I Thought Indiana Jones Had Killed Them All

An article from the latest issue of Archaeology magazine reports on the odd goings-on surrounding Reiner Protsch von Zieten, a larger-than-life professor with a penchant for luxury cars and Cuban cigars.

Von Zeiten

"was forced to end his 30-year career as a carbon-dating specialist following a year-long investigation into his professional "indiscretions." Many of Protsch's colleagues had their suspicions about his work, and in 2001 Thomas Terberger of Greifswald University sent several fossil samples originally dated by Protsch to Oxford University's Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit for reanalysis. Hahnhöfersand Man, the "world's oldest German" at 36,300 years old, proved to be only 7,500 years old. Binshof-Speyer Woman, a 21,300-year-old specimen known for her remarkably well-preserved teeth, was just 3,090 years old. And Paderborn-Sande Man, dated by Protsch to 27,400 years ago, had died in the eighteenth century. Terberger published a paper on his findings with Martin Street of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, and the University of Frankfurt later launched an investigation. Protsch dismissed the new dates, blaming the results on the possibility that lab workers did not remove shellac from the samples before performing carbon-14 testing.

Then things really got weird. Investigative reports in the German magazine Der Spiegel last year first revealed that Reiner Protsch "von Zieten" had lied about his ties to Prussian aristocracy and was actually the son of a Nazi party member who fled to the United States after the war. Der Spiegel also made public allegations that Protsch was unable to operate his own carbon-dating machine, ordered the destruction of materials in the university archives associated with Nazi medical experiments, and attempted to sell off the anthropology department's chimpanzee skull collection to a U.S. collector for $70,000. Protsch told the magazine that many of the specimens up for sale were part of his personal collection."

Read the rest here.