The “Protsch von Zieten” affair.

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

This one has already been making the round on another list. Certainly not as good as the recent Japanese Fujimura affair, this story does, nonetheless, seem “juicy” enough to make it fair game, from a media coverage point-of-view. This, however, should not be taken, by the journalists and their editors, as a licence to cross the fine line between over-dramatization and plain misrepresentation.

Regardless of what Herr Doktor Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten may have done, of his Prussian military ancestry, of his cigars and “flamboyant” lifestyle, and of his alleged trade in chimps skulls, it certainly does not justify coming up with statements as inane as the ones found in the title of the piece itself and in its first paragraph:

What was considered a major piece of evidence showing that the Neanderthals once lived in northern Europe has fallen by the wayside. We are having to rewrite prehistory [quoting C. Stringer.

… and by words like “misdating” and “dating disaster” found elsewhere in the text.

It is true that science marches on and that – in the present context and thanks to ongoing advances in the field of radiocarbon dating – a number of palaeoanthropological specimens are being redated. This leads, in a number of instances to the “rejuvenation” of specimens and the corollary appropriate scientific disposal of the dead one, as it were. But to use such perfectly normal occurrences in order to come up with a headline that questions the presence of Neanderthals in Northern Europe during MP times, is nothing but a demonstration of dismal ignorance on the part of the writer(s).

True, “a major piece of evidence has fallen by the wayside”. But, as alluded to earlier, such an occurrence is rather normal in the field of palaeoanthropology, and is to be expected, especially when one takes into account the immense progress that has been made, since the 60s and 70s, with regards to radiocarbon dating techniques and, particularly in the present case, the better scientific understanding of what is being dated.

This said I should add that I am more concerned, here, about the statement attributed to Chris Stringer, and in which he appears to be willing to raise to the level of a major palaeoanthropological shakedown what is, after all, just another research anecdote or blip that will require no more than a slight change in the distribution maps of  known European Neanderthal remains.  In fact, I like to believe that he was misquoted and I whish the same on the Oxford fellows who allegedly talked about a “dating disater”. As for "misdating", well, just read a dictionary definition of what "mis-" is supposed to do to a word.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

Neanderthal Man 'never walked in northern Europe'
By Tony Paterson in Berlin

NEWS.telegraph.co.uk (Filed: 22/08/2004)

Historians of the Stone Age fear that they will have to rip up their theories about Neanderthal Man after doubt has been cast on the carbon dating of skeletons by a leading German anthropologist.

Work by the flamboyant Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten showed that Neanderthal Man existed in northern Europe. Calculations on skeletal remains found at Hahnofersand, near Hamburg, stated they were 36,000 years old.

Yet recent research at Oxford University's carbon-dating laboratory has suggested that they date back a mere 7,500 years. By that time, Homo sapiens was already well-established and the Neanderthals were extinct.

Chris Stringer, a Stone Age specialist and head of human origins at London's Natural History Museum, said: "What was considered a major piece of evidence showing that the Neanderthals once lived in northern Europe has fallen by the wayside. We are having to rewrite prehistory."

But Prof von Zieten, 65, the descendant of a famous 18th-century Prussian general, rejected the evidence from Oxford University last week.

"The new data from Oxford is all wrong," he told Germany's Der Spiegel. He said that the university's scientists had failed to remove shellac preservative from the specimens. As a result, the remains appeared to be much younger.

"Unfortunately, archaeologists and most anthropologists do not study physics or chemistry and therefore they cannot make judgments on carbon dating," he said. "Wrong measurements are made in all laboratories."

Prof von Zieten, who has a penchant for large Havana cigars and Porsche cars, has been considered an expert in carbon-dating techniques since the 1970s. He has tested hundreds of prehistoric bone finds from Europe and Africa over the past 30 years.

Now, however, important remains that Oxford scientists no longer believe are prehistoric include the female "Bischof-Speyer" skeleton, found near the south-west German town of Speyer with unusually good teeth. Their evidence suggests that she is 3,300 years old, not 21,300.

Another apparent misdating involved an allegedly prehistoric skull discovered near Paderborn in 1976 and considered the oldest human remain ever found in the region. Prof von Zieten dated the skull at 27,400 years old. The latest research, however, indicates that it belonged to an elderly man who died around 1750.

Germany's Herne anthropological museum, which owns the Paderborn skull, was so disturbed by the findings that it did its own tests. "We had the skull cut open and it still smelt," the museum's director, Barbara Ruschoff-Thale, said last week. "We are naturally very disappointed."

Concern about Prof von Zieten's carbon-dating estimates arose last year following a routine investigation of German prehistoric remains by the German and British anthropologists Thomas Terberger and Martin Street.

"We had decided to subject many of these finds to modern techniques to check their authenticity so we sent them to Oxford for testing," Mr Street told The Sunday Telegraph. "It was a routine examination and in no way an attempt to discredit Prof von Zieten."

In their report, though, both anthropologists described this as a "dating disaster".

The scandal engulfing Prof von Zieten goes further. Police are investigating allegations that he tried to sell 280 chimpanzee skulls from his university to buyers in America for $70,000 (£38,000).

Prof von Zieten denies the claims, saying that he legitimately obtained the skulls from a Heidelberg ethnologist in 1975. Frankfurt university last month suspended the professor from his post in the anthropology department while it runs its own inquiry.

[hunasiensis]

All,

Stringer is wrong (if cited correctly); there still are Neanderthal finds in northern Germany:

Czarnetzki,  Alfred; Gaudzinski, Sabine; Pusch, C.M.
Hominid skull fragments from Late Pleistocene layers in Leine Valley (Sarstedt, District of Hildesheim, Germany)
Journal of Human Evolution,41,2,2001,133-140


Abstract
Three cranial fragments were recovered from coarse-grained deposits dug up by a suction dredge from gravel pits on the Leine river flats in the vicinity of Sarstedt (northwestern Germany). Also recovered were a number of artefacts which, upon careful inspection, could be assigned to the Middle Paleolithic. The geological pattern of the Leine Valley in this region suggests that these fragments were deposited in the lower terrace during a yet undetermined warm period––possibly Brörup or Odderade––during the Weichsel glaciation. However, attribution to the Eemian period or a Saale interstadial cannot be ruled out. The features of the Sarstedt (Sst) I infant temporal are known from Neanderthals (e.g., Weimar-Ehringsdorf, Engis, Krapina 1) and can be seen in specimens from the European late- Homo erectus group as well. Subadult individuals do not always exhibit full development of features characteristic for adults and––to some extent––anticipate the succeeding developmental stage (i.e., neoteny). The Neanderthal autapomorphies characterizing the fragments of the occipital and the parietal are certainly consistent with assigning both unequivocally to the species H. neanderthalensis. The presence of Middle Paleolithic artefacts recovered from the same deposits are commensurate with the presence of Neanderthals. However, there is no clear contextual association of any archaeological and fossil human material. Future DNA research will hopefully add up to the established morphological picture.

Arne

[Daryl Habel]

All,

Stringer is wrong (if cited correctly); there still are Neanderthal finds in northern Germany:

Czarnetzki,  Alfred; Gaudzinski, Sabine; Pusch, C.M.
Hominid skull fragments from Late Pleistocene layers in Leine Valley (Sarstedt, District of Hildesheim, Germany)
Journal of Human Evolution,41,2,2001,133-140

Arne

Arne, you're quite right.  Also, Salzgitter-Lebenstedt:

Hublin, J.-J. (1984). The fossil man from Salzgitter-Lebenstedt (FRG) and its place in human evolution during the Pleistocene in Europe.  Zietschrift f. Morph. und Anthrop. 75:45-56.

Let's see what the Stringer quote amounts to:

Chris Stringer, a Stone Age specialist and head of human origins at London's Natural History Museum, said: "What was considered a major piece of evidence showing that the Neanderthals once lived in northern Europe has fallen by the wayside. We are having to rewrite prehistory."

The first sentence is basically correct.  The second sentence would seem to indicate that  Professor Stringer needs to rewrite _his_ prehistory, anyway.  But then, this was reported in the UK media, so maybe he was misquoted, and besides, if there's one thing I've learned from reading terrible science news reports in the USA media, it's that the UK media is even worse.  Who ever concluded Hahnofersand was a Neanderthal (as this story implies), anyway?  It was my understanding that the best PA consensus could not firmly assign it to a taxon either H.s.s. or H.s.n.  The UK story didn't mention this issue.

But "must rewrite history" makes good headline fluff.

And thanks, Jacques,  for the Protsch update. There's still no word on the "missing" Kelsterbach cranium?

Dar

[trehinp]

And what about Neandertalian artefacts discovered in Susiloula cave, in the south of Finland ?

Weren't these evidence of Neanderthalians going pretty high up in the North?

See the Topic: Going into the "cold" in the “Prehistory” board.


Paul

[lagarvelho]

All:

I hope Stringer was misquoted here.  While I disagree with Stringer's assessment of Neandertals and their capabilities, and their possible contributions to later European gene pools, I find it hard to believe that he would make such a *stupid* statement as the newspaper makes out.  Unless he's ignoring all the sites everyone else has come up with?  I don't know.  Or maybe Stringer is desperate?  Or the newspaper is desperate for headlines? 
Anne G

[Daryl Habel]

All:

I hope Stringer was misquoted here.  While I disagree with Stringer's assessment of Neandertals and their capabilities, and their possible contributions to later European gene pools, I find it hard to believe that he would make such a *stupid* statement as the newspaper makes out.  Unless he's ignoring all the sites everyone else has come up with?  I don't know.  Or maybe Stringer is desperate?  Or the newspaper is desperate for headlines?  
Anne G

Anne,

I'd rather think the news reporter garbled together Stringer's quote from much more that passed between them in the interview.  As was pointed out by one of the posters (also a "silent" member of this group) in your Yahoo group this morning, if Stringer's last sentence: "...We are having to rewrite prehistory..." actually referred to post-Neanderthal prehistory, given that the Paderborn specimens (dated originally by Protsch to c. 21 ka) and others of the post-Neanderthal era now appear to have later dates, then some prehistory will have to be rewritten.  Obviously that's not the context implied by the way the reporter quoted Stringer, but I'd give him the benefit of the doubt.

Dar

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Dar,

Just a bit of information that may help throw some light on the innuendos concerning Protsch von Zieten  and on Chris Stringer alleged statement.

Only six dates, from three different sites, presumably obtained by and/or through Protsch von Zieten and concerning the Palaeolithic, are reported in the large database(s) that can be found here … and … here.

They were all obtained from human remains discovered at Hafnofersand,  Paderborn, and Kelsterbach.

All reported determinations are C14 dates obtained from what is described as “residual collagen”, and where carried out by two different labs. The initial (uncorrected) results read as follows:

Hafnofersand
Fra-24: 36 300 +/- 600
UCLA-2363: 33 200 +/- 2990

Paderborn
Fra-15: 27 400 +/- 600
UCLA-236: 25 650 +/- 1300

Kelsterbach
Fra-5: 31 200 +/- 600
UCLA-2361: 29 000 +/- 530

More details (including sample provenience, nature of the human remains, corrected readings, pertinent references, etc.) on these determinations can be found by clicking HERE. For downloading the MS Excel database, look for “téléchargement”/“télécharger" and then, do a search for Protsch.

Jacques

PS   If I can find time, I’ll try to come up with a few more comments concerning some aspects of this story and, perhaps, even say something about some of our "silent" partners! Why not?

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

Also for the record and for statistics’ sake: an example of the expectable feeding frenzy. End of story?

History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud.

Flamboyant anthropologist falsified dating of key discoveries

Luke Harding in Berlin
The Guardian  -- Saturday February 19, 2005

It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals.

This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull.

However, the professor's 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other "stone age" relics.

Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous "falsehoods and manipulations". According to experts, his deceptions may mean an entire tranche of the history of man's development will have to be rewritten.

"Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago," said Thomas Terberger, the archaeologist who discovered the hoax. "Prof Protsch's work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had co-existed, and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish."

The scandal only came to light when Prof Protsch was caught trying to sell his department's entire chimpanzee skull collection to the United States.

An inquiry later established that he had also passed off fake fossils as real ones and had plagiarised other scientists' work.

His discovery appeared to show that Neanderthals had spread much further north than was previously known.

But his university inquiry was told that a crucial Hamburg skull fragment, which was believed to have come from the world's oldest German, a Neanderthal known as Hahnhöfersand Man, was actually a mere 7,500 years old, according to Oxford University's radiocarbon dating unit. The unit established that other skulls had been wrongly dated too.

Another of the professor's sensational finds, "Binshof-Speyer" woman, lived in 1,300 BC and not 21,300 years ago, as he had claimed, while "Paderborn-Sande man" (dated at 27,400 BC) only died a couple of hundred years ago, in 1750.

"It's deeply embarrassing. Of course the university feels very bad about this," Professor Ulrich Brandt, who led the investigation into Prof Protsch's activities, said yesterday. "Prof Protsch refused to meet us. But we had 10 sittings with 12 witnesses.

"Their stories about him were increasingly bizarre. After a while it was hard to take it seriously. You had to laugh. It was just unbelievable. At the end of the day what he did was incredible."

During their investigation, the university discovered that Prof Protsch, 65, a flamboyant figure with a fondness for gold watches, Porsches and Cuban cigars, was unable to work his own carbon-dating machine.

Instead, after returning from Germany to America, where he did his doctorate, and taking up a professorship, he had simply made things up.

In one case he had claimed that a 50 million-year-old "half-ape" called Adapis had been found in Switzerland, an archaeological sensation. In reality, the ape had been dug up in France, where several other examples had already been found.

Prof Terberger said that he grew suspicious about the professor's work in 2001 after sending off the skull fragment to Oxford for tests.

Further tests revealed that all of the skulls dated by Prof Protsch were in reality far younger than he had claimed, prompting Prof Terberger and a British colleague, Martin Street, to write a scientific paper last year.

At the same time, German police began investigating the professor for fraud, following allegations that he had tried to sell the university's 278 chimpanzee skulls for $70,000 to a US dealer.

Why, though, had he done it?

"If you find a skull that's more than 30,000 years old it's a sensation. If you find three of them people notice you. It's good for your career," Prof Terberger said. "At the end of the day it was about ambition."

Other details of the professor's life also appeared to crumble under scrutiny. Before he disappeared from the university's campus last year, Prof Protsch told his students he had examined Hitler's and Eva Braun's bones.

He also boasted of having flats in New York, Florida and California, where, he claimed, he hung out with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steffi Graf. Even the professor's aristocratic title, "von Zieten", appears to be bogus.

Far from being the descendant of a dashing general in the hussars, the professor was the son of a Nazi MP, Wilhelm Protsch, Der Spiegel magazine revealed last October.

The university is investigating how thousands of documents lodged in the anthropology department relating to the Nazis' gruesome scientific experiments in the 1930s were mysteriously shredded, allegedly under the professor's instructions.

They also discovered that some of the 12,000 skeletons stored in the department's "bone cellar" were missing their heads, apparently sold to friends of the professor in the US and sympathetic dentists.

Yesterday the university admitted that it should have discovered the professor's fabrications far earlier. But it pointed out that, like all public servants in Germany, the high-profile anthropologist was virtually impossible to sack, and had also proved difficult to pin down.

"He was perfect at being evasive," Prof Brandt said yesterday. "He would switch from saying 'it isn't really clear' to giving diffuse statements.

"I'm not a psychologist so I can't say why he did it. But my guess is that when he came back from the States 30 years ago he realised he wasn't up to the job of being a professor. So he started inventing things. It rapidly became a habit.'

Yesterday the professor, who lives in Mainz with his wife Angelina, didn't respond to emails from the Guardian asking him to comment on the affair. But in earlier remarks to Der Spiegel he insisted that he was the victim of an "intrigue".

"All the disputed fossils are my personal property," he told the magazine.

Missing links and planted stone age finds

Piltdown Man
The most infamous of all scientific frauds was unearthed in 1912 in a Sussex gravel pit. With its huge human-like braincase and ape-like jaw, the Piltdown Man "fossil" was named Eoanthropus dawsoni after Charles Dawson, the solicitor and amateur archaeologist who discovered it. For 40 years Piltdown Man was heralded as the missing link between humans and their primate ancestors. But in 1953 scientists concluded it was a forgery. Radiocarbon dating showed the human skull was just 600 years old, while the jawbone was that of an orang-utan. The entire package of fossil fragments found at Piltdown - which included a prehistoric cricket bat - had been planted.

The devil's archaeologist
Japanese archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura was so prolific at uncovering prehistoric artefacts he earned the nickname "God's hands". At site after site, Fujimura discovered stoneware and relics that pushed back the limits of Japan's known history. The researcher and his stone age finds drew international attention and rewrote text books. In November 2000 the spell was broken when a newspaper printed pictures of Fujimura digging holes and burying objects that he later dug up and announced as major finds. "I was tempted by the devil. I don't know how I can apologise for what I did," he said.

Piltdown Turkey
The supposed fossil of Archaeoraptor, which was to become known as the "Piltdown turkey", came to light in 1999 when National Geographic magazine published an account of its discovery. It seemed to show another missing link - this time between birds and dinosaurs. Archaeoraptor appeared to be the remains of a large feathered bird with the tail of a dinosaur. The fossil was smuggled out of China and sold to a private collector in the US for £51,000. Experts were suspicious and closer examination showed the specimen to be a "composite" - two fossils stuck together with strong glue.
David Adam

[lagarvelho]

All:

If you go to the TalkOrigins site (HERE) you will discover that STringer apparently never made the excruciatingly stupid statement attributed to him by the "Beeb" and other news media.  While it's true he apparently used Hahnofersand as an exampe of early "moderns" with "archaic" features to point to their early appearance in Europe, he never attributed those features to Neandertals.  And it may be, though I can hardly credit this, that he really didn't know about Susiluola(I heard about it fairly recently myself).  But he should have known about Salzgitter-Lebenstedt.
Anne G

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Anne,

The URL you provided us with did not seem to be functional, to me, anyway. Assuming that you wanted to bring up is Jim Foley’s commentary (his Blog) on the most recent developments of the Protsch von Zieten affair, I have taken the liberty to make the appropriate change.

As for me, I view the unfoldind of this story as having reached the expectable “I-told-you-so” or "we-suspected/knew-it-all-along”  stage of development and, to tell you the truth, I don’t know what is more embarrassing, Protsch’s apparent, personal lack of professional ethics or that of all these “knew-it-all” who, rather belatedly, are now very eagerly coming out of their closets.

Jacques

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

I bring up the following “for the record”, and also to note that, in the present case, the scientific reporting of The Scientist compares rather well with what can be expected from the hyped up, sensationalistic press agencies’ releases we are used to. See, for example, the comments attributed to Terberger and to Foley.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

Faking it in Frankfurt

By Stephen Pincock

The Scientist  - Volume 19 - Issue 5 -12 - Mar. 14, 2005

When Frankfurt University said last month that anthropologist Reiner Protsch von Zieten had engaged in repeated scientific fraud for much of the past 30 years, the question naturally arose of how on earth he'd gotten away with it for so long. Protsch had deliberately misdated human fossil remains, plagiarized the work of others, and perpetrated various other falsehoods, a university commission found. He lacked the skills necessary to accurately carbon date fossil remains, but that didn't stop him from making such datings on numerous occasions and passing them off as genuine to other scientists.

His bogus data had not-insignificant repercussions in the field. "Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago," Thomas Terberger, an archaeologist who helped expose the fraud, told reporters last month. "Professor Protsch's work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Nean-derthals had co-existed, and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish."

The dating fraud came to light when Terberger and his colleague Martin Street tried to correlate Protsch's dating of some remains with their own archeological findings. The data didn't make sense, so they sent samples to a laboratory in Oxford, England for confirmation – only datings were tens of thousands of years wrong. Suddenly, "People started coming out of the woodwork, saying we always knew there was something wrong there," Street says.

So why hadn't someone put a stop to it earlier? The commission tried to address this question and mostly blamed the university for lacking the appropriate means of investigating and dealing with scientific misconduct. On the other hand, they added, Protsch's colleagues and the university management probably underestimated the extent and consequences of his actions. The university's president, Rudolf Steinberg, put it well: "A lot of people looked the other way," he told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Going beyond the university's laxness, there are perhaps things about fossil-based science that makes it harder to spot frauds. "You're dealing with little fragments that potentially have great significance," says Julian Thomas, an archaeologist from the University of Manchester and vice president of the UK's Royal Anthropological Institute. "Which makes it very difficult to duplicate results, or to prove them false."

"Historical science will always have a one-off element to it," says Robert Foley, director of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge University. "That uniqueness will always be a problem."

Certainly Terberger and Street initially found it hard to get their hands on the bone fragments that would allow them to replicate Protsch's dating. Universities and museums where the bones were stored were loath to have chunks of their precious fragments removed for testing – until the investigators explained that with modern methods, they'd need less than a gram to do the dating.

Still, Terberger and Street were surprised that no one had already done that confirmatory testing. "It is really difficult to understand how it took so long to come out," Terberger says. "We expected that the few fossils available would have been well studied and reliable. We were surprised that there was nothing done in this case. "

Perhaps the field missed warning signals because Protsch's findings matched well with existing theories about human history. "It may be the case that the community believed in these results readily because they fitted into an expected picture," Terberger suggests.

It wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened. The infamous Piltdown Man, "unearthed" in 1912 and heralded for 40 years as the missing link was only revealed as a fake in 1953. "One of the reasons that Piltdown man was so successful was that it fitted people's expectations of what they thought early humans would look like," says Foley.