Episode 3: Piltdown Meltdown, Anthropological Hoaxes, Fakes, and Folderols

From Presidents to pop stars, it seems like everyone is falling for hoaxes these days! In this episode, The Two Humans take a deep dive into the most famous anthropological hoax of all time to find out why we're attracted to false information.

Episode 3: Piltdown Meltdown: Anthropological Hoaxes, Fakes, and Folderols

An Intro to Anthro with 2 Humans

Human Number One, John McCray, and Human Number Two, John Lehr, re-assess what it means to be human.

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Resources:

Bacon, Francis

1902 Novum Organum. edited by Joseph Devey. P.F. Collier & Son, New York, NY. 2015 Francis Bacon: The Complete Works (Centaur Classics). Centaur Editions, Kindle edition.

BBC News

2021 Cerne Abbas Giant Age Revealed by Scientists. BBC News, May 12, 2021, www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-57076224.

Booher, Harold R.

1986 Science Fraud at Piltdown: The Amateur and the Priest. The Antioch Review. Autumn 1986, Vol. 44, No. 4, Tricks & Bones: The Piltdown Fraud (Autumn, 1986), pp. 389-407.

Duffy, Kathleen

2014 Teilhard’s Mysticism: Seeing the Inner Face of Evolution. Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY.

Fox, Alex

2020 Snail Shells Date England’s Cerne Abbas Giant to Medieval, Not Prehistoric. Smithsonian Magazine, July 9, 2020, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart- news/snail-shells-reveal-englands-180-foot-cerne-abbas-giant-not-prehistoric- 180975274/.

Goodrum, Matthew R. and Cora Olson

2009 The Quest for an Absolute Chronology in Human Prehistory: Anthropologists, Chemists and Fluorine Dating Method in Paleoanthropology. The British Journal for the History of Science, March 2009, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Mar. 2009), pp. 95-114.

Hancock, Peter

2015 Hoax Springs Eternal: The Psychology of Cognitive Deception. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY.

King, Ursula

1996 Spirit of Fire: The Life and Vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY.

Langdon, John H.

1991 Interpreting Piltdown. Current Anthropology. December 1991, Vol. 32, No. 5 (Dec. 1991), pp. 627-631.

Mead, Rebecca

2021 A Giant Mystery: Is an enormous chalk outline of a naked man an ancient image—or a modern joke? The New Yorker, May 24, 2021, pp. 18-23.

Oakley, Kenneth P. and J. S. Weiner

1955 Piltdown Man. American Scientist. October 1955, Vol. 43, No. 4 (October 1955), pp. 573-583.

Popular Science

2015 100 Hoaxes & Mistakes That Fooled Science: Experts Expose the Worst Bloopers and Fakes—from Crop Circles to Miracle Cures and Beyond. Fog City Press, San Francisco, CA.

Spencer, Frank

1990 Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery. Oxford University Press, London.

Thomson, Keith Stewart

1991 Piltdown Man: The Great English Mystery. American Scientist, May-June 1991, Vol. 79, No. 3 (May-June 1991), pp. 194-201.