Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Homo deceptus: Science's Dirty Little Secret
Episode Date: November 28, 2025In 1912, a fossil discovery shakes the scientific world. Piltdown Man is the elusive missing link between humans and their ape-like ancestors. Forty years later, a researcher at the Natural History Mu...seum gets a chance to see the relic for himself and notices something isn't quite right. For a full list of sources see timharford.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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In his office, under the great Gothic vaults of London's Natural History Museum,
Arthur Woodward was opening the mail
and found a note from his friend Charles Dawson,
postmarked the previous day. Valentine's Day, 1912.
Woodward was the keeper of the museum's geology department
and a notable figure in British science.
Dawson, a country lawyer, was an amateur geologist with a growing reputation of his own.
His letter began with small talk, the latest news on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's new book idea.
Dawson knew Conan Doyle personally.
But then Dawson turned to more significant matters.
Some workmen had been digging in the soils of Pilkdown,
a few miles away from Dawson's home on the south coast,
and they'd found a fossilised fragment of a human skull.
It might be something pretty special.
So would Arthur Woodward care to visit the site and take a look?
He would.
Over the months that followed,
Dawson and Woodward would supervise digs in the flint beds of Pilkdown,
piecing together bone fragments that would change our understanding of the world
and how humans took their place in it.
The discovery became known as Piltdown Man,
the most famous, most earth-shaking missing link
in the evolutionary chain,
connecting modern humans and their ape-like ancestors.
Pilt-down man had a thick but otherwise human-seeming skull,
big cranium, steep forehead.
The lower jaw was more like that of an ape.
A tooth was found, too, halfway between ape and human.
It was truly an astonishing discovery.
There were some doubters at the time.
Were these fragments really from the same primate?
Or might there somehow be a human skull and an ape jaw in the same flinty gravel?
Because apart from that tooth, it did look a bit like a human skull and an ape jaw.
But a few years later, Dawson found similar fossils a couple of miles away.
They became known as Piltdown 2.
Their discovery surely proved that Piltdown 1 couldn't possibly be an accidental jumble of ape and human.
Because how could the same accidental jumble occur twice on two different sites?
Although the amateur paleontologist Charles Dawson
had been the one to find the fossils at Piltdown 2,
he died before he had a chance to join Arthur Woodward
in announcing that discovery.
So Woodward was left to carry the scientific torch
and receive the glory.
And glory there was.
Woodward would become Sir Arthur Woodward,
a Knight Commander of the British Empire,
a recipient of the Royal Society's gold medal,
the Lylell Medal, the Linnaean Medal, the Thompson Medal,
and many other honours beside.
All just rewards for his skill, dedication, and prodigious scientific output.
But also surely rewards for his role in discovering evolution's first true missing link.
Piltdown Man
After he retired, Sir Arthur Woodward mused
that the discovery at Piltdown
had been the most important thing
that ever happened in my life.
A lovely thought.
But it wasn't a discovery.
And it didn't just happen.
I'm Tim Harford
and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.
It was July 19353,
it was July 1953,
first had a chance to handle the piltdown man.
relics, deep inside London's Natural History Museum. It was a breathtaking moment. Winer was a young
high flyer, professor of physical anthropology at Oxford, at the age of just 38, which meant that
when the discovery of Piltdown Man had been announced 41 years earlier, Winer hadn't even been
born. But of course he knew all about Piltdown Man. Everybody did.
This was the most famous human fossil ever found,
even if it was proving ever more of a headache to scientists.
The problem was this.
Dawson and Woodward had pieced together the fragments from the piltdown flints
to reveal a creature with a primitive jaw but a modern skull
and therefore an advanced brain.
This supported the so-called brain fur.
hypothesis, that our primate ancestors had evolved into humans by developing large brains.
Other changes, such as a smaller jaw, had come later. Why was that a problem? Because every
time a subsequent fossil was discovered, it suggested the opposite pattern, that proto-humans
had first developed a human jaw and a human diet, and only later had developed a human skull
and a human brain.
Piltdown man didn't fit.
Young anthropologists, paleontologists and biologists
had devoted their careers to trying to figure it out.
Later that day, at a grand summer banquet near the museum,
Winer had the chance to sit next to Kenneth Oakley,
the man who was now the guardian of the piltdown bones at the museum.
It was such a mystery, mused Wyner,
and such a shame that the Piltdown bones were an isolated discovery.
In year upon year of looking,
researchers had never found another bone of interest at the Piltdown site.
Then Winer wandered out loud to Oakley.
What about Piltdown too?
Why hadn't that site been more fully explored?
Funny thing, replied Oakley,
nobody actually knows exactly where the Piltdown two's site is.
It was common enough to keep such matters confidential
so that tourists and scavengers didn't descend on the site and ruin it.
But in this case, the details were more than confidential.
They were lost to history.
Well, how could that be? asked Winer above the hubbub of conversation
and the clinking of cutlery.
Oakley explained that Woodward had presented,
the Piltdown two discoveries after Dorson was dead.
The precise location was never mentioned in correspondence between them.
Maybe Dawson had died without telling him.
Woodward had certainly never recorded the site's location.
Strange?
Yes, thought Winer.
Very strange.
The Piltdown discovery had been viewed with some skepticism until Piltdown
Pilt Now it turns out that the Piltdown 2 fossils simply appeared at the Natural History Museum from, well, from out of nowhere.
Convenient that.
That hot summer night, Winer drove back to Oxford.
It was after midnight when he got home, but he couldn't sleep.
His mind just kept turning and turning over and over.
The next morning, Winer was examining casts of piltdown man in his lab.
Freed from preconceptions, he tried to look directly at what was in front of him.
It looked like a human skull and an ape jaw.
And these strange molar teeth, part ape and part human.
In fact, it was really only the teeth that suggested any link between the jaw and skull.
Under a powerful magnifying lens, Winer examined a tooth.
The pattern of wear was a bit odd.
Before long, he'd obtained an ape tooth from Oxford's Anatomy Department,
grabbed a file and a clamp, and began experimenting.
It was astonishing how easy it was to file the ape tooth down to look,
exactly like the Piltdown Fossil.
He discussed his doubts with a colleague.
There's another funny thing.
The bones were the deep, rich colour of dark chocolate,
stained with rust from the iron-rich flints.
But a few years before,
Oakley himself had drilled into the bones to get a chemical sample
and had noted in his write-up that the brown stain was
completely superficial.
The bones were bright white underneath.
To an already suspicious whiner, that was odd too.
No?
They decided to pick up the phone and call Kenneth Oakley.
In his office under the great Gothic vaults of London's Natural History Museum,
Kenneth Oakley picked up the telephone.
He was sitting not far from where his predecessor, Arthur Woodward,
had opened the letter from Charles Dawson.
Dawson's letter to Woodward had begun the remarkable story of Piltdown Man.
The phone call from Oxford to Oakley would end that story as we know it.
Winer and his colleague told Oakley that Piltdown Man was nothing more than a fake.
Oakley was stunned.
Then Winer's colleague asked him to drop everything,
go down to the museum's storerooms or the microscope,
and examine the pilt-down mola for signs of artificial abrasion.
Had it been filed down?
An hour later, he called them back.
They were right.
There was absolutely no doubt about it.
Over the following weeks and then months,
further tests established unnatural patterns of wear on the fossils.
The latest most accurate chemical dating test was used,
demonstrating that the Piltdown skull, the Piltdown Jor,
fossils from the Piltdown 2 site, all of them were modern,
a few hundred years old at best.
And the chocolate brown iron staining?
It wasn't iron.
It was an artificial stain.
Or in the case of the tooth, it was a layer of paint, Van Dyke Brown.
Over the following year, a thorough investigation scrutinised every single discovery associated with Piltdown.
The fossils, various tools, a total of 40 different specimens from three different sites in the area,
and concluded that every single one of them was a fake.
Each individual forgery had been bold and simple.
Collectively, they had been devastatingly convincing.
And the deception had been more ambitious and elaborate
than Joseph Weiner had dreamed.
But who was the fraudster?
Winer's astonishing discovery set off a frenzied cottage industry of speculation.
Had it been Dawson, the man who claimed to find the foster,
Or Woodward, who did so much to promote them, and in doing so, reaped the glory?
Or were they both the victims of a cruel hoax by some third party?
Cautionary tales will be back after the break.
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Now through December 2nd.
Ten years ago, I kept bumping into policy wonks discussing an exciting new idea.
Exciting to policy wonks anyway.
recent peer-reviewed article by five behavioral scientists reporting the results of several different
experiments had found that if you want somebody to truthfully fill in a form such as a tax return
or an insurance claim then don't get them to sign the form at the end saying they were honest
get them to sign at the beginning promising that they will be honest clever and that could save
real money imagine collecting more taxes
simply by getting people to sign at the top of their tax return,
nudging them into telling the truth about their income.
The UK's behavioural insights team,
better known as the Nudge Unit, leapt into action,
designing a controlled experiment on behalf of the government of Guatemala.
Three million tax returns later, the idea didn't work.
Researchers at the Nudge Unit were left scratching their heads,
much like the paleontologists who kept finding fossils
that were diet first, not brain first.
What had they got wrong?
And then came the Joseph Weiner moment.
Three psychologists, Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson and Yuri Simonson,
wrote a website together under the joky name Data Calada.
Usually they poked fun at sloppy research methods in social science.
For example, using some dubious statistical techniques that were all too common in the field,
the Data Collada team demonstrated that listening to the song When I'm 64 by the Beatles
makes you a year and a half younger.
Unbelievable, clearly not even the Beatles are quite that brilliant,
but the point was well made.
If the standard techniques in psychology and marketing research could produce that sort of
Nonsense, the standard techniques needed to be drastically improved.
Sometimes, however, the data collada team found themselves dealing not with sloppy practice, but with fraud.
When Simmons, Nelson and Simonson looked into that sign at the top academic paper,
they realised that the data behind one of the experimental studies made no sense.
The data apparently described the behavior of insurance company customers reporting their vehicle mileage.
But on closer inspection, it didn't look anything like real mileage data,
and it looked exactly like what you'd get if you used Microsoft Excel's randomization function.
But things got weirder than that,
because the investigators also found evidence that another study conducted by different researchers,
and then published in the same article also contained manipulated data.
The Data Collada team wrote a blog post titled Cluster Fake,
exclaiming, that's right, two different people independently faked data
for two different studies in a paper about dishonesty.
To make matters even more interesting,
two of the academics involved, the ones,
most closely associated with the manipulated data
were superstars of behavioural science,
Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino.
If they had committed the fraud,
this was big news.
As with Piltdown Man in the 1950s,
there was no doubt that somebody had faked the evidence,
or in this case, two different people.
The question was,
Who?
By 1953, when Joseph Weiner and his colleagues
comprehensively demonstrated that Piltdown man was a fake,
Sir Arthur Woodward was dead.
Charles Dawson had died decades before,
before the Piltdown Two find had even been announced.
One or both of those men were the obvious people to blame for the lie.
But there were others.
Over the years, a variety of books and essays have accused 20 different suspects of the fraud.
Some of them were acquaintances of Dawson in Hastings.
He'd been feuding with the local antiquarian society,
and several knowledgeable locals had good reason to dislike him.
Perhaps one of them had faked the bones and planted them at the pilt-down site,
where Dawson would find them and embarrass himself.
Then there were people from Woodward's world of academic paleontology, friends, rivals, subordinates.
One of them was a huge champion of Piltdown Man.
Had he colluded with Dawson perhaps?
Another was a zoologist.
In 1970, after his death, a trunk he'd left in storage at the Natural History Museum was opened.
It contained animal bones, stained, chocolate,
brown, like the piled-down skull and jaw. A fraudster? Or perhaps, a skeptic trying to understand a
fraud, just as Winer had filed down an ape-tooth to understand the forger's methods.
The most spectacular theory about the piled-down fraudster was published in the magazine's
science in 1983. The forger was none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dawson's
neighbor. Doyle might have had the opportunity to plant fakes, and as a doctor, he had the
expertise to make them. But the case against Conan Doyle, appropriately enough for such a
gripping storyteller, is nothing more than a good story. Not only is there no evidence that
he was involved, there's no plausible motive either. The theory rests on little more than a famous
man's proximity to the piltdown site.
No, it's far more likely that the fraud was not perpetrated on the discoverers of Piltdown Man,
but by one of them.
The forgery was masterminded either by Sir Arthur Woodward or by Charles Dawson or by them both.
Faced with the two fraudulent studies on dishonesty, both published in the same article,
the academic community faced a similar question.
Some of the fraudulent data was managed by Dan Ariely
and definitely not his named co-authors.
Does that prove he faked the data?
He says he didn't,
and it must have been faked by the insurance company he collaborated with.
But the insurance company had no reason to make up data
to support Dan Ariela's theory,
and they've also denied Ariely's claim.
Or maybe there was some third party involved.
An eager, unnamed research assistant, a disgruntled insurance company analyst.
It doesn't seem likely, but there's no way to be sure.
As for the other study with fake data, that was conducted by Francesca Gino.
Did she fake the data?
Or was it faked by some other unknown party?
She says she did nothing wrong.
Data Collada sent a concise dossier of evidence to Gino's employer, Harvard University,
knowing that they would have access to detailed data logs that might prove her guilt or her innocence.
Harvard spent 18 months investigating.
Then suspended Gino without pay, stripped her of her named professorship
and began proceedings to revoke her tenure.
There had been quiet mutterings about Ariely and Gino
long before Data Collada published their forensic exposés.
Then again, there were mutterings about Charles Dawson,
the discoverer of the first pilt-down bone fragments
long before Joseph Weiner's bombshell.
Among the most intriguing was the Maresfield map,
an old map showing the area near Piltdown.
It was published in a local archaeological journal in 1912,
the year of the Piltdown discovery.
It's a strange thing.
A crude forgery, claiming to be from 1724 but full of anachronisms,
the wrong spellings, the wrong typefaces,
roads that didn't exist until a century later, and many other errors.
And make of this what you will.
On the map, the word hundred is misspelled as hundred.
The O of hundred has a tiny arrow pointing to it.
And that O, maybe this is mere coincidence,
but the O just happens to be on the spot
where the first piltdown fossils were found.
Near the O on one side are the words,
pilt down.
Near the O on the other side,
the map notes the location of
forge pits.
Strange.
The map was published
without explanation
and with the label
made by C. Dawson
FSA.
It's a kind of treasure map.
Either Dawson
was publishing a prank
confession, or more likely,
it's an anon
accusation in code by a local antiquarian who disliked Dawson and suspected foul play at Piltdown.
Dawson never protested about the map's publication. That was wise. At the time, the veiled accusation
in a niche local journal passed unnoticed by the wider world. Complaining would only have drawn
attention to it.
But why didn't the whistleblower say something more direct about their suspicions?
That's unclear, but it's no mystery why they preferred to remain anonymous.
Identifying a fraud can be a dangerous business.
A few weeks after Data Collada published a detailed four-part expose of fraudulent data in work
co-authored by Francesca Gino,
Gino filed a lawsuit against Harvard University
and also sued Data Collada for defamation.
She asked for damages of $25 million.
Cautionary tales will return after the break.
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Dead men can't sue, which may be why so many different authors have accused so many long-dead
Edwardians of being the Pilt-down fraudster. But in truth, it's hard to look past Charles Dawson.
In the book The Piltdown Man hoax, case closed, the historian Miles Russell sets out an astonishing
track record of discoveries by Dawson.
In 1891, Dawson sent a large fossil tooth to Woodward at the Natural History Museum.
Who received it with delight, believing that it was a missing link in the fossil record,
a hundred million-year-old mammal in Europe?
It was also a fake.
Modern analysis shows that it was filed down from another tooth, just as the pilt-down tooth had been.
Dawson had access to fossils he could doctor
and now he had the ear of Woodward
a dupe who trusted him
and would vouch for whatever Dawson found
in 1893
Dawson sent a rusted little iron statuette
to an expert at the British Museum
it was in the Roman style
but the exciting thing said Dawson
was that it had been found
at a known Roman ironworking site
in Sussex. Yet, it was made of cast iron. Experts had thought cast iron wasn't made in Europe
until many centuries after the Romans left Britain. So this was another missing link, a piece of
evidence that fundamentally reframed our understanding of Roman technology. Where exactly had it been
found again? And by whom? Not to worry about those details, said Dawson. It was a workman.
Couldn't remember the chap's name.
It was a few years back.
More recent chemical analysis confirms that the statue is modern.
In 1894, Dawson published a remarkable drawing of a Neolithic flint axe
attached to a wooden half.
And it wasn't just a drawing.
Dawson had based his drawing on an earlier sketch by a local hobbyist
who discovered the axe and the halft.
when a few years back the haft alas had crumbled at the touch and all attempts to save it had proved futile
so here was yet another missing link early evidence of hafted prehistoric tools if you regard a drawing of a drawing of a disintegrated piece of wood as evidence that is even the flint axis
head has been lost, if indeed, it ever existed.
Then there was an ancient horseshoe of an unusual design, a spur, possibly Roman, a neolithic
hammer made of deer bone, very rare. It was carved with precision, and we now know that's
because it was carved by a modern steel chisel. A Chinese bronze bowl from the Han Dynasty
2,000 years ago, found in a medieval structure in the English coastal town of Dover.
Remarkable evidence of global trade.
Where exactly were these things found, Mr Dawson?
And by whom?
And when?
Ah, it was all a few years back.
I could continue.
Miles Russell certainly does, detailing a long series of Dawson fakes.
Dawson, it seems, was desperate for academic recognition.
And especially, he yearned to be a fellow of the Royal Society.
Perhaps if he'd lived a little longer, he might have succeeded.
After all, he had an astonishing track record of repeatedly finding novel and important discoveries.
The sort of things other researchers just couldn't find,
not if they tried for a lifetime.
What we can say for certain is that many of these Dawson fakes have traits in common.
There's a missing link, something new and surprising, yet connected to what's already known.
There's often an academic dupe, somebody who's come to trust Dawson and speak up in support of him.
And there's a persistent vagueness about the providence of the items, where the exact time, location and finder of the discovery are unclear.
Dawson often sat on his treasures for several years before announcing their existence.
That gave him deniability, if challenged, and it also made life difficult for anyone trying to follow the trail.
And what a piltdown? It's the ultimate missing link, of course.
And if Sir Arthur Woodward was innocent of the fraud, as seems likely, he was the ultimate dupe.
And there was the vagueness again, in his fateful.
letter to Woodward, Dawson provided few details. In fact, Dawson's ambiguous accounts
imply that he acquired the first Piltdown bone fragment sometime between one and 13 years before
showing it to Woodward. It was, shall we say, all a few years back. As for Piltdown 2,
the discovery of another human-like skull,
alongside another ape-like jawbone,
the discovery which dispelled all the doubts back in 1916,
we don't know where it was discovered, and we don't know when.
The overwhelming probability is that it was never discovered at all.
The bones went straight from Dawson's workbench
to Arthur Woodward's office without Dawson having bothered to bury them.
If Dawson hadn't faded away,
and died. Presumably he would have started to craft one of his characteristically vague stories.
But without Dawson to spin his yarns, Piltdown 2 was largely forgotten. It had served its purpose.
Francesca Gino's $25 million lawsuit against Data Collada was dismissed in September 24, 13 months after it was filed.
can't have been a fun 13 months for Joe Simmons, Leif Nielsen and Yuri Simonson.
The suit against Harvard continues.
In August 2025, Harvard filed a counterclaim against Gino,
suing her for defamation and alleging she falsified court evidence.
Gino maintains her innocence.
As for Dan Ariely, everyone agrees that he published a study containing fabricated
data, but nobody can prove that he was the one who fabricated it.
He continues to deny wrongdoing.
I would never falsify any data on any experiment, he told the New Yorker.
He told me the same thing.
At no point did I knowingly use unreliable, inaccurate or manipulated data in our research.
And there's no solid proof that he did.
It's easy to chuckle at some of this stuff.
So what if it actually makes no difference whether you sign at the top of a form or at the end?
So what if Charles Dawson did fabricate evidence of early humans and Cretaceous mammals
and Roman cast iron and Paleolithic axes and trade between China and Kent?
But it would be wrong to categorize Piltdown as merely a prank.
It was an astonishing, brazen forgery that had led paleontologists astray for 40.
years. Countless hours were wasted. Entire careers were devoted to making sense of the
piltdown discoveries, and what they told us about human evolution, all in vain, all because
of a lie that was designed to advance the career of the fraudster. The same can be said about
fraudulent research in modern science. Three million Guatemalan taxpayers were enrolled in an
experiment to test an idea that now seems to have been built on lies.
And if that seems bad, what about medical fraud? A few years ago, a Dutch researcher,
Don Poldermans, was found by his own employer, Erasmus Medical School, to have used fictitious
and knowingly unreliable data. Poldemans himself has apologised and said that the use of the fake data
was an accident.
But this wasn't a study about signing forms.
It was a study about how to do major surgery.
Poldemans had published research
recommending the use of beta-blocker drugs
before some surgical operations to lower blood pressure.
After the problems with his research became known,
a new analysis of the evidence concluded that beta-blockers
weren't just useless as a presurgical treatment,
but potentially deadly.
they raised the risk of post-surgical death by more than a quarter.
That's even worse than it sounds.
Two researchers estimated that if the confusion about beta blockers
had delayed the adoption of best practices by five years,
the consequence was 800,000 additional deaths.
That's more people than died at the Battle of the Somme.
Maybe that's an alarmist number.
but it certainly gives a sense of what's at stake.
Sometimes it's a matter of life and death, a lot of death.
And even if it isn't, it's about truth, and truth matters.
One of the Data Collada team, Joe Simmons, has been reflecting about the way bad science,
both the fakes and the sloppy stuff, distorts our view of reality.
and perverts the scientific process.
Flaude analysis tends to produce more interesting results than careful stuff.
Fake data absolutely guarantees those interesting results,
just as Dawson seemed to be able to dig up something amazing
every time you went to a site.
An influential portion of our literature is effectively a made-up story,
Joe Simmons told the New Yorker.
A field cannot reward truth
if it does not or cannot decipher it.
So it rewards other things instead.
Interestingness, novelty, speed, impact, fantasy.
Interestingness, novelty, fantasy.
Charles Dawson would have been right at home.
Key sources were Unravelling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh
and The Piltdown Man Hoax, Case Closed, by Miles Russell.
For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at Tim Harford.com.
Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright,
Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilley.
It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.
Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio.
Ben Nadaf Haffrey edited the scripts.
The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guthridge,
Stella Harford, Oliver Hembra, and Sarah Jop,
Masea Munro, Jamar Westman and Rufus Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible
without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keir Ropozy and Owen Miller.
Portionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry.
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference to us.
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