The Fake Archaeopteryx and Other Great Hoaxes Of History | Our History

i'm visiting a piece of old england all the classic ingredients are here the golf course with its sweeping green links a country club with all the trappings a red brick post office and an anglican church and as in any english suburb the houses have built an eccentric mixture of styles gothic late victorian and even stock broker tudor yet this isn't england i haven't left sri lanka this is neuralia a town built as a hilltop health resort by the british explorer sir samuel baker in the 19th century baker imported almost everything except the climate vegetables shrubs sheep cows a pack of foxhounds and even a blacksmith it's a brilliant fake but it's not intended to fool anybody it is not always so easy to distinguish between a fake and the real thing as museums all over the world have discovered sometimes to their cost in 1579 sir francis drake was circling the world he needed to stop to repair his ship his chaplain's account of the voyage says that drake landed somewhere on the west coast of america in a small bay he came ashore and put up a brass plate claiming the land for queen elizabeth he named the place nova albion or new britain this looked like the place jeff it was around here it could have been a little further over these two men believed that they could be standing on the very spot where drake staked his claim with the brass plate one of them george epperson is convinced this is the place he has spent years trying to prove it the other jefferson graves could unwittingly once have held the proof in his hand in the early 1930s as a child he came to this spot for a picnic with his parents and a friend he was digging in the soil when something caught his eye all of a sudden i saw something shiny and it ran over and started digging into that place and pretty soon this shiny thing was getting bigger and bigger and i started pulling at it and i was trying to get it out and i couldn't figure it out and it looked like something strange he says he picked up a rectangular brass plate on the way home in the car jefferson was examining the strange markings on it suddenly his friend grabbed the plate and threw it out of the window the parents drove on and that would have been the end but in 1936 the plate turned up again it was found in marin county and passed through a chain of hands until it came here to the bancroft library at berkeley historian dr herbert bolton was director of the bancroft he was delighted for years he told his students how thrilling it would be if drake's plate of brass turned up and suddenly it had been found and was in his care he declared it authentic placed it in his library and paid a reward to the finder bolton's reputation was so great that no one thought to question his declaration but when he died doubts started to creep in specialists in elizabethan english were suspicious of the wording the plate of brass was re-examined unfortunately we we don't find this artifact terribly convincing that too many things wrong with it at first glance the lettering is quite peculiar the way of referring to the queen for example is odd it says her majesty queen elizabeth of england which is not the way anyone in the 16th century would have referred to the monarch it would have been elizabeth by the grace of god queen of england or or some such uh formula but certainly not this the letter forms uh as well are really quite quite curious the the way an n is made simply as a not with a diagonal as we would expect but with a bar across the top in context you can see it's an n but it looks for all the world like a greek pi once the scholars had voiced their doubts the scientists were called in dr francozzaro holds the nobel prize for his work in chemistry in 1977 he was asked to look at the metal from which the plate was made he and his team drilled brass from the side of it and analyzed what they found our findings do not tell us what the age of the plate is but what we did find out was that it was so extremely pure in the extraneous elements that we looked for that it could not have been made in drake's time the plate of brass is made from copper and zinc they did not have copper of that purity available in drake's time zinc of that purity was not available in drake's time and they did not have the technology to make the composition of the plate of brass at that time not only was the bras too pure but the plates seemed to have been made using modern techniques in the 16th century brass was hammered into shape but this plate bore all the signs of a 20th century rolling mill it was a standard thickness throughout the plate of brass is very close to an eighth of an inch thick it's homogeneous to a 1 1000 of an inch within our ability to measure it corresponds exactly with the specifications for the number eight gauge of the american wire gauge standard used in the nineteen thirties back at agate beach george epperson's faith is undaunted by science or scholars he's sure that the log of drake's explorations and the description of the bay where he came ashore point to this place [Music] with his metal detector he's combed every inch of the sand looking for other things drake may have left oh i love detecting down here and i kind of hear murmurs out in the ocean like voices and there's a sea dogs that come around keeping company it's sometimes a little spooky but very interesting i love it if as he believes the plate of brass is genuine then this would indeed be a historic place he swore never to give up his campaign to have it recognized this is our country's oldest and rarest document even rarer than the constitution of america and it's very historic and should be acknowledged but if he's wrong and the scientists have proved it a fake how could the hoax have happened at berkeley they think they know they blame a history professor with a little too much enthusiasm he used to say in class that drake's plate must be out there waiting to be discovered well we've always supposed that that would be an invitation to uh students to get together and produce what was wanted and we very much think that that is the most likely explanation of how this came into being professor bolton was a very charismatic man after i read his lectures i wanted to go out and find the plate of brass i can't give you his exact words but the ending of this speech was of the order of the plate is there now go out and find it the natural history museum in london is home to the world's most famous collection of scientific specimens the material kept here has provided science with the information on which the natural history of the planet has been written specimens like this fly encased in amber resin which solidified 40 million years ago since it emerged from the collection of the german entomologist hermann lowe in 1850 it's been regarded as a prize exhibit for the insect inside this amber is a member of the house fly family which still exists today scientists were amazed to find it had been around so long and the natural history of flies was revised to include this rare discovery until one day a student was hired to classify the museum's amber collection andrew ross was using a lamp at the time i thought wow amazing specimen and then suddenly a crack appeared around the fly just around here it's actually caused by a gentle warmth from the microscope lamp that i was using this had me very worried because such an important specimen and cracks only appearing around it and i don't know now what do i do and i quickly put it away and hope no one would notice it um but i thought no that's a bit strange it shouldn't be doing that and i looked at the slide from the side and then everything became clear someone had taken a piece of amber they cut it in half hollowed a piece out put a fly in some kind of modern resin and glued the two bits back together the fact that it was a common house fly should have alerted the experts the fly they chose is a species called fannia scolaris known as the latrine fly because it lives around toilets and it's a very advanced fly and 150 years ago there's probably hundreds of them flying around and it's probably just the nearest fly to hand perhaps lying on a windowsill somewhere his discovery solved two problems troubling entomologists why was this the only living species to be found as a fossil and why had no other prehistoric latrine flies been found it's quite satisfying to find that important specimen is a fake and actually this solved a lot of problems because many entomologists have used this particular species as an example of how long species of flies can live for and they argued that the fossil record of insects was very poor because there's only the one specimen and there should be millions of others preserved in resin that are still living today but we now know that the fossil record is much better and all the insects preserved in amber extinct in science accusations of fraud and fakery usually have two results one is heated argument the other is a thorough and often agonized reassessment of what were thought established facts this was certainly true in 1985 when sir fred hoyle and other eminent scientists claimed that one of the most important fossils ever discovered was a fake it's called archaeopteryx and for more than a century it had been hailed as the vital missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds suddenly it looked as though all the textbooks on evolution would have to be rewritten curiously all the archaeopteryx fossils have been found in one small corner of southern germany around this stone quarry at songhofen the story goes that in 1861 the first specimen appeared when a quarry workman split a limestone slab [Music] over the years a handful of other archaeopteryx fossils emerged from the rock [Music] from them the experts reconstructed this extraordinary creature hailed as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds it was thought to have flown 150 million years ago fossil hunters believe the bones survive for two reasons the first was that they fell to their deaths in prehistoric slime 150 million years ago this area here was a shallow sea with lagoons at their edges scientists suppose that archaeoptics has been living nearby on naturally on trees or bushes on land but perhaps by thunderstorms had been driven into the sea and was drowned the fossils were also preserved because the mud solidified to the hardest of limestones archaeopteryx has been well preserved only here up to now because this stone is so hard and has not been attacked by nature those who believe that all the archaeopteryx fossils are fake point to another characteristic of the stone it's so finely grained that it produces the best lithographic plates artists can etch the most detailed pictures on them hoax theorists argue that a 19th century fossil hunter engraved in archaeopteryx in canada one investigator believes the essential ingredient for the hoax can be found in anyone's back garden craig willis thinks he knows exactly what the 19th century forger did willis spotted three things that alerted him the first was about the feathers all of the specimens of the archaeopteryx exhibit impressions of feathers which are typical of modern birds that are capable of flight and the feature that that stands out the most is the fact that they all exhibit this off-center quill or this asymmetric design which is characteristic of the flight feathers of all modern birds also the archaeopteryx did not seem to have the bone structure of a creature that could fly not a single one of these exhibited the characteristic breast bone which is the point of attachment for the huge flight muscles required for flapping flight finally willis argued that the bones lay flat in the stone a three-dimensional creature should have produced a three-dimensional fossil to make his fake fossil he needs some solnhof and limestone and some chemicals all these were available in the mid-19th century when archaeopteryx appeared first he rubs a fine powder from the limestone block he now adds sodium silicate he believes this is the crucial ingredient it makes the powdered rock reset into stone indistinguishable from the original what i'm going to do basically is make a make an impression of this surface of the feather a hoaxer would have greased the feather so that no traces of down remain to give the game away and just apply a few drops of the sodium silicate to the surface and i just take the tip of my finger and i i make a nice feather-sized puddle and with the powdered limestone which i've already prepared i i just add it i then take the feather and place the feather onto the onto the surface of the mixture like so once the feather is clamped into the artificial mud it takes only minutes to set before willis can check on his work now once the feather has been actually carefully peeled away from the surface there are a couple of features that are striking in terms of the texture and the color of the synthetic stone it's virtually indistinguishable from the background and if you get up very close to it using a good quality magnifier such as a jeweler's lens it's quite easy to detect all of the very finest detail of the structure of the feathers such as have been noted by investigators who have actually examined the archaeopteryx fossils under a scanning electron microscope comparison with the archaeopteryx fossil confirms willis's belief i'm absolutely convinced that all of the archaeopteryx are the alleged archaeopteryx fossils where absolutely brilliantly executed forgeries using a process if not identical to the one that i've just described and in all its basic features very very similar but back at the songhoff and quarry they don't believe that willis and the critics have cracked the case only two years ago this quarryman discovered the world's seventh archaeopteryx he says it was in a place no forger could have got into deep inside a limestone block i was working away with hammer and chisel and i was throwing away material we couldn't use as i was doing so i realized there was a fossil in this stone i recognized it as an archaeopteryx by the number of its claws a dinosaur has five claws and an archaeopteryx only three when they're trying to work out whether fine is genuine archaeologists always check to make sure that there's nothing suspicious about the circumstances of its discovery so when in 1911 two english school boys claimed that they'd found a masterpiece of prehistoric art during a break from class it's not surprising that at first investigators thought the lads had cooked up an elaborate practical joke the sherben bone is on its way from london to the macdonald archaeological institute in cambridge to scientists amazement it's taken 80 years to establish the truth its latest investigator is dr francesco derico i brought from the natural history museum the sherborne bone with the engraving of a horse as you can see and please have a look at it on the bone is a carving of a horse's head it's been claimed that the bone and the carving are as much as 10 000 years old the story began early this century at a boys public school in dorset sherburne became the unwitting focus for this long-running archaeological mystery the sherman bone was apparently discovered in a quarry in the school's grounds retired sherman master jim gibb has followed the twists and turns of the controversy in 1911 two new boys went for a walk up to the quarries and found this bone with a horse's head scratched on it they took it to their day room in the house older boys rubbished it and cortese one of the new boys who found it decided to throw it into the fire he was stopped by an elder boy who said give it to the science master uh it's probably genuine science master did indeed wonder if the bone might be genuine he took it to be examined by experts at the british museum they declared it was the work of stone age man but not everyone was convinced fifteen years after the bone was found the first doubts were emerging when an oxford scientist professor solace said he suspected it was a schoolboy hoax after all the debate has continued over decades now dr robert krasinski of the natural history museum in london is hoping for a verdict from dr dereko what you can see what you can conclude about it well we have a number of things to look at to try to check the authenticity of the engraving the shape of engravings and differences in patina the pattern is the surface texture of the bone and dr dereko knows if the bone and the carving are the same age the patterner will be uniform but if the carving is more modern differences will show the carved lines will be covered in much less sediment than the rest of the bone they don't seem to contain any traces of the sediment you don't see any pattern where you have these size lines no the line seems clear even quite white and the surface of the bone is light brown so the difference of pattern area is not a good indication for the authenticity of the engraving but i think we have to to do something more to be sure of it the bone and the carving are of different ages the museum turned to oxford university it has one of the world's leading carbon 14 dating laboratories scientists regard this as probably the most accurate method available the bone was sent to dr robert hedges when we were given the sherbourne bone our aim is to date the time when the animal whose bone it was was living this is the powder that we would take from the bone to begin with and that bone powder contains some protein we can extract the protein which is a very tiny amount and this very tiny amount of protein contains the original carbon atoms that were part of the animal when it was alive and it's in these carbon atoms that we measure how much radiocarbon still survives the amount that survives tells us how old the how long ago the animal lived the longer ago the less the radiocarbon well we found that the bone was about 600 years old and um of course this means it's much too young to have been covered with a engraving made in in paleolithic times so it must have been done very very much more recently than that at sherburne jim gibb accepts the verdict of science but he still has faith in the integrity of the two boys who found the bone i think the whole thing was done by older boys probably only a year or two older they knew a bit a bit about paleolithic art because the science master lectured on it and the history of the story i think makes it genuine but of course i was wrong though museum curators may lose sleep worrying if their exhibits are fakes i think the rest of us secretly enjoy the idea that perhaps we're being conned that's why some artists who fake paintings only become successful when they're caught like the british painter tom keating whose fraudulent old masters came to be valued almost as highly as the real things which all goes to show that the pleasure provided by a truly ingenious hoax can be absolutely genuine you

Channel: Our History

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Id: o9dHhFjOBpA

Length: 24min 29sec (1469 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022