Homo deceptus: Science's Dirty Little Secret
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1912, a fossil discovery shakes the scientific world. Piltdown Man is the elusive missing link between humans and their ape-like ancestors. Forty years later, a researcher at the Natural History Museum gets a chance to see the relic for himself and notices something isn't quite right.
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Transcript
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| 0:51.3 | In his office, under the great Gothic vaults of London's Natural History Museum, |
| 0:56.3 | Arthur Woodward was opening the mail, and found a note from his friend Charles Dawson, postmarked the previous day. Valentine's Day 1912. Woodward was the keeper |
| 1:06.2 | of the museum's geology department and a notable figure in British science. |
| 1:11.9 | Dawson, a country lawyer, was an amateur geologist with a growing reputation of his own. |
| 1:18.4 | His letter began with small talk, the latest news on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's new book idea. |
| 1:24.9 | Dawson knew Conan Doyle personally. |
| 1:30.3 | But then Dawson turned to more significant matters. Some workmen had been digging in the soils of Pilbdown, a few miles away from |
| 1:38.3 | Dawson's home on the south coast, and they'd found a fossilised fragment of a human skull. It might be something pretty special. |
| 1:48.1 | So would Arthur Woodward care to visit the site and take a look? He would. Over the months that |
| 1:56.2 | followed, Dawson and Woodward would supervise digs in the flint beds of Pilkdown, |
| 2:01.6 | piecing together bone fragments that would change our understanding of the world |
| 2:07.6 | and how humans took their place in it. |
... |
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