Pseudo Archaeology or How to write a bestselling novel

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Pseudo- ArchaeologyorHow to write a
best-selling novel

• 161221
• ?????????????????
• Department of Sociology and Anthropology
• Faculty of Social Sciences
• Chiang Mai University
• benjamin.marwick_at_anu.edu.au

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Outline

• How we know what we know
• The Cardiff Giant
• The Piltdown Hoax
• Atlantis
• The meaning of it all

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How we know what we knowScience and Pseudoscience

• Science a system of knowledge and methods to
  understand the world
• Pseudo- FAKE
• Pseudo-archaeology a fake archaeology

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How we know what we knowEpistemology

• What distinguishes true (adequate) knowledge from
  false (inadequate) knowledge?
• Science needs
• empirical evidence (empiricism)
• practicing logical reasoning (rationalism)
• to have useful knowledge (coherentism), and
• a skeptical attitude (skepticism)

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How we know what we know The Case of Childbed
Fever

• Vienna, 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis worked in 2
  maternity clinics
• Observes women die from fever.

Midwife Clinic
Doctor Training Clinic
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How we know what we know The Case of Childbed
Fever

• Hypothesis that doctors spread fever in the
  teaching clinic
• Predict If doctors stop spreading fever,
  mortality rate will drop
• Test stop doctors from spreading fever
• Observes mortality rate drop to 2

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How we know what we know Science or
Pseudo-science?

• The principle of science, the definition almost,
  is the following the test of all knowledge is
  experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of
  scientific truth. But what is the source of
  knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be
  tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to
  produce these laws, in the sense that it give us
  hints. But also needed is imagination to create
  from these hints the great generalizations to
  guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange
  pattern beneath them all, and then to experiment
  to check again whether we made the right
  guess.
• (Richard Feynman 1964 The Feynman Lectures on
  Physics. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA)

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• Some case studies

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The Cardiff Giant

• 1868, Cardiff, New York
• George Hull made a sculpture and buried it on his
  farm (cost 2600)
• 1869, the sculpture was accidentally uncovered

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The Cardiff Giant

• Immediately denounced as a fake by scientists
• But defended by Christian fundamentalists
• Was very famous
• 100s of people paid to see it
• Hull sold it for 30,000

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The Cardiff Giant

• PT Barnam wanted to rent it
• Not allowed, so he made his own fake and went on
  tour
• Both statues shown in New York
• After that, people accepted it was a fake

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The Cardiff Giant
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The Cardiff Giant

• Trained observers such as professional scientists
  had viewed the Giant and said it was an
  impossibility, a statue, a clumsy fraud, and just
  plain silly
• objective, rational, logical, and scientific
  conclusions, however, had little impact.
• desire to believe what one wants to believe
  regardless of the evidence

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The Piltdown Hoax

• 1912, Sussex, England
• Charles Dawson discovered the first of two skulls
  of an primitive hominid
• A mixture of human and ape with the face of Homo
  sapiens and a primate jaw.

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The Piltdown Hoax

• What did they find?
• Primitive jaw (unusually flat molars),
  Pleistocene animal bones (rhino hippo), hominid
  skull pieces (unusually thick), stone artefacts

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The Piltdown Hoax

• Historical context
• Neanderthal 1856
• Origin of Species 1859
• Crô Magnon 1869
• Java Man 1890
• Peking Man 1903
• Heidelberg Man 1907
• England? Pebble-collecting

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The Piltdown Hoax

• 1930-1950, many new early hominid discoveries
• 1924 Australopithecus africanus
• 1938 Paranthropus robustus
• 1948 Australopithecus robustus
• Pattern human-like body, primitive head
• Piltdown doesnt fit
• "I remember writing a paper on human evolution in
  1944, and I simply left Piltdown out. You could
  make sense of human evolution if you didn't try
  to put Piltdown into it." (Sherwood Washburn)

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The Piltdown Hoax

• How was the hoax exposed?

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The Piltdown Hoax

• 1949, a new dating technique was invented
• Measure the amount of the fluorine in the bones.
• Bones pick up fluorine in groundwater
• A relative measure of the amount of time bone had
  been in the ground.

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The Piltdown Hoax

• Prediction
• Results
• Truth finally revealed!

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The Piltdown Hoax

• Scientists take another look
• the first and second molars were worn to the same
  degree
• the inner margins of the lower teeth were more
  worn than the outer - the 'wear' was the wrong
  way round
• the edges of the teeth were sharp and unbevelled
• the exposed areas of dentine were free of shallow
  cavities and flush with the surrounding enamel
• the biting surface of the two molars did not form
  a uniform surface and the planes were out of
  alignment
• canine tooth had been stained with pigment and
  filed down to simulate human wear the pulp
  cavity had been filled with a substance not
  unlike chewing gum.
• Mandibular condoyle missing
• Of course it was a fake!

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What is Atlantis?

• Ancient Island civilization
• Perfect society
• Rich, complex culture
• Destroyed by earthquakes 10,000 BC

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First record of Atlantis
Atlantis... It was really great!
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First mention of Atlantis

• Plato is the earliest source
• He says its a very ancient story
• But no other sources

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The Atlantis Puzzle

• Plato says Atlantis has
• Many buildings, temples, Royal Palace
• Streets and huge canals
• Many farms
• Big army
• Our predictions

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Where did Atlantis come from?
400 BC Plato
5,000 BC First City
4,000 BC First Writing
10,000 BC First Agriculture
10,000 BC End of Atlantis
3000 BC First Pyramids
3000 BC First Wars
little step by little step
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Where did Atlantis come from?

• How to test UFO hypothesis?
• Find Atlantis!

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Where is Atlantis?

• Plato says (our predictions)
• In the Atlantic Ocean
• Near the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of
  Gibraltar?)
• Greek ships can not sail in the Atlantic Ocean
  because the Atlantis is too near the
  surfaceGreeks of Platos time knew almost
  nothing about the Atlantic because they were kept
  away from the area by a powerful seagoing enemy,
  the Carthaginians.

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Recent ideas about Atlantis location

• 19th and 20th Century
• Many people try to find Atlantis
• Ignatius Donnelly 1882
• Helena Petrovna Blavatsky 1888
• Edgar Cayce
• Graham Hancock 1990s
• They say Atlantis was
• single source of world civilization
• that it was really a story depicting the fall of
  Minoan Crete

• Crete, Santorini, Cyprus, Sardinia, Malta, Troy,
  Tantalis, Andalusia, Ponza,
• Finland, Ireland
• India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia
• Bahamas, Caribbean
• Antarctica
• Atlantis is everywhere and nowhere!

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Santorini Best guess

• 3500 BC
• Volcano exploded Thera Island
• Bronze Age Minoan city of Akrotiri was destroyed

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Santorini Best guess

• Similarities
• Land disappeared in an earthquake and was
  replaced by sea.
• The disaster destroyed an enemy of Athens
  (Minoans)
• Both Minoans and Atlanteans were sea going
  traders.
• The Minoan island of Crete in particular had a
  sophisticated culture with large palaces, just
  like Atlantis.
• Both civilizations used rituals involving bulls
  in their religion.

• Differences
• The size is wrong. Atlantis was a continent, not
  a tiny island.
• The location is wrong. Atlantis was in the
  Atlantic Ocean, not the Aegean Sea.
• The date is wrong. Plato dated the Atlantis
  disaster thousands of years earlier than the
  Santorini explosion.
• The Minoans did not disappear after the Santorini
  disaster. Egyptian records show normal trade
  continued with the Minoans long after the
  Santorini explosion.

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Atlantis What to think?
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Atlantis What the archaeologists think
Its just a story I made up!I wanted to tell a
story about a powerful nation that wants to
dominate the entire known worldbut is defeated
in a big battle by a materially poor,
technologically backward but spiritually pure
society
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350 BC 1980 AD
Star Wars!
Atlantis!

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The meaning of it all

• Cardiff Man
• People will ignore scientific evidence and
  believe what they want
• Piltdown Hoax
• People will fake science to prove what they want
• Atlantis
• People will ignore science and do fake science to
  believe what they want

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The meaning of it all

• Cardiff Man
• Now forgotten
• Piltdown Hoax
• No lasting damage to science or evolution,
  important example of hoax
• Atlantis
• A lot of people still believe it
• No impact on science or history

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The meaning of it all

• Science can help to find the true past
• Scientific evidence and method resists
  pseudoarchaeology
• BUT
• We get the past we deserve