Major revisions to the Ice Age history of man will have to be made due to the discovery that the scientist responsible for most of the work was a long running fraud. Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten had been systematically misrepresenting the ages of relics for years, sometimes by as much as a factor of ten. I would like to make a few points about this:
1. I agree that this is a black eye for the study of anthropology. What should be kept in mind, however, is that the fraud was discovered through the process of outside verification. While Professor von Zieten managed to ride his credibility for far too long, that credibility still could not hold out over the long term.
2. Did this guy have grad students working for him? I wonder what they were thinking through all of this.
3. I found this article through Scrappleface. The last shot about this creating a weakness in the theory of man's evolution was uncalled for. The current theories regarding modern humans and neanderthals have them as evolutionary cousins, not of the same line but different branches of the evolution "tree".
4. This is a serious blow to the world created by Jean Auel. Of course, those books made no bones about being fiction.
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