January 1, 2022 • 33 mins
This 2016 episode covers the Piltdown Man, which is one of the world's most infamous instances of scientific fraud. It derailed the study of evolution for decades. How exactly did scientists in 1912 fall so completely for a hoax?
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday and Happy New Year. The pill down Man
that's going to come up in one of our episodes
this week, so we thought we would pull out our
episode on that scientific fraud for Today's Saturday Classic. Our
first Unearthed episodes of the year are also coming in
just a bit, and we know we have listeners who
are eagerly awaiting them. This episode was originally a standalone
(00:24):
Unearthed episode, so we thought it might help tide folks
over until the next one's come out in a week
or so. This originally came out December, so enjoy and yes,
folks have already written into us about how to pronounce
the word zoologist. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class,
(00:44):
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tray, Steve Wilson and I'm Holly fry So.
The Pill down Man one of the world's most infamous
(01:04):
instances in scientific fraud, and in August of which is
this year, researchers published a paper in Royal Society Open
Science that concluded that it was the work of a
single hoaxer. So rather than rolling that into our Unearthed episodes,
which are just around the corner, we are doing an
(01:25):
entire unearthed episode just on this Uh. We're going to
talk about the pilt down man, how this hoax played out,
and what exactly was unearthed in this newly published paper
that inspired us to do this episode. Yeah. So that
we've gotten lots of requests for over the years. Yeah,
And for me, I've sort of had it on the
(01:47):
I'll get to that one day maybe list. And now
this is a time when I can be proud of
my procrastination because it enabled this cool thing to come out.
Well what what is? Uh? Eight. One of the things
that's intriguing to me is that I literally wrote this
on the list in August, right that it has I
have been planning to do this episode right now as
(02:09):
of August, and now it seems particularly relevant because it
is such a cautionary tale about not just uncritically observing
absorbing things that are announced as news. The whole time
I was working on this outline, I was like, this
(02:29):
is this feels like we just need a reminder. So
it makes sense of why the pilt Down hoax even
happened in the first place. We actually need to go
all the way back to Charles Darwin's publication of On
the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty nine. The full
title of that particular writing is on the Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of
(02:53):
favored races in the Struggle for Life, and this details
Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection, which are at
the foundation of evolutionary biology. When he published this book,
Darwin knew that one type of evidence that would really
support his theories was in relatively short supply, and that
is transitional fossils. These are fossils that have some traits
(03:16):
belonging to an older species and some belonging to a
more modern species. And transitional fossils are physical evidence of
an intermediary evolutionary step that demonstrates how life is changing
over time. One famous example of a transitional fossil is archaeopterics.
It's got some features that are more like a reptile
(03:39):
and others that are more like a bird, and today
it's viewed as a transitional fossil between non avian dinosaurs
and modern birds. Darwin knew that people would try to
discredit his work because at that point in history, not
that many transitional fossils had been found. Archaeoptrics, for example,
would not even be discuss or until eighteen sixty and
(04:01):
a lot of people at that point described it more
as the first bird rather than as a transitional fossil.
Of course, was after his book had already been published,
but Darwin actually anticipated actually these exact source of discoveries.
He explained in the Origin of Species that this lack
of evidence was probably due to an incomplete geological record
(04:25):
and not to an actual absence of the fossils that
would prove him. Right after Darwin's publication of On the
Origin of Species, there was a big focus on finding
more transitional fossils. In particular, people were hoping to find
the missing link, that single fossil that would conclusively demonstrate
a connection between ancient apes and modern humans. Today, we
(04:50):
know about lots of transitional fossils that detailed the progression
of all kinds of life. We have transitional fossils and
the evolutionary family trees of bird is and fish and
whales and horses and elephants and on and on. I
literally could just randomly name animals. That's the thirty minute
podcast episode is just Tracy saying animal works. It starts
(05:13):
to sound like the list of what they were eating
in Monty Python in the Holy Grail. So in terms
of human life, the idea of a single missing link
between ancient hominids and modern humans has really vanished under
the weight of a lot of individual transitional fossils that
add up to a human family tree that's full of
(05:34):
forks and branches. It is not a single linear, one
lane road that starts on ape and ends on human
connected with one magical quote missing link fossil. It's a
lot more complicated than that. Yeah, uh in n though
the missing link would have been an earth shattering, groundbreaking
(05:54):
and career making discovery, and that is what brings us
to pilt Down Man And February of nineteen twelve, Sir
Arthur Smith, Woodward, keeper of Geology at the British Museum
now called the Natural History Museum, got a letter from
Charles Dawson. In addition to being a solicitor, Dawson was
an amateur archaeologist, and he said he had found something
(06:15):
very exciting in some gravel beds and pilt Down, Sussex.
According to Dawson's account, he had noticed that a road
where he lived had been repaired with some odd flints,
and he traced the flints to their source, which turned
out to be a shallow gravel bed. While talking to
the workers there, he learned that they'd dug up something
they described as quote, like a coconut, and that they'd
(06:37):
thrown the pieces away. Dawson dug these fragments out of
the trash and found that they were part of a skull,
and over the next couple of years he'd gone back
to the pit and found several other pieces of skull
and jawbone before finally writing his letter to Smith Woodward.
Uh These skull fragments and jaw bone, he described, looked
(06:58):
somewhat human, but not ex actley, and his letter he
compared his discovery to a job bone that had been
discovered by a workman in a sand pit near Heidelberg, Germany,
in nineteen o seven, which had been named Homo heidelberg insis.
In Homo heidelberg insis had some features in common with
Homo erectus and others in common with modern humans or
(07:20):
Homo sapiens. Dawson said his discovery quote would quote rival
h heidelberg Insis in solidity. Dawson and Smith Woodward kept
quiet about this find at first, as they did some
more digging at the pit, and then they presented their
findings to a packed meeting of the Geological Society of
London on December eighteenth of nineteen twelve. They had an
(07:44):
ape like mandible or jaw bone. Two of its molars
were in place and had significant wear, and then there
were pieces of the brain case of a skull, which
seemed a lot more human than the mandible did. They
had also found some stone tools and fragments other non
human mammal fossils. Their coloring was comparable to that of
(08:05):
the gravel bed, and the conclusion was that these fossils
were at least five hundred thousand years old. Regarding their presentation, A. C. Hadn't,
writing in the journal Science, said quote Mr Dawson gave
an account of the finding of the specimens, the nature
and geographical and geological position of the gravel bed, and
Dr Smith Woodward described the remains in a most excellent manner.
(08:28):
Hadn't went on to write, quote, there could be no
doubt that this is a discovery of the greatest importance
and will give rise to much discussion. It is the
nearest approach we have yet reached to a missing link.
Probably few will deny that eoanthropist Dawson I is almost,
if not quite, as much human as Simian. I'm just
gonna say we are guessing on how that is pronounced,
(08:50):
because it seems like no one knows. So your aanthropist
Dawson I is what they've named their find, and that
means Aawson's dawn man, which is not self congratulatory at all.
I mean, I know, often scientific names of things are
named after the person who found or discovered or put
(09:12):
them in a taxonomy or whatever, but like Dawson's dawn man,
it just seems particularly back patty. Yeah. Uh. In nineteen
thirteen and nineteen fourteen, excavations continued at the gravel pit
where these first fossils had reportedly been recovered, and these
excavations unearthed some other evidence as well. There was a
(09:33):
canine tooth which had some features in common with ape
teeth and others in common with modern human teeth. They
also found a carved slab of bone that became known
as the cricket bat because it was roughly shaped like one.
Although Dawson did keep excavating, or at least saying he
was excavating the start of World War One meant that
it took place on a much smaller scale. He sent
(09:56):
a couple of postcards to Smith Woodward saying that he
had found some other fossil and other sites not far
away from that first fine but otherwise this was really
the end of the discoveries that pilt Down. And then
Dawson died in nineteen six A lot of scientists were
very excited about the pilt Down discoveries. Understandably, not only
(10:16):
were they put forth as the missing link that was
so important to evolutionary science at the time, but they
had also been found in Britain, which meant that the
British Isles had played an important part in the evolution
of all of humanity. The British Empire was at this
point the largest empire and human history, controlling almost one
quarter of all of the land on Earth. So the
(10:38):
idea that Britain had also been a keystone and human
evolution carried this mix of pride and of wealth. Obviously,
these people were quite ready to believe that Britain was
actually the birthplace of the human uh the human species.
So although it was not universally accepted. The pilt Down
Man played a major role in scientific thought about human
(11:01):
ever evolution for about the next forty years. More than
two fifty papers and monographs were published about it, and
it was cited in more than seventy publications. So it
was a pretty big deal. And it was also completely
made up. We're going to talk about after a sponsor break.
(11:25):
So after this announcement, many in the scientific community just
took Dawson and Smith Woodward's report to the Geological Society
of London at face value. The original pieces of these
specimens were locked away in storage for safekeeping, but casts
of them were made to share with researchers who wanted
to do further study. A lot of the early scientific
(11:46):
debate about these specimens didn't even consider the basic question
of whether they were authentic at all. Instead, it was
about things like whether Smith wouldwards interpretation of the skull
was correct. He had made a reconstruction of the skull
based on nine fragments that had initially been found. The
resulting skull had a capacity of about one thousand and
seventy six cubic centimeters to other anatomists and anthropologists disagreed
(12:11):
about whether Smith Wouldwards reconstruction was accurate. Sir Arthur Keith
of Scotland was on one side of this debate, and
Sir Grafton Elliott Smith of Australia was on the other.
Keith made his own reconstruction, which had a capacity of
about fifteen hundred cubic centimeters, or about the same as
a modern human skull, which prompted Smith Woodward to revise
his original reconstruction. Smith, on the other hand, came to
(12:35):
different conclusions, insisting that the original one thousand, seventy six
cubic centimeters was a lot more correct. These all had
to do with basically how the skull pieces were lined
up and what parts of the skull bones people thought
they were from. Like you think of your skull as
one solid piece, but it's actually several pieces connected by sutures.
(12:58):
So the question was whether these fine fragments of skull
were being correctly used to make a reconstruction, not whether
they were actually from a prehistoric human. There was also
a lot of talk about whether the canine tooth that
was found later was really part of the same mandible
or not, but there was no talk about whether any
of these pieces were actually genuine basically a big chunk
(13:21):
of the scientific literature surrounding this fine just was credulous
and uncritical from the start. And to be fair, many
of the technologies that we used to authenticate the age
of fossils today were not invented yet and they would
not be for more than twenty years. And also a
lot of the other fossil evidence today that we know
about that shows that hominids developed more humanlike jaws before
(13:45):
they developed developed bigger brain cases, those had not been
discovered yet either, so they didn't really have things to
compare them to. But even so, a lot of people
studying this fine simply took for granted from the beginning
that it was legitimate and they free their study from there.
Like the quote popularized by Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims like
(14:06):
I found the missing link in a gravel pit and
pilt down require extraordinary evidence, and that just was not
present here. This uncritical acceptance that the piltd Down man
was real was certainly not completely universal, especially as time
passed and people had more opportunities to study it. For example,
American zoologist Garrett Smith Miller published quote the Jaw of
(14:29):
the piltdown Man in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections in nineteen fifteen,
and which he concluded that the skull fragments did come
from a real human skull, but that the mandible came
from an extinct species of chimpanzee. Writing an American anthropologist,
William K. Gregory later published an analysis the molars which concluded, quote,
(14:49):
I believe that Mr. Miller is fully justified in holding
that the lower molars of the Piltdown jaw are those
of a chimpanzee and not of an extinct genus of hominity.
As more analysis emerged, there were also people who not
only questioned whether this work was quote scientifically justifiable, but
also warned that all this buzz and heightened expectations were dangerous.
(15:14):
George Grant mcgurdy had published a fairly credulous overview of
the pilt Down findings in nineteen fourteen, but by nineteen
sixteen he had not only revised his own opinions, but
was also alarmed at the state of scientific inquiry around
the pilt Down man. In the journal Science, mcgourty outlined
a range of doubts, criticisms, and skeptical inquiries that had
(15:35):
come in from the United States Britain, France, and Italy,
among other places, and he included this warning quote. Has
not this dazzling combination blinded the discoverers and indirectly some
of their colleagues, even at a distance, because of the
high pitch of expectancy to which recent discoveries in the
prehistoric field have not, without reason contributed. Under the circumstance,
(16:00):
such blindness, if only temporary, would be pardonable and comparatively harmless.
But serious danger lurks in the possibility of its persisting
long enough to become an obsession and a hindrance to
future progress in this particular field. And that's exactly what
was happening. In spite of the growing body of skepticism
(16:21):
and criticism, the pilt Down man became a widely accepted
part of a body of scientific literature. Things started to
unravel a little about a decade after the pilt Down discovery. First,
in ninety six, it was discovered that these gravel beds
where the fossils were found were not old enough to
contain five hundred thousand year old fossils whoops uh. Then,
(16:46):
starting in the nineteen thirties, paleontologists started finding other hominid
fossils in other parts of the world, and they seemed
to suggest an evolution of human life that was taking
place primarily in Africa and Asia. And as we noted
or Leier that the jaws were becoming more human link
before the brain cases and not the other way around,
(17:06):
it made less and less sense that some critical moment
in human evolution had happened on some tiny islands off
the northwest coast of Europe, following a totally different pattern
from what was being discovered elsewhere. But even so, a
sizeable chunk of the scientific community carried on believing that
the Piltdown specimens were genuine. A number of chemical and
(17:28):
isotopic dating methods started to be developed in the nineteen forties,
and in nineteen fifty three, Kenneth Oakley, then head of
anthropology at the British Museum, analyzed the pilt Down man's
skull fragments through florine dating, and the fragments were definitely
much newer than Dawson and Smith Woodward had said, and
they were way way too new to be the missing link.
(17:50):
The first test suggested that it was only fifty thousand
years old, not ten times that Following Oakley's discovery, the
British Museum publicly announced that the pilt Down Man was
a fraud, and these floorine tests definitely were not perfect.
They showed that all the skull pieces were the same age,
whereas later analysis would show that in fact they were not,
(18:14):
and later on more refined dating methods would also determine
that the pieces were only about six hundred years old,
certainly not fifty thousand. But in spite of those shortcomings,
they were definite proof that the pilt Down Man was
not a real hominid fossil. Yeah, as our ability to
test things got better over time because we learned, so
(18:35):
did our ability to point out just how fake these
things really were. Further analysis showed the mandible was really
from a juvenile orangutan, and that all these pieces that
had been purported to be a person's remains were actually
meticulously altered to look genuine. They had been stained to
(18:57):
match the material in the gravel beds, but the danes
were not made of substances that were local to the area.
The moehlers had also been artificially worn down to like
natural and then other mammal fossils that were found in
the same area were actual genuine fossils, but they were
not from species that actually lived in pilt Down. This
(19:18):
was not a case of somebody accidentally finding some human
bones near on orangutan bone for some reason and then
drawing of logical but incorrect conclusion. It was a deliberate hoax.
The good news was, with the pilt Down Man out
of the way, all of the other fossil evidence that
had been discovered in Africa and Asia in the decades
(19:40):
since then made a lot more sense. There was no
longer any lingering question of, well, if humanity's origins are
in this part of the world and evolving this way,
traveling in this pattern, what is this other fossil doing
way over here following a completely different model. This was
incredibly important in terms of the study of human evolution.
(20:02):
The pilt Down Man had become such a dominant presence
in the field that people were using its existence to
totally disregard legitimate fossil findings that strongly suggested human origins
in Africa. One of the foundations of scientific progress is
the ability to reassess your conclusions when you're faced with
new compelling evidence. But the pilt Down man was such
(20:25):
a juggernaut that people were disregarding that new evidence instead.
This was probably complicated by a conscious or unconscious reluctance
among at least some scientists to believe that modern humanity
rose in Africa, not in Britain. But the bad news
was that a lot of the world had fallen for
(20:46):
this hoax. It had impeded progress and perpetuated inaccurate information
for decades. On top of that, the revelation that it
wasn't real eroded the general public's belief in science. In
the words of Earnest A. Houghton of Harvard, writing an
American Anthropologists in ninety four, quote, what really worries me
(21:06):
is the revelation to a lady that is often hostile
to biological science, of calculated dishonesty on the part of
someone intimately concerned with a discovery of supposedly great importance
to the history of man. It is as shocking is
the proof that men in high places of our own
government have betrayed their country. Already, the press is flooded
(21:27):
with accusations by anti evolutionists that all of the other
evidence of man's origin from an ape like ancestry has
been deliberately faked by unscrupulous scientists. The fact that the
pilt Down fraud is possibly and even probably unique will
be very difficult for the public to accept. Before you
get too attached to the wise words of Ernest D.
(21:48):
Houghton here, I mean they really touched me. I feel
like they are applicable even still today. Uh. He also
did a lot of work combining race in criminology that
is influenced by the eugenics movement, and the lot of
that work was pretty definitely racist. So as much as
I love these words that he has to say about
(22:11):
how damaging it was for this to be revealed as
a fraud, there are other factors of his work. So
this is not a h an endorsement of him as
a scientist by us as podcasters who are not scientists. Uh. Yeah,
we can appreciate his insight in that moment without applauding
(22:31):
the rest of his body of work, for sure. Uh.
And with this finding now unquestionably shown to be fraudulent,
the focus then turned to piecing together who had done
it and why, And we're going to talk about that
after we first pause for a word from one of
our sponsors. In the years after the pilt Down Man
(22:55):
was shown to be a hoax, many many theories were
put forth out the potential culprits. A lot of the
attention has been on Dawson himself. After all, he was
the one who reported the findings of the first place,
and he was instrumental in the announcement and the initial investigations.
He may have hoped that such a profound discovery would
(23:15):
earn him admission into the Royal Society. A couple of
people who either knew or worked with Dawson were citing
sided as possibilities as well, including Samuel Woodhead and Pierre
Taliard de Charness. The latter was the one who actually
found that canine tooth. Even though he played such a
(23:36):
huge role, most people did not suspect Sir Arthur Smith Woodward,
believing him to have been an unwilling dupe or one
of the intended targets, since his reputation would have been
ruined if word had gotten out while he was still alive.
Sir Arthur Keith, whose paper on the skull reconstruction we
talked about earlier, was also suggested as a suspect. One
(23:56):
of the most famous suspects at least outside of the
world of scientists was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who knew
Dawson had an interest in this type of thing and
lived nearby. In ninety weird set of criteria to say
somebody is a suspect. I mean there were like, apparently
there were people who were like, he just wants to
destroy the evolutionists, right, that's so seriously circumstantial stuff that's
(24:22):
getting piece together. Flimsy circumstantial stuff. Uh. In nineteen sixty six,
a trunk found in storage in the British Museum was
discovered to contain a number of bones, including some that
had been stained in a similar manner to the Piltdown Man.
This trunk, marked with the initials M. A. C. H
apparently belonged to Martin A. C. Hinton, who also amassed
(24:45):
quite a collection of other bones, fossils and specimens. He
had been working as a volunteer at the museum in
nineteen twelve, and he became its keeper of Zoology in
nineteen thirty six. So naturally this brought up lots of
theory is about what was going on with what was
in this trunk. One of the theories was that these
bones were Hinton's trial run, and that he had done
(25:06):
this and then planted the fussiles in quotation marks to
get revenge on Smith Woodward, who had turned him down
when he tried to move his volunteer position back in
Nweve into a paid one. However, not all of this
quite adds up. I had a hard time pending down
exactly why this was later debunked as being who had
(25:29):
orchestrated this, But his time at the museum started after
the first discovery it pilt down, and he also had
expressed some skepticism at the fine being authentic. So another
school of thought is that the way these stained bones
that looked very similar to the pilt down specimens came
(25:50):
to be in his suitcase is that he was trying
to replicate the coloring it pilt down to prove that
it was a fraud. The paper, published in Royal Society
Open Science this year is an attempt to conclusively solve
this whole puzzle once and for all. The study involved
DNA analysis, dating analysis, spectroscopy, and high precision measurements of
(26:14):
the specimens, as well as studying three dimensional representations of them,
which is known as virtual anthropology. The DNA analysis confirmed
that teeth and the mandible were from an orangutan, probably
one born in Borneo, and that all of the orangutan
specimens that were part of this hoax probably came from
(26:35):
the same individual animal. Attempts to figure out whether there
are any missing orangutan specimens and local museum collections have
so far been unsuccessful, but it's also possible that somebody
could have bought an orangutan skull in an antiquarian shop.
A minimum of two, possibly three, different human skulls were
(26:56):
used in the production of the skull fragments, and while
tests to figure out whether they were all the same
age were inconclusive, they were all subjected to the same
m O to make them look like fossils that could
have come from that gravel bed, and there was dental
putty used to hold the teeth in place in the
(27:16):
mandible and to hold the gravel and pebble plugs in place,
with these materials being similar to the sediment that was
at the pilt Down dig site, that this discovery of
dentil putty was not new to this research that was
just published, like people knew about the dentil putty way before,
which like continues to make me question why in n
(27:40):
nobody was like this looks glued on, right. I mean,
maybe it was just some really really skillful dentil putty use,
but I don't know. That's one of the many things
that makes me go, how ready were you all to
believe that the sing link was from Britain? Because that's
(28:03):
the only way all this works, And I think the
answer is very ready, extremely ready. The team concludes that
given the consistencies in the m O and the limited
number of total specimens, the pilt down Man was probably
the work of one forger, most likely Charles Dawson, possibly
trying to further his own scientific career, which, given that
he died in nineteen sixteen at the age of fifty two,
(28:25):
just four years after the first announcement, clearly did not
quite work out for him. I had a whole conversation
about this episode with with my husband in the car
over the weekend about how, like, you know, a lot
of these different people have been put forth as potential suspects,
and a lot of them are are sort of dismissed,
and really all of these things are really circumstantial, Like
(28:48):
there's just there's even with all of this analysis, there's
still a lot of circumstantial evidence and guesswork and stuff
like that. But to me, the biggest strike against Charles
Dawson is the fact that he did die only four
years after this whole thing started, so any like many
of these other people who have been pointed out as
(29:08):
suspects lived for a whole lot longer, and and that
sort of raises the question of, Okay, what were they
after that never came to fruition Like Charles Dawson's relatively
early death makes it seem like whatever he was after
he didn't get and then he was never he wasn't
around to either further perpetuate it or be like, you
(29:31):
know what, I made that up? Like that's it's yet
another piece of circumstantial evidence, uh in in the Charles
Dawson column. So all of that, though, may raise the
question why spend so much time and effort just trying
to get the bottom of who did this? And so,
in the words of the papers authors quote, solving the
(29:54):
pilt down hoax is still important now. It stands as
a cautionary tale to scientists now to see what they
want to see, but to remain objective and to subject
even their own findings to the strongest scientific scrutiny. That's
a piltdown, man. I love that episode. Thank you, Tracy. Oh,
(30:15):
you're very welcome. I'm I'm gonna totally admit I had
a very good time reading the vastly incorrect papers published
in the early nineteen teens about this finding from people
who were flat out wrong, and at the same time
I was really bad about it, Like uh we I
(30:40):
have often when we've done episodes about old medical history
or something like that, read you know, the old papers
from the time that that were published, and these, you know,
people very confidently espousing stuff that's wrong, just really wrong,
and that it makes me a lot matter this time
because it was wrong and somebody did it on purpose
and it stood in the way of scientific progress for
(31:03):
decades makes me real mad. Yeah we uh you and
I talked about off Mike, the fact that forty years
is a really long time when you consider like that
is the length of a career for a scientist in
some cases, and so there were probably people who were
not willingly even party to this sort of blindness. But
(31:24):
we're proceeding along on a career path that was basically
complete blunder, and they wasted their time and their scientific minds,
and yeah, and wasted the greater whole of humanity's ability
to learn more about where we came from. And then
it's by total coincidence that between the day when I
(31:47):
wrote this on the calendar however many month months ago,
and now like now, there is such a renewed focus
on like the the putting out there of just fake,
wrong information that is demonstrably wrong and it being accepted
(32:07):
as fact. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
Since this episode is out of the archive, if you
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(32:28):
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(32:51):
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Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your face. Rich
Oos
Happy Saturday and Happy New Year. The pill down Man
that's going to come up in one of our episodes
this week, so we thought we would pull out our
episode on that scientific fraud for Today's Saturday Classic. Our
first Unearthed episodes of the year are also coming in
just a bit, and we know we have listeners who
are eagerly awaiting them. This episode was originally a standalone
(00:24):
Unearthed episode, so we thought it might help tide folks
over until the next one's come out in a week
or so. This originally came out December, so enjoy and yes,
folks have already written into us about how to pronounce
the word zoologist. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class,
(00:44):
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tray, Steve Wilson and I'm Holly fry So.
The Pill down Man one of the world's most infamous
(01:04):
instances in scientific fraud, and in August of which is
this year, researchers published a paper in Royal Society Open
Science that concluded that it was the work of a
single hoaxer. So rather than rolling that into our Unearthed episodes,
which are just around the corner, we are doing an
(01:25):
entire unearthed episode just on this Uh. We're going to
talk about the pilt down man, how this hoax played out,
and what exactly was unearthed in this newly published paper
that inspired us to do this episode. Yeah. So that
we've gotten lots of requests for over the years. Yeah,
And for me, I've sort of had it on the
(01:47):
I'll get to that one day maybe list. And now
this is a time when I can be proud of
my procrastination because it enabled this cool thing to come out.
Well what what is? Uh? Eight. One of the things
that's intriguing to me is that I literally wrote this
on the list in August, right that it has I
have been planning to do this episode right now as
(02:09):
of August, and now it seems particularly relevant because it
is such a cautionary tale about not just uncritically observing
absorbing things that are announced as news. The whole time
I was working on this outline, I was like, this
(02:29):
is this feels like we just need a reminder. So
it makes sense of why the pilt Down hoax even
happened in the first place. We actually need to go
all the way back to Charles Darwin's publication of On
the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty nine. The full
title of that particular writing is on the Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of
(02:53):
favored races in the Struggle for Life, and this details
Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection, which are at
the foundation of evolutionary biology. When he published this book,
Darwin knew that one type of evidence that would really
support his theories was in relatively short supply, and that
is transitional fossils. These are fossils that have some traits
(03:16):
belonging to an older species and some belonging to a
more modern species. And transitional fossils are physical evidence of
an intermediary evolutionary step that demonstrates how life is changing
over time. One famous example of a transitional fossil is archaeopterics.
It's got some features that are more like a reptile
(03:39):
and others that are more like a bird, and today
it's viewed as a transitional fossil between non avian dinosaurs
and modern birds. Darwin knew that people would try to
discredit his work because at that point in history, not
that many transitional fossils had been found. Archaeoptrics, for example,
would not even be discuss or until eighteen sixty and
(04:01):
a lot of people at that point described it more
as the first bird rather than as a transitional fossil.
Of course, was after his book had already been published,
but Darwin actually anticipated actually these exact source of discoveries.
He explained in the Origin of Species that this lack
of evidence was probably due to an incomplete geological record
(04:25):
and not to an actual absence of the fossils that
would prove him. Right after Darwin's publication of On the
Origin of Species, there was a big focus on finding
more transitional fossils. In particular, people were hoping to find
the missing link, that single fossil that would conclusively demonstrate
a connection between ancient apes and modern humans. Today, we
(04:50):
know about lots of transitional fossils that detailed the progression
of all kinds of life. We have transitional fossils and
the evolutionary family trees of bird is and fish and
whales and horses and elephants and on and on. I
literally could just randomly name animals. That's the thirty minute
podcast episode is just Tracy saying animal works. It starts
(05:13):
to sound like the list of what they were eating
in Monty Python in the Holy Grail. So in terms
of human life, the idea of a single missing link
between ancient hominids and modern humans has really vanished under
the weight of a lot of individual transitional fossils that
add up to a human family tree that's full of
(05:34):
forks and branches. It is not a single linear, one
lane road that starts on ape and ends on human
connected with one magical quote missing link fossil. It's a
lot more complicated than that. Yeah, uh in n though
the missing link would have been an earth shattering, groundbreaking
(05:54):
and career making discovery, and that is what brings us
to pilt Down Man And February of nineteen twelve, Sir
Arthur Smith, Woodward, keeper of Geology at the British Museum
now called the Natural History Museum, got a letter from
Charles Dawson. In addition to being a solicitor, Dawson was
an amateur archaeologist, and he said he had found something
(06:15):
very exciting in some gravel beds and pilt Down, Sussex.
According to Dawson's account, he had noticed that a road
where he lived had been repaired with some odd flints,
and he traced the flints to their source, which turned
out to be a shallow gravel bed. While talking to
the workers there, he learned that they'd dug up something
they described as quote, like a coconut, and that they'd
(06:37):
thrown the pieces away. Dawson dug these fragments out of
the trash and found that they were part of a skull,
and over the next couple of years he'd gone back
to the pit and found several other pieces of skull
and jawbone before finally writing his letter to Smith Woodward.
Uh These skull fragments and jaw bone, he described, looked
(06:58):
somewhat human, but not ex actley, and his letter he
compared his discovery to a job bone that had been
discovered by a workman in a sand pit near Heidelberg, Germany,
in nineteen o seven, which had been named Homo heidelberg insis.
In Homo heidelberg insis had some features in common with
Homo erectus and others in common with modern humans or
(07:20):
Homo sapiens. Dawson said his discovery quote would quote rival
h heidelberg Insis in solidity. Dawson and Smith Woodward kept
quiet about this find at first, as they did some
more digging at the pit, and then they presented their
findings to a packed meeting of the Geological Society of
London on December eighteenth of nineteen twelve. They had an
(07:44):
ape like mandible or jaw bone. Two of its molars
were in place and had significant wear, and then there
were pieces of the brain case of a skull, which
seemed a lot more human than the mandible did. They
had also found some stone tools and fragments other non
human mammal fossils. Their coloring was comparable to that of
(08:05):
the gravel bed, and the conclusion was that these fossils
were at least five hundred thousand years old. Regarding their presentation, A. C. Hadn't,
writing in the journal Science, said quote Mr Dawson gave
an account of the finding of the specimens, the nature
and geographical and geological position of the gravel bed, and
Dr Smith Woodward described the remains in a most excellent manner.
(08:28):
Hadn't went on to write, quote, there could be no
doubt that this is a discovery of the greatest importance
and will give rise to much discussion. It is the
nearest approach we have yet reached to a missing link.
Probably few will deny that eoanthropist Dawson I is almost,
if not quite, as much human as Simian. I'm just
gonna say we are guessing on how that is pronounced,
(08:50):
because it seems like no one knows. So your aanthropist
Dawson I is what they've named their find, and that
means Aawson's dawn man, which is not self congratulatory at all.
I mean, I know, often scientific names of things are
named after the person who found or discovered or put
(09:12):
them in a taxonomy or whatever, but like Dawson's dawn man,
it just seems particularly back patty. Yeah. Uh. In nineteen
thirteen and nineteen fourteen, excavations continued at the gravel pit
where these first fossils had reportedly been recovered, and these
excavations unearthed some other evidence as well. There was a
(09:33):
canine tooth which had some features in common with ape
teeth and others in common with modern human teeth. They
also found a carved slab of bone that became known
as the cricket bat because it was roughly shaped like one.
Although Dawson did keep excavating, or at least saying he
was excavating the start of World War One meant that
it took place on a much smaller scale. He sent
(09:56):
a couple of postcards to Smith Woodward saying that he
had found some other fossil and other sites not far
away from that first fine but otherwise this was really
the end of the discoveries that pilt Down. And then
Dawson died in nineteen six A lot of scientists were
very excited about the pilt Down discoveries. Understandably, not only
(10:16):
were they put forth as the missing link that was
so important to evolutionary science at the time, but they
had also been found in Britain, which meant that the
British Isles had played an important part in the evolution
of all of humanity. The British Empire was at this
point the largest empire and human history, controlling almost one
quarter of all of the land on Earth. So the
(10:38):
idea that Britain had also been a keystone and human
evolution carried this mix of pride and of wealth. Obviously,
these people were quite ready to believe that Britain was
actually the birthplace of the human uh the human species.
So although it was not universally accepted. The pilt Down
Man played a major role in scientific thought about human
(11:01):
ever evolution for about the next forty years. More than
two fifty papers and monographs were published about it, and
it was cited in more than seventy publications. So it
was a pretty big deal. And it was also completely
made up. We're going to talk about after a sponsor break.
(11:25):
So after this announcement, many in the scientific community just
took Dawson and Smith Woodward's report to the Geological Society
of London at face value. The original pieces of these
specimens were locked away in storage for safekeeping, but casts
of them were made to share with researchers who wanted
to do further study. A lot of the early scientific
(11:46):
debate about these specimens didn't even consider the basic question
of whether they were authentic at all. Instead, it was
about things like whether Smith wouldwards interpretation of the skull
was correct. He had made a reconstruction of the skull
based on nine fragments that had initially been found. The
resulting skull had a capacity of about one thousand and
seventy six cubic centimeters to other anatomists and anthropologists disagreed
(12:11):
about whether Smith Wouldwards reconstruction was accurate. Sir Arthur Keith
of Scotland was on one side of this debate, and
Sir Grafton Elliott Smith of Australia was on the other.
Keith made his own reconstruction, which had a capacity of
about fifteen hundred cubic centimeters, or about the same as
a modern human skull, which prompted Smith Woodward to revise
his original reconstruction. Smith, on the other hand, came to
(12:35):
different conclusions, insisting that the original one thousand, seventy six
cubic centimeters was a lot more correct. These all had
to do with basically how the skull pieces were lined
up and what parts of the skull bones people thought
they were from. Like you think of your skull as
one solid piece, but it's actually several pieces connected by sutures.
(12:58):
So the question was whether these fine fragments of skull
were being correctly used to make a reconstruction, not whether
they were actually from a prehistoric human. There was also
a lot of talk about whether the canine tooth that
was found later was really part of the same mandible
or not, but there was no talk about whether any
of these pieces were actually genuine basically a big chunk
(13:21):
of the scientific literature surrounding this fine just was credulous
and uncritical from the start. And to be fair, many
of the technologies that we used to authenticate the age
of fossils today were not invented yet and they would
not be for more than twenty years. And also a
lot of the other fossil evidence today that we know
about that shows that hominids developed more humanlike jaws before
(13:45):
they developed developed bigger brain cases, those had not been
discovered yet either, so they didn't really have things to
compare them to. But even so, a lot of people
studying this fine simply took for granted from the beginning
that it was legitimate and they free their study from there.
Like the quote popularized by Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims like
(14:06):
I found the missing link in a gravel pit and
pilt down require extraordinary evidence, and that just was not
present here. This uncritical acceptance that the piltd Down man
was real was certainly not completely universal, especially as time
passed and people had more opportunities to study it. For example,
American zoologist Garrett Smith Miller published quote the Jaw of
(14:29):
the piltdown Man in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections in nineteen fifteen,
and which he concluded that the skull fragments did come
from a real human skull, but that the mandible came
from an extinct species of chimpanzee. Writing an American anthropologist,
William K. Gregory later published an analysis the molars which concluded, quote,
(14:49):
I believe that Mr. Miller is fully justified in holding
that the lower molars of the Piltdown jaw are those
of a chimpanzee and not of an extinct genus of hominity.
As more analysis emerged, there were also people who not
only questioned whether this work was quote scientifically justifiable, but
also warned that all this buzz and heightened expectations were dangerous.
(15:14):
George Grant mcgurdy had published a fairly credulous overview of
the pilt Down findings in nineteen fourteen, but by nineteen
sixteen he had not only revised his own opinions, but
was also alarmed at the state of scientific inquiry around
the pilt Down man. In the journal Science, mcgourty outlined
a range of doubts, criticisms, and skeptical inquiries that had
(15:35):
come in from the United States Britain, France, and Italy,
among other places, and he included this warning quote. Has
not this dazzling combination blinded the discoverers and indirectly some
of their colleagues, even at a distance, because of the
high pitch of expectancy to which recent discoveries in the
prehistoric field have not, without reason contributed. Under the circumstance,
(16:00):
such blindness, if only temporary, would be pardonable and comparatively harmless.
But serious danger lurks in the possibility of its persisting
long enough to become an obsession and a hindrance to
future progress in this particular field. And that's exactly what
was happening. In spite of the growing body of skepticism
(16:21):
and criticism, the pilt Down man became a widely accepted
part of a body of scientific literature. Things started to
unravel a little about a decade after the pilt Down discovery. First,
in ninety six, it was discovered that these gravel beds
where the fossils were found were not old enough to
contain five hundred thousand year old fossils whoops uh. Then,
(16:46):
starting in the nineteen thirties, paleontologists started finding other hominid
fossils in other parts of the world, and they seemed
to suggest an evolution of human life that was taking
place primarily in Africa and Asia. And as we noted
or Leier that the jaws were becoming more human link
before the brain cases and not the other way around,
(17:06):
it made less and less sense that some critical moment
in human evolution had happened on some tiny islands off
the northwest coast of Europe, following a totally different pattern
from what was being discovered elsewhere. But even so, a
sizeable chunk of the scientific community carried on believing that
the Piltdown specimens were genuine. A number of chemical and
(17:28):
isotopic dating methods started to be developed in the nineteen forties,
and in nineteen fifty three, Kenneth Oakley, then head of
anthropology at the British Museum, analyzed the pilt Down man's
skull fragments through florine dating, and the fragments were definitely
much newer than Dawson and Smith Woodward had said, and
they were way way too new to be the missing link.
(17:50):
The first test suggested that it was only fifty thousand
years old, not ten times that Following Oakley's discovery, the
British Museum publicly announced that the pilt Down Man was
a fraud, and these floorine tests definitely were not perfect.
They showed that all the skull pieces were the same age,
whereas later analysis would show that in fact they were not,
(18:14):
and later on more refined dating methods would also determine
that the pieces were only about six hundred years old,
certainly not fifty thousand. But in spite of those shortcomings,
they were definite proof that the pilt Down Man was
not a real hominid fossil. Yeah, as our ability to
test things got better over time because we learned, so
(18:35):
did our ability to point out just how fake these
things really were. Further analysis showed the mandible was really
from a juvenile orangutan, and that all these pieces that
had been purported to be a person's remains were actually
meticulously altered to look genuine. They had been stained to
(18:57):
match the material in the gravel beds, but the danes
were not made of substances that were local to the area.
The moehlers had also been artificially worn down to like
natural and then other mammal fossils that were found in
the same area were actual genuine fossils, but they were
not from species that actually lived in pilt Down. This
(19:18):
was not a case of somebody accidentally finding some human
bones near on orangutan bone for some reason and then
drawing of logical but incorrect conclusion. It was a deliberate hoax.
The good news was, with the pilt Down Man out
of the way, all of the other fossil evidence that
had been discovered in Africa and Asia in the decades
(19:40):
since then made a lot more sense. There was no
longer any lingering question of, well, if humanity's origins are
in this part of the world and evolving this way,
traveling in this pattern, what is this other fossil doing
way over here following a completely different model. This was
incredibly important in terms of the study of human evolution.
(20:02):
The pilt Down Man had become such a dominant presence
in the field that people were using its existence to
totally disregard legitimate fossil findings that strongly suggested human origins
in Africa. One of the foundations of scientific progress is
the ability to reassess your conclusions when you're faced with
new compelling evidence. But the pilt Down man was such
(20:25):
a juggernaut that people were disregarding that new evidence instead.
This was probably complicated by a conscious or unconscious reluctance
among at least some scientists to believe that modern humanity
rose in Africa, not in Britain. But the bad news
was that a lot of the world had fallen for
(20:46):
this hoax. It had impeded progress and perpetuated inaccurate information
for decades. On top of that, the revelation that it
wasn't real eroded the general public's belief in science. In
the words of Earnest A. Houghton of Harvard, writing an
American Anthropologists in ninety four, quote, what really worries me
(21:06):
is the revelation to a lady that is often hostile
to biological science, of calculated dishonesty on the part of
someone intimately concerned with a discovery of supposedly great importance
to the history of man. It is as shocking is
the proof that men in high places of our own
government have betrayed their country. Already, the press is flooded
(21:27):
with accusations by anti evolutionists that all of the other
evidence of man's origin from an ape like ancestry has
been deliberately faked by unscrupulous scientists. The fact that the
pilt Down fraud is possibly and even probably unique will
be very difficult for the public to accept. Before you
get too attached to the wise words of Ernest D.
(21:48):
Houghton here, I mean they really touched me. I feel
like they are applicable even still today. Uh. He also
did a lot of work combining race in criminology that
is influenced by the eugenics movement, and the lot of
that work was pretty definitely racist. So as much as
I love these words that he has to say about
(22:11):
how damaging it was for this to be revealed as
a fraud, there are other factors of his work. So
this is not a h an endorsement of him as
a scientist by us as podcasters who are not scientists. Uh. Yeah,
we can appreciate his insight in that moment without applauding
(22:31):
the rest of his body of work, for sure. Uh.
And with this finding now unquestionably shown to be fraudulent,
the focus then turned to piecing together who had done
it and why, And we're going to talk about that
after we first pause for a word from one of
our sponsors. In the years after the pilt Down Man
(22:55):
was shown to be a hoax, many many theories were
put forth out the potential culprits. A lot of the
attention has been on Dawson himself. After all, he was
the one who reported the findings of the first place,
and he was instrumental in the announcement and the initial investigations.
He may have hoped that such a profound discovery would
(23:15):
earn him admission into the Royal Society. A couple of
people who either knew or worked with Dawson were citing
sided as possibilities as well, including Samuel Woodhead and Pierre
Taliard de Charness. The latter was the one who actually
found that canine tooth. Even though he played such a
(23:36):
huge role, most people did not suspect Sir Arthur Smith Woodward,
believing him to have been an unwilling dupe or one
of the intended targets, since his reputation would have been
ruined if word had gotten out while he was still alive.
Sir Arthur Keith, whose paper on the skull reconstruction we
talked about earlier, was also suggested as a suspect. One
(23:56):
of the most famous suspects at least outside of the
world of scientists was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who knew
Dawson had an interest in this type of thing and
lived nearby. In ninety weird set of criteria to say
somebody is a suspect. I mean there were like, apparently
there were people who were like, he just wants to
destroy the evolutionists, right, that's so seriously circumstantial stuff that's
(24:22):
getting piece together. Flimsy circumstantial stuff. Uh. In nineteen sixty six,
a trunk found in storage in the British Museum was
discovered to contain a number of bones, including some that
had been stained in a similar manner to the Piltdown Man.
This trunk, marked with the initials M. A. C. H
apparently belonged to Martin A. C. Hinton, who also amassed
(24:45):
quite a collection of other bones, fossils and specimens. He
had been working as a volunteer at the museum in
nineteen twelve, and he became its keeper of Zoology in
nineteen thirty six. So naturally this brought up lots of
theory is about what was going on with what was
in this trunk. One of the theories was that these
bones were Hinton's trial run, and that he had done
(25:06):
this and then planted the fussiles in quotation marks to
get revenge on Smith Woodward, who had turned him down
when he tried to move his volunteer position back in
Nweve into a paid one. However, not all of this
quite adds up. I had a hard time pending down
exactly why this was later debunked as being who had
(25:29):
orchestrated this, But his time at the museum started after
the first discovery it pilt down, and he also had
expressed some skepticism at the fine being authentic. So another
school of thought is that the way these stained bones
that looked very similar to the pilt down specimens came
(25:50):
to be in his suitcase is that he was trying
to replicate the coloring it pilt down to prove that
it was a fraud. The paper, published in Royal Society
Open Science this year is an attempt to conclusively solve
this whole puzzle once and for all. The study involved
DNA analysis, dating analysis, spectroscopy, and high precision measurements of
(26:14):
the specimens, as well as studying three dimensional representations of them,
which is known as virtual anthropology. The DNA analysis confirmed
that teeth and the mandible were from an orangutan, probably
one born in Borneo, and that all of the orangutan
specimens that were part of this hoax probably came from
(26:35):
the same individual animal. Attempts to figure out whether there
are any missing orangutan specimens and local museum collections have
so far been unsuccessful, but it's also possible that somebody
could have bought an orangutan skull in an antiquarian shop.
A minimum of two, possibly three, different human skulls were
(26:56):
used in the production of the skull fragments, and while
tests to figure out whether they were all the same
age were inconclusive, they were all subjected to the same
m O to make them look like fossils that could
have come from that gravel bed, and there was dental
putty used to hold the teeth in place in the
(27:16):
mandible and to hold the gravel and pebble plugs in place,
with these materials being similar to the sediment that was
at the pilt Down dig site, that this discovery of
dentil putty was not new to this research that was
just published, like people knew about the dentil putty way before,
which like continues to make me question why in n
(27:40):
nobody was like this looks glued on, right. I mean,
maybe it was just some really really skillful dentil putty use,
but I don't know. That's one of the many things
that makes me go, how ready were you all to
believe that the sing link was from Britain? Because that's
(28:03):
the only way all this works, And I think the
answer is very ready, extremely ready. The team concludes that
given the consistencies in the m O and the limited
number of total specimens, the pilt down Man was probably
the work of one forger, most likely Charles Dawson, possibly
trying to further his own scientific career, which, given that
he died in nineteen sixteen at the age of fifty two,
(28:25):
just four years after the first announcement, clearly did not
quite work out for him. I had a whole conversation
about this episode with with my husband in the car
over the weekend about how, like, you know, a lot
of these different people have been put forth as potential suspects,
and a lot of them are are sort of dismissed,
and really all of these things are really circumstantial, Like
(28:48):
there's just there's even with all of this analysis, there's
still a lot of circumstantial evidence and guesswork and stuff
like that. But to me, the biggest strike against Charles
Dawson is the fact that he did die only four
years after this whole thing started, so any like many
of these other people who have been pointed out as
(29:08):
suspects lived for a whole lot longer, and and that
sort of raises the question of, Okay, what were they
after that never came to fruition Like Charles Dawson's relatively
early death makes it seem like whatever he was after
he didn't get and then he was never he wasn't
around to either further perpetuate it or be like, you
(29:31):
know what, I made that up? Like that's it's yet
another piece of circumstantial evidence, uh in in the Charles
Dawson column. So all of that, though, may raise the
question why spend so much time and effort just trying
to get the bottom of who did this? And so,
in the words of the papers authors quote, solving the
(29:54):
pilt down hoax is still important now. It stands as
a cautionary tale to scientists now to see what they
want to see, but to remain objective and to subject
even their own findings to the strongest scientific scrutiny. That's
a piltdown, man. I love that episode. Thank you, Tracy. Oh,
(30:15):
you're very welcome. I'm I'm gonna totally admit I had
a very good time reading the vastly incorrect papers published
in the early nineteen teens about this finding from people
who were flat out wrong, and at the same time
I was really bad about it, Like uh we I
(30:40):
have often when we've done episodes about old medical history
or something like that, read you know, the old papers
from the time that that were published, and these, you know,
people very confidently espousing stuff that's wrong, just really wrong,
and that it makes me a lot matter this time
because it was wrong and somebody did it on purpose
and it stood in the way of scientific progress for
(31:03):
decades makes me real mad. Yeah we uh you and
I talked about off Mike, the fact that forty years
is a really long time when you consider like that
is the length of a career for a scientist in
some cases, and so there were probably people who were
not willingly even party to this sort of blindness. But
(31:24):
we're proceeding along on a career path that was basically
complete blunder, and they wasted their time and their scientific minds,
and yeah, and wasted the greater whole of humanity's ability
to learn more about where we came from. And then
it's by total coincidence that between the day when I
(31:47):
wrote this on the calendar however many month months ago,
and now like now, there is such a renewed focus
on like the the putting out there of just fake,
wrong information that is demonstrably wrong and it being accepted
(32:07):
as fact. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
Since this episode is out of the archive, if you
heard an email address or a Facebook U r L
or something similar over the course of the show, that
could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
(32:28):
Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health
stuff works email address no longer works, and you can
find us all over social media at missed in History
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class
(32:51):
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your face. Rich
Oos
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Tracy Wilson
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.