In 1912, a fossil discovery shakes the scientific world. Piltdown Man is the elusive missing link between humans and their ape-like ancestors. Forty years, and countless scientific articles later, a man at the Natural History Museum gets a chance to see the relic for himself and notices something isn’t quite right.
This episode was first released to members of the Cautionary Club.
Further reading
Two excellent and comprehensive books about the case are Unravelling Piltdown by John Evangelist Walsh, and The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed by Miles Russell.
Other useful articles on the Piltdown forgery:
Freeman, E.F. (2017), Piltdown Man’s ‘Treasure Map’. Geology Today, 33: 108-113. https://doi.org/10.1111/gto.12187
Kate Bartlett Piltdown Man: Britain’s Greatest Hoax BBC History 17 Feb 2011
Nandini Subramaniam The Problem of Piltdown Man Science History Institute 4 May 2023
Robin McKie Piltdown Man: British archaeology’s greatest hoax The Observer 5 Feb 2012
Isabelle De Groote Solving the Piltdown Man crime: how we worked out there was only one forger The Conversation 10 August 2016
On the Data Colada Affair:
Gideon Lewis-Kraus Big Little Lies The New Yorker 9 October 2023 and How A Scientific Dispute Spiralled Into A Defamation Lawsuit The New Yorker 12 September 2024
Cathleen O’Grady Honesty researcher’s lawsuit against data sleuths dismissed Science 12 Sep 2024
Fabricated data in research about honesty. You can’t make this stuff up. Or, can you? Planet Money 28 July 2023
Dan Engber The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger The Atlantic 19 Nov 2024
Data Colada Posts 98, 109, and 118 – and their article False-Positive Psychology.
Tim Harford How To Spot Scientists Who Peddle Bad Data The Financial Times 8 September 2021
Kelsey Piper The staggering death toll of scientific lies Vox 26 Aug 2024