The Hindu : International : Fraud causes a setback to anthropology

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Sunday, Feb 20, 2005

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International

Fraud causes a setback to anthropology

By Luke Harding

BERLIN, FEB. 19. 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.

Forced to retire

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.

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 Hahnhofersand Man, was actually a mere 7,500 years old, according to the radiocarbon dating unit at Oxford University, England.

Deeply embarrassing

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 was unable to work his own carbon-dating machine. —

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