, again, the professional here, reconstructs these fragments that they found. The jaw, the skull. And he discovers something kind of amazing, which is that the skull looks like it's human, but from 500,000 years ago, which, you know, for context, archaic Homo sapiens are about 300,000 years old. More modern Homo sapiens are about 160,000 years old. So a 500,000 year old, like, humanoid skull is amazing.

Lizzie Logan (14:49)

How is he getting that number? Because I don't. You're not carbon dating in 1912.

Dana Schwartz (14:54)

I think you are estimating from the best of your ability based on the stain. Like, the coloring of it means, like, how long it's been in the earth and the size of the skull, because human brains have gotten bigger over time. And he also.

Lizzie Logan (15:07)

And it was just like in some gravel, what, like six feet down in Sussex.

Dana Schwartz (15:14)

Yeah, Sus. A little sus.

Lizzie Logan (15:18)

Putting the sus in Sussex.

Dana Schwartz (15:20)

Here's the even more amazing part. And I think what helped him date.

Lizzie Logan (15:23)

It also, if it was small, couldn't it just be like a child?

Dana Schwartz (15:26)

Maybe. But here's the kind of amazing part. Well, I actually, I don't think it's a child. I think they know sort of what size human skulls are.

Lizzie Logan (15:33)

There's like. But science.

Dana Schwartz (15:36)

The jaw does not look like a human jaw. It looks like a primate jaw. And that's even more amazing because it's a human skull with a primate jaw. But you'd think, oh, it's just a monkey jaw that somehow fell into this gravel with it. A pet monkey. But the teeth were mole. They had wear patterns that looked like human teeth.

Lizzie Logan (15:58)

Interesting.

Dana Schwartz (15:59)

Okay, so that's very exciting for a few reasons. First, because this big debate was going on at the time whether early, you know, pre humans developed their brains first or their human diet first. And this was showing pretty clearly that they developed their brains first because it was a big skull and an ape like jaw.

Lizzie Logan (16:22)

That is so convenient that they were having this debate and then they happened to find some evidence that exactly answered this debate that started to answer this debate question. What a lucky find.

Dana Schwartz (16:34)

It's an amazing find. And you know what else is lucky? It's found in England. What was really exciting is because. So helpful. So there had been a find in Germany and I'm going to mispronounce this because it's Latin, but they call it Homo heidelbergens. And it was basically a pre human that was found in Heidelberg, Germany. And that was very exciting for the Germans. But now it's, you know, about to be World War I in a few years and we don't want Germany to have a more impressive find than England. So it's is pretty exciting that we found, you know, according to the Atlanta Georgian magazine at the time, quote, natives of Great Britain can trace their ancestry further back than any other peoples on the face of the earth, which is amazing. And also as we were talking about with racism, that fun thing.

Lizzie Logan (17:27)

This podcast's bailiwick.

Dana Schwartz (17:29)

Racism, racism. Finding this skull and jawbone really reinforces a Eurocentric model of evolution that shows that the races were developing separately a very, very long time ago.

Lizzie Logan (17:43)

Oh, 500,000 years ago.

Dana Schwartz (17:44)

5,000 years ago. So it's differentiating the races and it's like showing that, well, a lot of evolution happened to lead to the superiority of white European people and it just happened to be happening on the island of Great Britain. You know how it would make sense that all this evolution would be happening on this little island?

Lizzie Logan (18:02)

Yeah, on this little island with like bad weather and not that many different types of crops and you know, a pretty genetically similar population. That makes total sense.

Dana Schwartz (18:15)

And then again, just to reiterate, races did not separate 500,000 years ago. It happened much, much more recently because those changes, those developmental changes are minuscule, like in the scheme of evolution. But they didn't know that at the time. Another thing that was pretty exciting for them and the press had a lot of fun with this. And like when you're reading articles about it, it's like cute because it feels like everyone had an inside joke. They also found this carved fossilized elephant bone that had Been flattened, use as, like, a decorative object or a tool. But it kind of looked like a cricket bat. So this guy had a cricket bat, which they liked. A decade ago, I was on the.

Evan Ratliff (18:57)

Trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Dana Schwartz (19:06)

So why did it take so long to catch him?

Lizzie Logan (19:09)

I'm Josh Zieman, and this is Monster.

Dana Schwartz (19:11)

Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the Son of Sam. Available now listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

Evan Ratliff (19:25)

You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda and the bfg. But did you know he was also a spy?

Lizzie Logan (19:32)

Was this before he wrote his stories?

Dana Schwartz (19:34)

It must have been.

Evan Ratliff (19:35)

Our new podcast series, the Secret World of Roald Dahl is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.

Dana Schwartz (19:46)

What?

Evan Ratliff (19:47)

And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.

Dana Schwartz (19:50)

Okay, I don't think that's true.

Evan Ratliff (19:52)

I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first.

Dana Schwartz (20:53)

Year that there's a one person billion.

Evan Ratliff (20:55)

Dollar company which would have been like, unimaginable without AI.

Dana Schwartz (20:58)

And now will happen.

Evan Ratliff (21:00)

I got to thinking, could I do that one person, person I'd made AI agents before for my award winning podcast Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people.

Lizzie Logan (21:12)

Oh hey Evan, good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses.

Evan Ratliff (21:21)

Listen to Shell game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Dana Schwartz (21:26)

On June 11, 1998, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing.

Lizzie Logan (21:32)

It's an all out manhunt for John Awjay. Every search and rescue team in LA county has been called in to help.

Dana Schwartz (21:38)

Within days, tips started flooding into the Sheriff's department. The rumor around the drug scene was that a deputy was taken care of. Is this the story of a man who just got lost in the desert or of a cover up in the inside the nation's largest sheriff's department. A homicide captain saying, detective, do not find out if this guy's guilty or innocent. Who does that? Valley of Shadows, a new series from Pushkin Industries about crime and corruption in California's high desert. Do you have any advice for us.

Lizzie Logan (22:14)

While looking into this disappearance?

Evan Ratliff (22:17)

I wouldn't do it alone.

Dana Schwartz (22:20)

Listen to Valley of shadows on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So Arthur Smith Woodward, this is the find of his career. He announces the discovery at the Geological Society and he named it again, apologies for the Latin Euanthropus dawsoni or Dawson's dawn man. And right away people are a little, you know, suspicious or at least just curious and they challenge the reconstruction because this isn't a full skull they found, it's fragments. And if you've ever tried to like put things together, you know that he was like making an argument about the size of the brain, Right? But it's like if you put them together a little more down, then the brain could be way smaller. Right.

Lizzie Logan (23:08)

And if you put them together really far apart, then you have two skulls.

Dana Schwartz (23:13)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Lizzie Logan (23:15)

I mean, I'm saying like if you have like six fragments, like okay, maybe you have three fragments each from two skulls. Like you can, the evidence can line up however you want it.

Dana Schwartz (23:23)

That's it. So people are looking at these fragments being like, these fragments are interesting, but the way you're putting them together, I'm taking issue with. One of the biggest anthropologists who took issue with it was our second author of the episode, a man named Arthur Keith, who, who's another anthropologist. And he is looking at the way that Smith Woodward reconstructed it with certain teeth, like a reconstruction. He like drew in like, oh, and these type of teeth would go here, teeth that they didn't find. And he did it with ape like canines. Your canines are like the long pointy teeth. And Smith Woodward imagined that this, you know, dawn man had ape like canines. And Arthur Keith is like. But those other molars look pretty humanoid. And if they were doing side to side chewing, how would they have ape like canines? That doesn't make sense. And the two of them were so misaligned on this possible model that these lifelong friends literally end their friendship.

Lizzie Logan (24:21)

Oh my God.

Dana Schwartz (24:22)

Yeah. The Arthurs come apart because of the fake teeth, the imagined teeth in this model.

Lizzie Logan (24:30)

Can I just say it is. I mean, granted, you know, we have the benefit of hindsight and these people were scientists and they believed what they believed based on the evidence they had at the time. Yeah. But looking back, it is a little bit silly to me that they thought that like, you know, the absolute peak of human evolution could only have come out of Great Britain. Well, you know, an island that can only produce people named Arthur, apparently.

Dana Schwartz (24:59)

You know, I don't think.

Lizzie Logan (25:00)

Come on, you don't even have diversity of one.

Dana Schwartz (25:03)

I don't think they thought that the only fossils were in England.

Lizzie Logan (25:08)

I think so, no.

Dana Schwartz (25:09)

Again because they had found these fossils in Germany. But I think they were excited that they finally had their own. Some people, if you can believe it, were saying that like, it actually looks like an ape jaw with a human skull. It just doesn't look like it's one being one person.

Lizzie Logan (25:26)

Yeah.

Dana Schwartz (25:26)

That they just found an ape jaw and found a human skull.

Lizzie Logan (25:29)

Right. Why are you putting them together?

Dana Schwartz (25:32)

So there are published people, like in 1913, a man named David Watterson publishes in a journal that he's like, this just looks like an ape jaw and human skull to me.

Lizzie Logan (25:43)

Yeah. But don't go together.

Dana Schwartz (25:45)

Don't go together. And they were like, these things could have just ended up in a heap together.

Lizzie Logan (25:49)

Yeah. And they're maybe not even from the same time period.

Dana Schwartz (25:53)

But here's the thing. In 1915, Dawson says in another site two miles away, he found fragments of a second skull also with the same jaw that looks like an ape like jaw. So this find is known as Piltdown 2. People don't talk about Piltdown 2 as much because we didn't get a ton of detail about it. We don't even know where the exact site is because Dawson didn't write it down. And then in 1916 Dawson dies.

Lizzie Logan (26:24)

Oh, Rip.

Dana Schwartz (26:25)

He dies. He's only 52.

Lizzie Logan (26:27)

Did he become a fossil?

Dana Schwartz (26:30)

I don't know. I hope. I bet he wishes he did.

Lizzie Logan (26:34)

I bet he tried.

Dana Schwartz (26:35)

But basically he had found what is known as Piltdown 2 and sort of left it to Arthur Smith Woodward, who presents the finds to the Geographic Society and kind of like, dances around the fact that he doesn't actually know where it came from. But this one is a frontal bone, an occipital fragment, a lower molar that is the same species as the original find. So it's like if an ape jaw just happened to be in a heap pile with a human skull, and that was just, like, a weird coincidence, why would it happen twice? So for the next few decades, it sort of remains an interesting find and a source of national English pride, but it's kind of overshadowed by other exciting finds all over the world. And it kind of runs contradictory to other evidence that starts coming out about evolution, namely that it seems that the human jaw develops before the human brain. So every other fossil that they're finding around the world in the next few decades seems to prove that one. So it's like, well, the Piltdown man is kind of this unusual aberration. And then in the early 1950s, a man named Joseph Weiner, who works at the British Museum, basically goes to his boss, Kenneth Oakley, and is like, hey, no one's actually really looked at those Piltdown fragments for a while, right? And it's true. They had been, like, put away for safekeeping, and people had examined, like, molds and photos and. But not the actual artifacts. So they get the team together. Oakley is the leader of this group, and they basically are like, well, now it's the 1950s. We have all these new tools at our disposal. They are able to do nitrogen dating and fluorine absorption tests. And a fluorine absorption test is basically like, if a fossil has been in the earth for a long time, it absorbs more fluorine. So you can tell how long it's been down there by how much fluorine.

Lizzie Logan (28:34)

See, that is more sciency to me than, what color is it?

Dana Schwartz (28:39)

And it turns out that they were much more recent fossils than had been specified.

Lizzie Logan (28:45)

That makes sense to me, again, because they were dug up by some guys going through gravel.

Dana Schwartz (28:49)

And they also prove that the jaw and the skull are different ages.

Lizzie Logan (28:54)

Again, that makes sense to me because it would be a hell of a coincidence if they were from the same body.

Dana Schwartz (29:00)

Here's the. Also the thing they realized by looking pretty Close. And taking X ray photographs of the teeth because they realize that these teeth with these sort of human molars, it doesn't really look like human chewing patterns. And so they were like, okay, what we can do is we can take an X ray, and if those molars had been ground down when this person had been alive, it would show signs of healing because it's like, if you damage your body, it will heal a little bit. So they take.

Lizzie Logan (29:32)

Do teeth heal?

Dana Schwartz (29:33)

I guess, yeah. Or just, like, enough enamel? I don't. That's what they say.

Lizzie Logan (29:38)

Lizzie learns things live on the pod.

Dana Schwartz (29:40)

It says that they were taking X ray photographs to look for signs of healing.

Lizzie Logan (29:44)

Fascinating.

Dana Schwartz (29:46)

And here's the crazy part. Oh, yeah, New dentine. So that's what's being replaced. I don't know what. Dentine, I guess, is just a little part of a tooth that can grow back.

Lizzie Logan (29:54)

Fascinating.

Dana Schwartz (29:55)

It turns out that no new dentine had grown. This had not happened while the subject was alive.

Lizzie Logan (30:01)

It was just postmortem tooth damage.

Dana Schwartz (30:03)

Lizzie, would you believe it if I told you that these teeth had just been filed down with a file? And here's what else they discover.

Lizzie Logan (30:13)

All for a little bit of geologist glory.

Dana Schwartz (30:16)

A little bit of geologist glory, but.

Lizzie Logan (30:18)

Not even any money.

Dana Schwartz (30:20)

So here's also the crazy thing is. Remember how I told you it's, like, dark? It's like the color of a coconut? Yeah. So it turns out if that was authentic, it would go all the way into the bone.

Lizzie Logan (30:31)

Right.

Dana Schwartz (30:32)

But if you cut it open just a little bit, it's white underneath, baby.

Lizzie Logan (30:36)

Are these just like some teeth he found at the local butcher?

Dana Schwartz (30:40)

He stained these fossils with iron and chromic acid to make them look older. It was a surface level stain. Like, it's a. It's a bad hoax. There's also. There's also dental putty.

Lizzie Logan (30:54)

I mean, at this point, I'm thinking, like, were they like cardboard cutouts of teeth?

Dana Schwartz (30:58)

Like, well. So November 1953, Time magazine publishes evidence proving that it was definitely a forgery. This big expose led by Kenneth Oakley, they proved that the skull was only a few hundred years old. Like, it was a medieval skull and it was a lower jaw of an orangutan. And there were chimp teeth that were literally filed down. Which, again, is, like, people should have known that.

Lizzie Logan (31:26)

Yeah, that seems like something you could test for in 1912.

Dana Schwartz (31:29)

Well, so the question then is, why did it take so long to discover the hoax? And there's a few reasons.

Lizzie Logan (31:36)

And what's the point of the hoax? But I assume we'll get to that later.

Dana Schwartz (31:39)

Yeah, yeah. But why did it take so long for them to discover? I mean, first, to be fair, chemical dating techniques were pretty primitive in the 1910s.

Lizzie Logan (31:47)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dana Schwartz (31:48)

The big reason, though, is I also think people were kind of distracted arguing how to interpret the finds that they didn't even ask the bigger question of, is it even real? Because you have these skull fragments, and so you're all debating, like, okay, well, which way do they fit together? Which way do these teeth go? How should these teeth look that you're not asking the bigger question?

Lizzie Logan (32:11)

Yes.

Dana Schwartz (32:12)

It's like a magician, like, sleight of hand situation.

Lizzie Logan (32:14)

Yes.

Dana Schwartz (32:15)

And then, I mean, the big answer is, like, ring a little bell? Like racism. Like, it reinforced something people wanted to believe. They wanted to believe that there was this major find in England. You know, there had been discoveries in France and Germany, and England was feeling a little bad about themselves. And, you know, when there were other discoveries in Africa that contradicted the Piltdown man, they were just like, well, that's a different branch of evolution, you know, and, like, confirmation bias. I mean, that's how science works. Whereas you look at information and things don't make sense, you come up with a reason for it. And if you want to believe that the data is true, your first instinct isn't like, well, the data's wrong. You're like, well, how do I explain this? Yes. Because they didn't understand evolution fully back then the way we do now, especially the divergence of human evolution. And like I said, like, racism, like the Piltdown man, was also really upheld and celebrated by racist people because it proved something they wanted to believe. But the crazy thing, I think the reason that the Piltdown man is one of the famous, most famous scientific hoaxes in history is because it took 40 years for it to be fully revealed. And again, I want to make it clear, in those 40 years, people, individuals, like, wrote papers being like, I don't actually think it's real. Yeah. But the giant scientific consensus had not come to that determination.

Lizzie Logan (33:44)

Well, it also seems like people in those 40 years were saying, like, oh, this is something strange, that we don't know what it was, and it doesn't disprove our theories of evolution. They weren't saying, someone is duping us on purpose.

Dana Schwartz (34:03)

Exactly.

Lizzie Logan (34:04)

That, to me, is the twist. Like, scientists all the time find stuff, don't know what it means. Some fringe group is like, it means there's aliens. And the scientific community is like, no, it doesn't that's not to say we do know what it is, but we know it doesn't mean there's aliens.

Dana Schwartz (34:23)

And you know what people say all the time is, oh, scientists are just making that up. Evolution isn't real.

Lizzie Logan (34:28)

Yeah, it's like, well, okay, it is a theory, but, like, it's real.

Dana Schwartz (34:32)

It's real.

Lizzie Logan (34:33)

But like, it is still a reveal that, like, oh, he. He did it on purpose.

Dana Schwartz (34:40)

He did it on purpose.

Lizzie Logan (34:41)

Like, I would have believed that he found it and was just like. Just really wanted to believe that these two things went together. Why did he do that?

Dana Schwartz (34:49)

Well, here's the thing.

Lizzie Logan (34:50)

But beyond racist pride, because, like, what?

Dana Schwartz (34:54)

Pause. Like, we bruh, we don't actually know for a fact who did it. If you're asking who did this hoax, the obvious answer is Dawson. Yeah, the solicitor who was like, hey, I found some interesting things. And the answer of why he would want to do it is because he wanted the respect of the geological society. He wanted the pride and prestige that came from a once in a generation find.

Lizzie Logan (35:27)

Okay?

Dana Schwartz (35:28)

And he was an amateur who wanted to be taken seriously. He had a history of interesting finds and really wanted to be validated by the establishment.

Lizzie Logan (35:39)

I guess I'm just stacking him up against the other hoaxters that we've covered who put so much more time and effort into their hoaxes that I'm like, this one is really sort of like, pathetic to me. Feel like he only did kind of the one thing. Like, I know you said that he did another one. Well, yeah, but, like, that other guy wrote like a whole Shakespeare film.

Dana Schwartz (36:04)

A whole Shakespeare film, you know what I mean? Just to impress him.

Lizzie Logan (36:06)

And he wrote like letters and poems and he had the tea bags and he was staining the thing, you know what I mean?

Dana Schwartz (36:13)

This guy was using acid on his fossils. He was filing down teeth, monkey teeth.

Lizzie Logan (36:19)

Like a handful of teeth. Like one time, like, I don't know. This just seems really lazy to me.

Dana Schwartz (36:24)

Well, so people also think, okay, did he have an accomplice?

Lizzie Logan (36:28)

Did.

Dana Schwartz (36:28)

If it was Dawson, was Arthur Smith Woodward either in on it or did he originate it? I kind of think, no, that he was just like a willing dupe.

Lizzie Logan (36:38)

Sure.

Dana Schwartz (36:38)

Like, it made his reputation and I think he decided not to look too critically at it. I also think Arthur Smith Woodward was friends with Dawson and he trusted him. So I don't think. It doesn't make sense for me when people are like, he was probably in on it. To me, that doesn't quite lineup. You can't prove he wasn't but it always rang a little false for me that he would be willing to put his reputation on the line that way. It's very risky for him.

Lizzie Logan (37:04)

Yeah, if he was a professional who was making money from being a science man.

Dana Schwartz (37:10)

Stephen Jay Gould. Like the famous popular historian, Popular science writer, professor at Harvard.

Lizzie Logan (37:17)

Once again, our definition of famous is different than Dana.

Dana Schwartz (37:21)

He has said in two very famous essays, famous to me, that he thinks that Jesuit priest Pierre Tilhard de Charin was part of the conspiracy. He lays out some points about, like, well, he was there. And I'm like, it's possible, but it's not, like, smoking gun evidence.

Lizzie Logan (37:37)

Like, would he have done that for, like, Christian reasons?

Dana Schwartz (37:40)

No, just to, like, be in on the hoax.

Lizzie Logan (37:42)

Oh, okay.

Dana Schwartz (37:43)

Just to, like, I don't know, the pride of discovery. I think archaeologists, like I said, like, fossils are hard to find, and I think they really want to feel good about themselves.

Lizzie Logan (37:53)

I mean, fossils are cool. I'm not going to deny it.

Dana Schwartz (37:57)

Well, here's the other theory, and this is the third Arthur in our episode.

Lizzie Logan (38:04)

I'm going to say it again on the pod. England is a silly place.

Dana Schwartz (38:08)

Well, Lizzy, would you believe me if I said this episode's getting a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cameo?

Lizzie Logan (38:14)

All right, number one, drink if we mention them. Taylor Swift. Number two, drink if we mention them, P.T. barnum. Number three, drink if we mention them. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Dana Schwartz (38:26)

People think Arthur Conan Doyle might have been the perpetrator of the Piltdown hoax based on the fact he was neighbors with Dawson. He's nearby. He played golf near the Piltdown site. I'm convinced he was mad at the scientific establishment. Humiliating. You know, his favorite spiritualists lived in the area. People read his novel the Lost World, and they think it's him doing a Da Vinci Code. He was, like, leaving hints in it.

Lizzie Logan (38:53)

I'm convinced.

Dana Schwartz (38:55)

What I kind of find amazing about the it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle theory is, remember how I mentioned earlier that this all started because Dawson wrote to his friend Arthur Smith Woodruff and was like, hey, I found something kind of interesting. That letter began with some, like, hey, what's up? Like, casual conversation. And he also is like, hey, you know, our mutual friend Arthur Conan Doyle, like, hear his work. Not a novel. The, you know, the Lost World, which in, like, a murder mystery. That is how you set it up.

Lizzie Logan (39:24)

That is like, foreshadowing.

Dana Schwartz (39:25)

Drop it. Foreshadowing. The evidence against Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is there is no actual evidence that he's just the most famous guy nearby.

Lizzie Logan (39:36)

Uh, I'M convinced you've. No, he did it.

Dana Schwartz (39:39)

But if you're trying to humiliate the scientific establishment, wouldn't he have said at some point, hey, I fooled you all?

Lizzie Logan (39:45)

Yeah, he forgot to do the reveal.

Dana Schwartz (39:47)

He forgot to do the reveal. But the thing is, we didn't have any real smoking guns until the 1970s. A trunk is found in the Natural History Museum, and they open it, and it was left by a zoologist named Martin Hinton, who had died 10 years earlier. And they open this trunk and discover bones that are stained, just like the Piltdown Man. Bones?

Lizzie Logan (40:17)

What. What animals type? What?

Dana Schwartz (40:20)

Whose bones? I think like, bones he got legally. I don't think, like, he was murdered. Human bones, I don't know. Okay, but suspicious, because that is suspicious. He just left it.

Lizzie Logan (40:30)

Why would there be stained bones sitting in this museum?

Dana Schwartz (40:33)

Exactly. Why is your trunk filled with stained bones? Okay, it's suspicious, but there's also, like, it doesn't really seem like Hinton was the one who did it. And people kind of explain that as, like, maybe he was. Maybe he suspected a hoax and was trying to find out, figure out how they did it.

Lizzie Logan (40:53)

Yeah, maybe he was doing a little investigation.

Dana Schwartz (40:57)

Exactly. Like, maybe he was doing, like. Well, I don't want to embarrass anyone, but I want to, like, see if I can also stain these bones. I'm gonna, like, just spoil everything and just be like, it was Dawson. It was Dawson who did the fake. Maybe someone was in on it with him, but it was 100% Dawson.

Lizzie Logan (41:13)

Yes.

Dana Schwartz (41:13)

And now Miles Russell, who's this British archaeologist and this writer that I absolutely love because he's just like. He's the king of the haters in the best way. Like, have you watched any of the Diddy documentary? You know, it's just like, 50 Cent.

Lizzie Logan (41:27)

Oh, I love 50 Cent for being a hater.

Dana Schwartz (41:29)

Yeah.

Lizzie Logan (41:29)

Yeah.

Dana Schwartz (41:30)

Miles Russell is the 50 cent of this story.

Lizzie Logan (41:33)

Great.

Dana Schwartz (41:35)

I'm a big fan. He wrote this book called the Piltdown Man Hoax. Case closed. That was very helpful to me in this episode. And he decides in exhaustive detail to go through the dozens of Dawson's other earlier discoveries and proves one by one that they all were fake.

Lizzie Logan (41:54)

You know, there's always more. This is, again, like, rappers do have the best beefs. It's Kendrick dropping one after the other after the other after the other against Drake. Give it to me. Give it to me.

Dana Schwartz (42:10)

And again, Dawson has died decades before. Dawson is dead, but he. Miles Russell, just goes next, next, next. 38 times 30. You'd be like, well, three. You prove you've proven it. He's faked three. No, 38. And in his words, to quote him, Piltdown was not a one off hoax, more the cumulation of a life's work. Yeah. So that's it. He was just like this amateur who wanted to be taken seriously. So he was the wizard of Sussex, but like in a Wizard of Osway.

Lizzie Logan (42:42)

Yeah.

Dana Schwartz (42:44)

In 2016, Piltdown man came back into the news because there was this big like hundred year retrospective, massive review study that showed that did like a real investigation, like a forensic analysis, and they determined that it was only one actor. They were like, it was only one guy, like doing the staining and the filing and all that. And it was Dawson.

Lizzie Logan (43:07)

Yeah.

Dana Schwartz (43:08)

Like, it's all consistent with Dawson.

Lizzie Logan (43:09)

Yeah.

Dana Schwartz (43:10)

So that's the Piltdown man, which is a massive embarrassment to the British scientific establishment, but also kind of bad for science as a whole because creationists cite it still as proof that scientists are lying about evolution.

Lizzie Logan (43:27)

But he wasn't a scientist. He was just some Joe Schmo.

Dana Schwartz (43:29)

Yeah. But the scientists believed it and like wrote about it and celebrated it. And it's like, it reinforces the thing of like, well, they just want to see what they want to see. But I will say scientists were also the people that were like, it's not real.

Lizzie Logan (43:44)

That's true.

Dana Schwartz (43:45)

So, you know, but unfortunately that's the hard part. And why it's a kind of a damaging hoax. And it's also a damaging hoax because genuinely it held back knowledge of evolutionary science for 40 years, which is like, that's like a career.

Lizzie Logan (44:00)

Yeah.

Dana Schwartz (44:01)

And again, these data points are relatively rare at this point. So if you are basing your information on human evolution and you have this one major data point, it affects how you think and how you analyze other finds. Yeah.

Lizzie Logan (44:19)

If anyone out there is thinking of doing any sort of archaeological hoax, can you do it on something that's like settled science or something that doesn't matter?

Dana Schwartz (44:31)

Yeah.

Lizzie Logan (44:31)

You know, Fish.

Dana Schwartz (44:33)

Something that I also think is kind of random and fun. And I hope no one gets mad at me for this. So please don't get mad at me. If you're listening to this and you're a Scientologist, I just think it's funny. L. Ron Hubbard wrote this book, A History of man, and that's like a book talking about how different phases of human evolution, you can like have trauma from those phases. So it's like you can have subconscious trauma from like your caveman era. And he Specifically does call out the Piltdown phase as one of the phases of human history where you can have subconscious trauma that Scientology could undo. Like, if you're obsessed with biting or have mouth issues because, like, the Piltdown jaw was, like, a monkey jaw, then Scientology can, like, help you undo that past trauma. And that book was published in 1952, like, before it was revealed as a fraud. Well.

Lizzie Logan (45:29)

And that was actually the only thing L. Ron Hubbard was ever wrong about.

Dana Schwartz (45:33)

Exactly. And we're on the record about that.

Lizzie Logan (45:35)

Other than that he's correct about everything.

Dana Schwartz (45:37)

Correct about everything was wrong. Was just one year early wrong about that wrong thing. Or maybe Elrond had it figured out and there was a different phase of evolution that we just don't know about.

Lizzie Logan (45:48)

Oh, my goodness. Everyone watch Going Clear Scientology and the Prison of Belief. It's a very good documentary, and I will just let it speak for itself.

Dana Schwartz (45:55)

So that is the Piltdown man hoax. It is one of the most famous archaeological, if not the most famous archeological hoaxes in history. It's a fun Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cameo. But I want everyone to listen to this podcast, everyone who listens to this podcast to do a public service, which is, if ever anyone brings up, like, hey, I heard it was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who did it. You have to be the spoilsport who's like, oh, that's so fun.

Lizzie Logan (46:21)

But no, he didn't. I don't think you have to be this boy sport.

Dana Schwartz (46:25)

But no, we need to present correct information.

Lizzie Logan (46:29)

I think you have to plug this podcast. I think you have to say, I think I heard about that. I can't remember where. Oh, it was this podcast hoax. And then you have to make them download this episode.

Dana Schwartz (46:39)

Even better. So find us online if you like this show. Leave us a review. Leave us a rating on wherever you get your podcasts. Tell your friends about it. If you want to email us. I actually. I read all the emails. Hoaxthepodcastmail.com Lizzie, where can we find you on the Internet?

Lizzie Logan (46:58)

You can find us also on Instagram @HoxThePodcast. I'll respond to all the DMs. Oh, I. One last bit of hoaxkeeping. It doesn't really matter for the show, but I just thought it was interesting in our first episode because we were texting each other pictures. I think people in their heads envisioned that we were doing this on Zoom.

Dana Schwartz (47:24)

Oh, yeah.

Lizzie Logan (47:24)

And have then kept that vision in their minds. And I've talked to a few people who are like, you two have really good banter. It really feels like you're in the same room. Just so everybody knows we are in the same room all the time.

Dana Schwartz (47:38)

Or are we always in the same.

Lizzie Logan (47:40)

Room all of these episodes? We're in the same room.

Dana Schwartz (47:42)

Yeah, we are.

Lizzie Logan (47:43)

So please feel that you're in this room with us as you rate, review and subscribe. And please, please.

Dana Schwartz (47:49)

Hoax Responsibly by.

Lizzie Logan (48:02)

Hoax is a production of iHeart podcasts. Our hosts are Dana Schwartz and Lizzie Logan. Our executive producers are Matt Frederick and Trevor Young, with supervising producer Rima El Kayali and producers Noams Griffin and Jesse Funk. Our theme music was composed by Lane Montgomery. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or we wherever you get your podcast, thanks for listening. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.