Citation Needed - Piltdown Man

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological fraud in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. Although there were doubts about its auth...enticity virtually from the beginning, the remains were still broadly accepted for many years, and the falsity of the hoax was only definitively demonstrated in 1953. An extensive scientific review in 2016 established that amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson was responsible for the fraudulent evidence. Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 For me though, it was Racka Kuni. I love the dildo and butt plug fights though. They were good, but Racka Kuni was outstanding. Let me out of here. I told you not until I get all the hair off me. Ow, stop. Stay still. No, I will not hurt.
Starting point is 00:00:15 Let me out of the cave. Guys, what's happening now? Thank you, Cecil. Can you tell them to let me out? Let him out. See? Did that help? That didn't help. Okay. Eli, Eli, what the hell are you doing? Can you tell them to let me out? Let him out. See? Did that help? It didn't help.
Starting point is 00:00:26 Eli, Eli, what the hell are you doing? Well, Noah, I went out into the vacant lot behind the studio, so I could help with this week's episode. Built down, man? Exactly. I know that in order to have enough down, we had to catch a bunch of peltz, right? Who did what now? What the, what the, who? I needed peltz to get their down.
Starting point is 00:00:45 So we could make a human effigy out of the hill down. So I built a cage, put some cheese in there, waited, and voila! Now I just have to harvest the down and we're all set. That's heath in there, man. And you could still just look up what we're gonna talk about instead of like guessing every week. Heath, did you just walk into a cage with cheese in it again? Eyes!
Starting point is 00:01:07 Yes, I might have. Eli, that's Heath in there. That is not a pilt, whatever the hell you think that is. No, you know what? I see it now. He is too tall to be a pilt. Well, it could be pilt Chamberlain. Pilt?
Starting point is 00:01:21 You're not, you're not helping. Oh, God, it's really good though. But let me out. Hello and welcome to Citation Needed. Podcasts, we choose Subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we are experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. Step right up and see the oddities of nature. We have a drop bear, a jackalope, a nessie, and a jupa cobra.
Starting point is 00:02:05 I'll let you sort out, which is which? A shotgun jupa cobra. And the potato fam in the Irishman. What are we doing? We're just thinking we're fighting. It's shotgun might not be the best for you, is there? I guess I have to take nessie now so that we won't all have to pretend Tom has a neck. Okay, no know what Jesus, I have a net.
Starting point is 00:02:28 No, it's why I have to give my shirts custom made. No, his face. No, you feel stupid. Patrons without you, Eli would have to go back to his old job, but paint lips on his belly button and we're in a top hat over the rest of this torso. No one needs to see that man. Nobody needs to see that. If you'd like to learn how to prevent that terrible image, I painted from becoming a reality,
Starting point is 00:02:51 be sure to stick around to be able to show it. And out of the way, tell us Noah, what person-place thing concept phenomenon or event will we be talking about today? We can be talking about Pilt Down Man. Almost everyone on the cast knows Pilt Down Man was a hoax. Oh, Bidah hoax! Was it Noah? So Pilt Down Man is probably the most notorious hoax in the history of science.
Starting point is 00:03:18 You might recall that when I did the Cardiff Giant on Episode 247, I said that it was my second favorite fake human remains story, and that's because I knew I needed to leave space for this motherfucker. Right. And Tom had room for the story of Carl Tansler. Okay, there's a corpse. Fried-fuck-style, right? And of course, Cecil will only let me do my favorite human remains story at Platinum Night. So, it was that. There you go.
Starting point is 00:03:41 Okay. So, so, so, Piltown Man was a hypothesis concocted from a series of fake fossils, fake discovered by fake archaeologists Charles Dawson back in the early 20th century. And because it catered to the national racial and scientific prejudices of its day, it was widely accepted as real. And the fact that it was a mediocre forceory wasn't definitively proven for over 40 years. Texas textbook makers left it in because it makes kids feel good about racism. Yeah, we're still doing that. Yeah. So our story starts in 1912 when amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claims that he's
Starting point is 00:04:18 discovered evidence of a missing link between a man in a place to see gravel bed in East Sussex or more specifically, he claimed that he had been given said evidence by a workman who discovered it and on the initial assumption that it must have been a fossilized coconut broken open. What? Yeah, so this origin story is the first of many red flags that should have worn Dawson's contemporaries that something might be a miss here. Consider the kind of stupidity that you have to assume on the part of the workman to have
Starting point is 00:04:47 him looking at a hominid skull and go on, was I some kind of coconut and then realize that it's like a broken skull is way more useful to a hoaxor who might want to reassemble it in some new way or leave out some part that wouldn't fit with his story. That's not a horse, you're just banging hominid skulls together. I mean, grip it by the horse. To be fair, Noah, if the thought nobody's that stupid head crossed Dawson's mind, we would never story this evening. So you're right. You're right.
Starting point is 00:05:18 I just have to return to a wild, laying around fossilized coconut in East Sussex in England. That was also a bit in the money. Regardless of the fossil's questionable chain of custody, the skull fragments were enough to get the attention of the head of the British Museum's geology department Arthur Smith Woodward. Woodward accompanied Dawson on a number of excavations on the same site in the coming months and together they discovered several more skull fragments including a few teeth and part of a lower jaw. Or rather sorry, they didn't discover those together. Dawson came upon those things while digging by himself in between their team dicks. Yeah, there's another red flag for you there.
Starting point is 00:06:07 All right, everybody close your eyes if you happen to have a fossil of anything important, you can put it on my desk. Okay, but to be fair, if Dawson hadn't discovered the fossil pieces, the British Museum would have had nobody to steal them from. These places have processes. So when we were put all the pieces together, he wound up with a very odd specimen. According to his reconstruction,
Starting point is 00:06:32 the discovery was of a hominid with room for a modern human-sized brain, but a decidedly ape-like jaw. In fact, in the meeting of the Geological Society of London, where he announced the discovery, Woodward said that the jawbone was with the exception of a couple of human-like molars indistinguishable from that of a young chimpanzee, which Jewish credit was correct because it was the possible young chimpanzee jaw with the couple of teeth filed down to look more human-y.
Starting point is 00:07:00 But they didn't realize that at the time, and the scientific community welcomed Ian Thrup is dosenied to humanity's family tree. Championsy Dennis just as a price chart with bananas on the wall of his practice. Now, to be fair, this story is often sold as the entire scientific community marching in lockstep around this discovery. And that's not a fair characterization. A lot of authorities rejected Woodward's reconstruction of the scope from the very beginning. Right? The Royal College of Surgeons did their
Starting point is 00:07:29 own reconstruction and came up with a much different conclusion as did several prominent voices in the wider field of anthropology. But sadly, these dissenters had no Joe Rogan podcast to platform them. So they were sad. Yep. That was it. But skepticism or no, we've discovered the missing link is a way better headline than we found a weird look in dude. So the press pushed for the former and to be fair, the majority of the scientific establishment followed along. And one of the main reasons was that it was exactly what scientists expected to find next, right? The prevailing theory of the time was that the human species branched off from apes
Starting point is 00:08:05 first by developing a much larger brain and then by losing all of our ape-like features. We now know that the truth is pretty much the exact opposite of that, but the scientists of the day were by and large being shown what they wanted to be shown. Okay, wouldn't it have to be
Starting point is 00:08:21 the exact opposite of that? Like, I'm not saying I would have figured this out. I wouldn't have figured out evolution correctly if I was a scientist back then, but that's a weird assumption. Like, all the apes started just doing math, Olympiads and fucking Sudoku's in their brain. They were like,
Starting point is 00:08:36 eh, brain really big, skull got bigger. And then they were like, hey, we can probably, I don't know, lose the fur, tone down the jaw lines. We're smart. Right? I would have liked it. I would have liked it. We should, now, so I should also emphasize the large role
Starting point is 00:08:50 that straight up bigotry played in the underlying assumptions. Right? So we're talking about 1912, the height of the eugenics movement and the heyday of scientific racism, the working theory at the time was that some large primate made it out of Africa to Europe and then the sheer geographical superiority of that continent lit caused them to become superior primates.
Starting point is 00:09:15 They evolved into modern white people and then spread and interbred with other early primates deluding their otherwise perfect whiteness to make all the other peoples of the world. You can really see why conservatives don't want real history taught, right? Anyway, the super smart eight fossil slotted perfectly into the hypothesis and made that way easier to set. That's stupid. I learned an intelligent design class that our craniums got bigger because God held in all our sneezes. You never learned critical face theory.
Starting point is 00:09:52 I was just trying to point out that even in their own story, the superior Europeans were still running around fucking a bunch of non-human primates. It wasn't just racism blinding these scientists to the hoax. Nationalism played a big part in it as well. So you have to remember that the whole field of anthropology is pretty young at this point, especially when it comes to human remains, right? So the first known discovery of early human remains was the Gibraltar School of 1848, which was a Neanderthal School discovered in the cave in southern Spain. That's followed by the discovery of, that gives Neanderthal's her name, actually, that's the skull cap in the cave in southern Spain. That's followed by the discovery of, that gives Neanderthals, their names actually,
Starting point is 00:10:25 that's the skull cap in the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856. Then you've got Crow Magnen remains from France in 1868 and Neanderthals skull from Belgium in 1886. So homers were erectus in Java in 1891 and homo-hidle-Bergensis in 1908 also in Germany. Now you might have noticed that all the countries I just mentioned were to England and that pissed off the British. Right? Look, but tiny as little Belgium had
Starting point is 00:10:51 early humans, they got shit. So British scientists desperate to have an early human of their own embraced with the media dubbed the earliest Englishman. And and through the entire story, you're going to find that British scientists were way more accepting of the discovery than their American and European counterparts. Okay. The earliest Englishmen, they were like, look at these skull dimples. This thing wasn't speaking fucking flammish or French like. It was a British fossil. That's so stupid.
Starting point is 00:11:19 We could see the loss of several teeth to the ancient wine gum, if you pay attention. Yeah. This is definitely a British person. We are sure. see the loss of several teeth to the ancient wine gum, if you pay attention. Yeah, this is definitely a really sure. And we are. And even though this doesn't really factor into the story, I want to add it because it kind of gives us the like the trifecta of prejudices. It's okay. I bullied Heath into ending his essay with hippo facts last week. You're okay to go. Yeah. So there's also an undercurrent of sexism through this whole story as well. Because as the title of this episode of tests, this discovery was pretty much always referred to as pilt down man, even though it would be impossible to tell from just a skull whether
Starting point is 00:11:54 you were dealing with a male or female specimen, especially if it's an unknown species where you don't even have like average sizes to work with. But despite that ambiguity, the wiki points out that every single major newspaper always referred to it as a man with the single exception of the daily express newspaper, which quote, referred to the discovery as a woman, but only to mock the suffragett movement of which the express was highly critical. And quote, should have called it hilt down fetus in America. You'd never be able to get rid of it, man. Jokes on them. They paid full price for the rights to that skull. If it had been a woman's skull, they could have gotten it for 70 cents on the that.
Starting point is 00:12:35 Now it's so the chief opponent to Woodward's story was a guy named Arthur Keith later, sir Arthur Keith, but don't mistake him for the good guy. He was bad too, major proponent of scientific racism, but he wasn't buying the pilt down remains as Woodward was selling them. He argued that the skull couldn't be real because the lower jaw had human-like molars, but the upper jaw had big ape-like canines. Those things cannot coexist. Right, so human molars have to be able to move side to side to chew. That's the whole point of them. And the moors in Piltdown Manage showed clear signs of having done that, having been worn down by that side to side chewing.
Starting point is 00:13:13 That would be literally impossible to do if you had big ass canines on either side of your mouth. But ultimately, just like locked it in. Yeah, exactly. But ultimately, all the aforementioned prejudices lined up against Keith and he was denounced the next meeting of the Geologic Society by several anthropologists that wrote off his criticisms as nothing more than professional jealousy. So now he wasn't the only voice of opposition as early as 1913, so less than a year after the finding was announced. David Waterson of King's College in London published an essay in Nature, arguing that the sample was announced david waterson of kings college in london published an essay in nature arguing
Starting point is 00:13:45 that the sample was an eight mandible and a human skull french paleontologist marcellum bull did the same in nineteen fifteen and uh... americans the wallages garrard smith miller did the same it was clear that to really win over the scientific community dot it was going to need to find some more fossils so he did in nineteen fifteen he claimed to have found three more skull fragments that were later called the Sheffield Park fragments.
Starting point is 00:14:09 They were examined by the president of the American Museum of Natural History who declared the pieces to be quote, exactly those which we would have selected to confirm the comparison with the original type. End quote. That's convenient. Yeah, should have been another red fucking flag.
Starting point is 00:14:26 Right, the exact same guy who found every single relevant fossil when confronted by widespread skepticism about his fine, finds exactly the fossils that would vindicate him from the most serious criticisms. No way. Yeah. So instead of being suspicious, they accept that as proof of the fires authenticity and even Keith conceded that it must be real.
Starting point is 00:14:46 Hold on, guys, I also found a fossilized post it. It says to whom it may concern, I keep an old set of upper molars just in my hand, and I grind them against my lower molars to chew so that it all makes love tag. I'm not saying I'm disagreeing, but I do want to point out that Noah's personal incredulity meter is most triggered when the thing that should happen is what happens. This is how Jaded we've become. That's fair. So, okay, so Dawson died a year later in 1916, but his hoax lived on for a bucket while
Starting point is 00:15:28 Keith eventually became one of the discovery's chief proponents. And in July of 1938, he even unveiled a memorial to mark the site where Piltdown Man was first discovered. During the unveiling, he said, quote, so long as man is interested in his long past history in the vicissitudes which are early four runners pass through the varying fair which overtook them. The name of Charles Dawson is certain of remembrance and quote, and I don't think he had our show in mind when he said, God, these old timey people fell for everything, man.
Starting point is 00:16:03 Anything and everything that we don't fall for hoaxes anymore. Oh, that's my alarm to take my Ivermectin to prevent COVID. So let me take a break while I swallow some horse pills here. Jantleman! It is with the utmost pleasure that I present to you, Carciniferous Homeopathic Oofus Bufus. The missing link? Wow! Arshai! What? What? What? What? I say I say I say I say yes.
Starting point is 00:16:47 Smitherson my science enemy because it is old timey times and we scientists have science enemies. How's this widow? Was it you want? Well, dogkins, as I examined this so called specimen of the ors, I kept up with notice that the demandable and the cornacupia do not align. There would need to be some sort of corn mandibular joint in place. Mmm, yes, I'm glad you mentioned that.
Starting point is 00:17:16 Smilison? For you see, hey, I was eating that chicken. This is an ancient, uh, joint thingy that you just said, and that I also found. We just think that this is a naturally occurring tendon traveling from the Vesuvius Major down to the Palala Lala. Wow, right here! Hey, those are my glasses. Oh, if I'm very impressive, but you're missing just one important piece, Stubbornkins, the mandibular credence of the fourth legium. Yes, yes, well, the mandibular credence, well, it's in this
Starting point is 00:17:57 species, will I see it happens to be invisible? Are you sure? Are quite scientists very well done? We're the best scientists to be invisible. Are you sure? Or quite a scientist? Very well done. We are the best scientists in the world right now. You bet you're us, we are. We're back and before we left know what was telling us about scientists that could have probably been fooled by realistic frosting sculptures. Who's going to be the cake boss? No, who's going to be the cake boss?
Starting point is 00:18:37 All right, so like I've already pointed out, plenty of people actually rejected Dawson's interpretation of the fight. It just didn't make any sense, even when you added the additional fine in 1915. It still didn't make sense, but the tragic downfall here, as much as anything else, anyway, is that the critics largely just thought that Dawson was mistaken, not fraudulent. Right? So a lot of people suggested that the two fossils just happened to be in the same place. Human skull and an ape jaw in the same ground, but very few suggested that Dawson was deliberately
Starting point is 00:19:06 hoaxing the entire scientific community. And that's a lot of the reason it was allowed to stand for so long. Scientists have a really high opinion of themselves, so they're reluctant to think that people within their own a hollowed ranks would stoop to something so vulgar and basis forgery. Right? I mean, also, you got to to admit a lot of recreating animals from fossils amounts to like putting together a Lego set without all the Legos, no picture and no box.
Starting point is 00:19:33 Just like holding up your cobble together, maybe a Sores parts and then turning them around to see if maybe you're holding an arm or a leg or a rock. Definitely a more than meets the eye kind of thing going on there with them. For example, you can make a wooly mammoth into a cyclist. So for decades, scientists accepted the thing as genuine. This was super problematic for the science itself because when it comes to fossilized early human remains, there's a pretty small sample size, especially at this point, I literally listed all of them, right, in this show. So every new discovery is being viewed through the lens of Piltdown Man from here after, and every new discovery is telling a vastly different story, right?
Starting point is 00:20:18 Because it turns out that cranial capacity did not drive our divergence from our A-Bleg ancestors in a twist that nobody at the time was predicting. It turned out that bipedalism was probably the main driver for both. When the first Australia Pithicus remains were discovered in 1924, and the first home or erectus remains were found in 1929, much of the scientific elite wrote them off as either aberrations or hoaxes themselves. After all, they were clearly telling a very different story and the European scientists liked the Eurocentric story better.
Starting point is 00:20:47 Alternative artifacts. Bags. Exactly. Look, bipedalism absolutely drove the need for language so that proto-humans could bitch about how much the facts are. Of course, there had always been questions about the skulls authenticity and the detractors kept finding better and better ammunition
Starting point is 00:21:09 as these other finds contributed to the narrative and as the science got better in examining it, right? So finally, in 1953, Pi Magazine published evidence from a number of different prominent scientists proving definitively that Piltdown Man was not just bogus but a deliberate forgery. New technology, including advancements in microscopy, showed that it was a composite of three different primate species.
Starting point is 00:21:32 The skull itself came from a medieval human. The lower jaw was from a 500 year old orangutan jaw, and he had added a few fossilized chimpanzee teeth, I guess, just to spice it up a bit. The bones had been stained with an iron solution and Chromic acid to make them appear far older. And the teeth showed phyomarks that were clearly made so that the specimen would appear to have a more human diet. Yeah, also the steampunk monocle with a leather strap.
Starting point is 00:21:58 I didn't quite know. Do you think that as he was gluing three kinds of monkeys together at job ins or whatever the fuck his name is ever thought to himself? You know, I could just do real science. This is taking away. You think now, so as to the identity of the forger, I feel like we've already guest. But Wikipedia offers up six suspects, including Arthur Keith playing the long game. Also, notorious preister and citation needed favorite William Horace, Dave or Cole of
Starting point is 00:22:30 the Dreadnot Hoax fame, who we met way back in episode 33. Also, Sherlock Holmes author and notorious sucker Arthur Conan Doyle is listed as a suspect. He was contemporaneous to all the events. He played golf nearby and he harbored a huge grudge against the scientific community as a whole for proving that his favorite psychic was a charlatan. But in reality, there's no reason to believe that a hoaxed or other than Charles Dawson was involved. Right. I mean, he could have had an accomplice, but he didn't really need one and it's unlikely that he would have brought in another person
Starting point is 00:23:04 into his lie if he didn't have to. Wikipedia's out here offering us suspects like the end of the first season of cereal. Maybe it was the guy who made all the money and got all the fame or maybe it was the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes is a fun lot. Yeah, right. Well still working his job. So of course, all of the circumstantial evidence pointed to Dawson. He was the one who stood to gain the most from discovery. He was the one that the species was named after. He's the one who actually discovered every single relevant fossil. He's also the person, like the only person, as it turns out, that didn't have a professional
Starting point is 00:23:39 reputation that he could torpedo with this thing. But far more importantly, if not still technically circumstantial, is the fact that we have mountains of other fossils that he faked. Okay, so for decades before he discovered Pilthom, and he'd made a long string of unlikely discoveries, and when archeologists peruse those, they were able to identify no fewer than 38 hoaxes within that collection.
Starting point is 00:24:04 The list of hoaxed fossils in the Wiki is pretty incredible. Okay. It starts with the teeth of a supposed hybrid reptile mammal that he dubbed Plagaeolix Dawsoni, which had been filed down in pretty much the exact same way as Piltdown Man's teeth were. He also had some faked bricks that he claimed were the latest dateable find from Roman Britain leg. A couple of forged statues, uh, one of which he said was Roman another which he said was Chinese, but an ancient Chinese statue in Britain.
Starting point is 00:24:37 Yep. Was it by the fossilized coconuts and he's sussex? He could grip by the heart of the face. And also hiding in the middle of the list of his finds in the collection is something referred to only as the English Channel C-Surpent. I couldn't find any more information on that. There was also a weird reference to the shadow figures on the wall of hasting castle, which as near as I can tell, is a reference to a kind of ghost story he told
Starting point is 00:25:06 about seeing shadow monsters on the wall of a secret tunnel under some famous castle ruins when he was a kid I don't fucking know. Okay, this one is just five lion fossils glued together to make a robot. Ladies and gentlemen of the council Nobel you know me for my many in sundry discoveries today I present to you that time I saw a ghost So much I couldn't figure out what the fuck that was about anyway the point is that the dude was all kinds of foolish Shit and had been his entire career British archaeologists miles Russell who examined Dawson's fine set of the collection, quote, piltdown man was not a one off hoax, more the culmination of a life's work, end quote. Other researchers have drawn a number of links between the forgeries and his private collection and the methods used on piltdown man up to it, including by
Starting point is 00:25:57 the way, the teeth that were used on the piltdown man, he used some of the other teeth from the same fucking orangutan on a different fortress. So 500 year old orangutan. Right. You think, right? Lazy bastard. So it seems super likely that he was the sole perpetrator of the hoats. It sounds bad because a lot of miles out of the orangutan. Yeah, right. He used everything. It was no but a tear in her eye, not a single person with a tear in her eye. There you go. Now, there is a tantalizing theory that suggests that a few of the relevant hoaxes were not Dawson's work.
Starting point is 00:26:32 I don't know how much credence to give this theory, but it's way too good not to include the SAC. In addition to the scope fragments and the teeth, they also uncovered a few stone age tools in the pilt down area. And among those tools was the club made from a fossilized elephant bone. But here's the thing. The club in question, there's a remarkable resemblance to a cricket bat. And the idea that the earliest Englishman would be found alongside the earliest cricket
Starting point is 00:26:58 bat is a little too on the nose even for Dawson. Okay. And I'm sorry Noah, but are we still in England? But now England with elephants and coconuts and Chinese statues. Yes, yes, yes, huh? Yep. Okay, but the theory here is that some of Dawson's critics unable to dislodge his hypothesis in academic circles
Starting point is 00:27:20 were littering ever more obvious forgeries around the area in hopes that those would get pinned on Dawson and bring down the whole facade. That's what it does. I should have, by the way, there was just a couple of super duper obvious forgeries that were found and dismissed over the years, including the mayor's field map, the Ash Burnham dial and the Piltdown Paleolith. Okay, that's clearly a graph inculculated that someone replaced the keys with rank and time keys. Okay, that's it. It still says cast. It's a T.I. 85. Okay. This one's wearing a smart
Starting point is 00:27:53 watch. Okay. It says fossil on the side, but I don't know. It's real. I'm still a little skeptical though. So, so the hoax and the scientific community's readiness to accept that at face value left to stay in an anthropology that lingered for years and some might even say lingers to this day. When creationists and other science deniers want to dismiss the entire edifice of scientific study, Piltdown Man is one of their go to examples, right? Of course, this ignores the fact that it was other scientists doing better science that ultimately exposed the hoax, but it still serves as an important reminder of the dangers
Starting point is 00:28:31 of thinking you're too smart to be fooled and thinking your colleagues are too ethical to lie. Okay, I work with Eli, so I have never thought. Right, not everyone is in equal danger on that one. But there is one other tiny side note that I want to add to the story. It's just a fun little reminder of how one hoax trick and inadvertently expose another. So the year before time ran, the big expose
Starting point is 00:28:54 that proved once and for all that piled down man was a hoax. It was cited by none other than El Ron Hubbard as a phase of biological history that leaves people with the kinds of subconscious memories of trauma that Scientology promises to get rid of. Right? So he made this whole big deal about how obsessions with biting or hiding your teeth or mouth are rooted
Starting point is 00:29:14 in our memories of being piled down men with these big-ass embarrass and grumpy jaws. Oh, okay, just fantastic. And despite that being entirely premised on fraudulent bullshit, the book where Hubbard makes that claim has been reprinted by the Church of Scientology five times most recently in 2007.
Starting point is 00:29:32 What, there's still wrong with it? Sure. You're right. They're, they're current literature still has a, well, if Scientology isn't true, how do you explain Piltdown Man's Auth sentence in it? So where are you? Wow. Piltdown Man volcano demons, both true. We're nailing it right.
Starting point is 00:29:50 Yep. And if you had a summarized, we learned in one sentence, what would it be? Science is mostly fake. They don't. All right. That's fair. Are you ready for the quiz? I absolutely am.
Starting point is 00:30:01 Yeah. All right. No, which of the following was the most important skill for a British archaeologist in the early 20th century? Hey, eugenics, B, for knowledge, C, line, D, Mr. Potato. D, D would have saved a lot of trouble, but given that the entire essay is proof that the answer is see I'm gonna go with See that is correct. It is absolutely giant big fat liar correct all right Noah the most incredible thing about all this is
Starting point is 00:30:36 Imagining that Charles found all this stuff in some imaginary wonder world of never was in East Sussex What was his favorite place to look for fossils? imaginary wonder world of never was in East Sussex. What was his favorite place to look for fossils? A, anywhere you can find a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe. B, dig site nine and three quarters. Nice. C, Charles Dawson's Creek. So obviously it's obviously C Charles doesn't scream.
Starting point is 00:31:05 I don't know what to wait. All right, Noah. The Piltown man isn't Scientology's only missing link. They've also discovered the two-wong child blaster. What? Two-wong child is one of the missing links we discovered. Yep Right on covered. Yeah moving on. Yeah, yeah, the Andrew That's
Starting point is 00:31:34 Or see I like that. They've also discovered the whereabouts of Shelley Miss. Oh Jesus God I'm afraid Andrew's gonna be mad at me. Let's just make Eli the winner then. Eli's the winner. Eli won. Eli won. I'm showing this cabbage just to the side.
Starting point is 00:31:52 Eli won without a loss. So what do you know, Eli? Tom goes next. I'm gonna say about Shelley, Miss cabbage next week. All right, well for Noah, Tom, Eli and Heath, I am Cecil, thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then, Tom will be an expert on something else. Tweet now and then, we can listen to all our other shows.
Starting point is 00:32:12 And if you'd like to do something very important, like help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com, slash citation pod, or you can leave us a five-star review, everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media or check the show notes, be sure to check out citationpod.com. All right, after 14 hours of discovery, we have ancient man with this ancient TV set, a TV tray and cup of tea that is still warm. Sure, sure, sure. But did he take milk or sugar?
Starting point is 00:32:51 Give me like four minutes. Does anyone see my glasses? I need a milk sea soul to get there Okay, keep that or I'll kill myself here Here we go. I need it pilt. I got it. Oh, you can do it. You can do it. You got the sin. You got the sin. You got the sin. You got the sin. I need it pilt to get there down. I needed Pilts to get there down.

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