Posted on Saturday 26 February 2005

In the comments to my last post, Tatyana alerted me to the storm currently raging in European paleoanthropology over frauds perpetrated over a thirty year period by Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten of Frankfurt University. Until his unmasking for consistently falsifying the results of carbon dating tests (in one particularly grievous case dating a skull at 27,400 years old when it was actually only 250 years old "and still smelt") Protsch was considered an authority in the early human migration in Europe. He was only discovered when one of the skulls he had dated was checked by another lab.

Apart from fraud, Protsch activities also included selling off University specimens to private collectors in the US and shredding sensitive papers relating to the Nazi period.

According to John Hawks, as a consequence of Protsch's nefarious activities, there is now no longer any evidence that modern humans lived in Western and Central Europe any earlier than 25,000 years ago. He also mentions that even before this scandal broke, within his field Protsch was already notorious to the extent that his name had become a verb:

We used to have a saying for skulls that had been destroyed in a futile process to date them: they were "Protsched." In other words, Protsch has had a reputation as a bit of a screw-up in paleoanthropology for a long time. How he came to have a relatively powerful position at a German university is part of the legacy of problems in that system over the past thirty years or more. What is unfortunate is that he really did destroy some specimens and damage others, he really did hold back the progress of science in examining the population history of Northern Europe, and he has finally succeeded in giving paleoanthropology a very public shiner.