SGU Episode 345

SGU Episode 345
25th February 2012
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 344                      SGU 346
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guests
FC: Fraser Cain
PG: Pamela Gay
Quote of the Week
Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.
Vernon Sanders Law
Links
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Forum Discussion

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, February 22, 2012 and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella..

B: Hey everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson.

R: Hello everyone.

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey guys.

S: And Even Bernstein.

E: Hello everyone. How is everyone tonight?

S: Great. How's everyone doing?

R: Super.

B: Pretty good.

J: Fabulously.

E: Hanging in there. Not bad.

This Day in Skepticism (0:31)

"February 25, 1866 - Discovery of the Calaveras Skull"

R: You know, it's a very exciting day today, today being February the 25th. This is the anniversary of the discovery of the Calaveras Skull, which was found in 1866.

E: Not one of those crystal skulls, is it?

R: No. This was a real skull, uh, you know it's a real skull just by the name, because as our Spanish speakers know, Calaveras Skull means Skull Skull. So.. that's handy.

S: Skull skull.

E: Skull skull.

R: Yeah the Calaveras Skull is one of the great archaeological hoaxes of the past couple hundred years. What happened was in 1866, on February 25th, some miners claimed that they found a human skull beneath a layer of lava very deep in the earth, so they handed it over to some geologists. It eventually made its way into the hands of Josiah Whitney, who was a professor of Geology at Harvard University and the state Geologist of California. I'm not exactly sure if that's a position that still exists, but he held it back then. And Whitney..

E: That's a hell of a commute..

R: ..made an announcement that it was a genuine skull, and so at the time it was announced as the oldest possible human being that had ever been found. It was immediately met with quite a bit of skepticism, (B: Yay!) mostly because the skull happened to look exactly like human skulls do today. So it was eventually embraced by Creationists, because Creationists used it as some evidence that humans had existed for millions of years without having ever changed, so the Old Earth-style Creationists...

E: Yeah you find a skull that deep and...

S: Yeah it was technically Pliocene strata which would make it between 5.3 and 2.5 million years before present, which of course is a lot longer than Homo sapiens have been around, and a lot longer than Homo sapiens have been in North America.

B: Yeah, so that would present a problem..

R: It wasn't until though, a good 30 years later that an archaeologist from the Smithsonian named William Holmes decided to investigate it more thoroughly. There had already been these rumblings about people not believing it was true, and also rumors that the miners had deliberately set it up as a hoax. So this one particular archaeologist decided to look into it and he performed some tests, he found that to not many people's shock, it was in fact a much more recent skull than had been suggested. In fact, it was a skull of a Native American. It matched, at least, it matched the skull of a Native American and it would have possibly been about 1,000 years old, as opposed to millions of years old.

E: Wow. 1/6th the age of the earth.

R: (Laughs) Exactly. He also went back and talked to some of the friends of the miners. The miners who had discovered it were dead, unfortunately, but he was able to talk to many other people who confirmed that these guys had set this up as a deliberate hoax on one particular scientist who almost didn't fall for it. It was apparently first turned over to a guy named William Jones, who is a physician and a natural history buff, and he found cobwebs inside it, and tossed it out into the street, so the story goes. But then he thought twice about it, went back, picked it up, gave it a little more consideration, thought it might be genuine, turned it over to Whitney, and Whitney took it as the real thing.

S: There are remarkable similarities between this story and the story of Piltdown man.

B: Ahh yeah.

S: One is that the skull was taken as confirmation of the beliefs at the time specifically of this guy, Josiah Whitney believed that humans were much more ancient than other scientists at the time believed, and he thought they coexisted with mastodons and so he took this skull as confirmation of his pet theory. And that motivated him highly to accept it as real. The second similarity is that it was really, it was very quickly, I think more quickly than Piltdown, thought to be a hoax. It was not generally accepted as real, but still it took 30 years. Like with Piltdown, there was a long delay before definitive testing of the fossil itself.

J: Why did they wait so long?

S: I don't know. Do you know, by the way..

B: Time was slower back then..

S: ..do you know what test they used to date it? The fluorine absorption dating. Fluorine absorption.