Raging Against the Machine: Thoughts on Technofear and Luddism

The modern era is a time of unfettered technological development, evolving at breakneck speeds. Alongside the development of modern technology is a fear for what harmful effects it may have on humanity and civilization. With the ubiquity of the Internet have come fears about cognitive decline. With the arrival of social media platforms have arisen concerns about isolation and loneliness and this technology’s contribution to the mental health crisis. Adding to existing worries about the enablement of plagiarism and misinformation, the advent of artificial intelligence has kicked our fears into overdrive, with chatbots writing students’ essays for them and machine learning programs generating forged videos that can fool the eyes and ears. Considering the longstanding notion in fiction that technology may spell the doom of mankind, that artificial intelligence will inevitably turn on its designers and machines will rise up to dominate their creators, it’s no surprise that a creeping dread colors our relationship with AI and the information and communication technology that permeates our culture. And there is longstanding historical precedent for such technofear. Most immediately, preceding concerns about screen time on our smartphones and laptops, there were fears that video games harmed kids. Today some see a causal relationship between social media and mass shootings, just as previously it was argued that such shootings were inspired by violent games. And just as today many are concerned that social media and constant Internet use result in poor school performance, alienation from friends and family, reduced social skills, and sedentary lifestyles, the exact same things were previously said about video games. Before video games, television fueled these concerns. We all remember being told that TV will rot our brains or harm our eyesight or turn us into couch potatoes. All the same things are said today about the Internet and social media. And before TV, it was radio, which critics feared was distracting children from their schoolwork and generally overstimulating them. But such technofear goes back much further. While we can’t know for certain, since some of the first stone tools were weapons, we might imagine that fear was a common reaction to the development of technology from the beginning. How could early humans not react at first in fear of the power to create and control fire? Throughout human history, there are plenty of examples of technological innovation being feared as some kind of sorcery. Think of the development of chemical sciences by alchemists seeking the Philosopher’s Stone. And long before the fear of computing technology came the very similar fear of printing technology made possible through the development of movable type. When automobiles were developed, it’s said that pedestrians shrank from the loud smoke-belching machines and shouted “Get a horse!” And telegraph systems, which have been called the “Victorian Internet,” were once destroyed by fearful mobs. Today, rampant reliance on technology is a labor concern, due to automation in the workplace, lack of transparency in online business models, and the potential for artificial intelligence to replace entertainment industry workers. In the past, such labor concerns about technology resulted in organized rebellion and violence of a kind never seen before, by the Luddites in England, but today the word Luddite is an epithet, hurled at any who express the slightest qualm about the potential or even the measurable harm of a technology. And all of these analogies, comparing critics of technology today to those in the past, tend to paint any concerns about the safety or potential harmful effects of modern technology as baseless, as the domain of backward thinkers and old fogies who just can’t handle change. So the question is, what does history really tell us about the rationality of such fears? Is the fear that modern technology may be lead to our demise reasonable or does entertaining such fears make one a reactionary technophobe who lacks foresight and a basic understanding of the modern world?

This is a topic I have wanted to explore for a while, but it’s very different from my typical topics, and it’s also one I’ve dreaded finally tackling for a number of reasons. I teach research, critical thinking, and writing at a few colleges in my area, and for several years I have used the topic of technology and its effects and controversies as a theme of my courses. In my first-year composition courses, specifically, I have students take a side in the debate about the potential cognitive effects of the Internet, and we follow that up with a further argument about the possible social and mental health effects of screen time. After that, students enter a research project period, choosing a topic of their own related to some controversial technology, with common topics including the harms of automating industries and the dangers of artificial intelligence. Because of these classes, I have read many arguments on these debates, not just those composed by students but also editorials and scholarly articles that address concerns about these technologies. Despite having been immersed in the topic, I find myself unable to take a strong position on it. Take, for example, the concern that information and communication technology, or ICT, like the Internet, is weakening cognitive abilities. I still find myself swayed by the arguments of people like Nicholas Carr that the Internet has turned us into distracted thinkers with short attention spans and shallow readers who skim and browse instead of reading and thinking deeply. I see it in myself, of course, but I also see it in students who misuse sources and take material out of context because they have not fully read or understood it. And I further see the Internet as the central reason for the poor source evaluation and limited research skills of students even at the college level today, who frequently think that Googling a topic and browsing the first page of results constitutes research, and that some general information webpage or FAQ, probably composed by a site’s webmaster, or some blog post written by a freelancer, is a high-quality source. Some educators blame the Internet for the informality in students’ writing and see that as its chief harm, but whether informal or not, at least people are reading and writing when they are interacting online. I think the issues of digital literacy are far more significant.  But at the same time, I know that the Internet is an indispensable tool in research, and if you know what a high-quality source is and how to find it, the Internet can provide access to a vast reserve of useful and credible information. So of course, it’s up to educators to give students the tools they need to navigate and make the best use of this technology. From my own experience researching and creating this podcast and listening to other podcasts and immersing myself in podcast culture, I know that information and communication technology can be used to enrich one’s life, to hone one’s critical thinking skills, and to grow one’s knowledge. Whether you’re a podcast listener or you’re putting in the work to create a podcast, the technology encourages lifelong learning. And this is true not just of podcast listeners, but of readers of blogs and viewers on video platforms and even of those who regularly dive into Wikipedia rabbit holes. If you can discern what’s trustworthy, it seems to me the Internet can be a tool for growing your knowledge and strengthening your cognitive abilities. So then it seems to be a matter of how it’s used or misused. What has prompted me to further explore my reservations about modern technology in this episode, though, is the new technology currently being misused by students. Since the beginning of the year, the jobs of educators have been made far more difficult by the emergence of accessible AI writing bots like ChatGPT. Some students now no longer even try to complete the reading and compose their own responses, instead feeding prompts into such chatbots and submitted the AI-generated text as their own. Yes, there are ways to detect such academic dishonesty, but this new tool has me disenchanted and is sending me reeling once again into technofear, wringing my hands for future generations that may let their writing skills atrophy. A future in which very few people read books was bleak enough, but a future in which writing, one of the most fundamental skills of humanity, is delegated to a computer program is downright dystopian.  

An artist’s depiction of Homo habilis developing the first technology: stone tools.

There are some further issues I struggle with in taking on this topic. One is that taking an anti-technology stance, even uncertainly or in part, is difficult for me to take. It strikes me as being anti-science, and listeners of the show know that I’m a staunch defender of science. As I have shown in numerous topics, anti-science and anti-intellectualism are great disingenuous evils in our world that should be opposed vigorously. But I think that one can defend science and oppose anti-intellectualism while also acknowledging the potential harms or risks inherent in any scientific breakthrough. With the film Oppenheimer in theaters, it’s perhaps an apt example to point out that one can acknowledge the genius of nuclear physicists and the manifold benefits of nuclear science while also recognizing the inherent risks of nuclear power. Likewise automotive technology resulted in many social and economic benefits, such as increased personal freedom, better access to employment, and the development of infrastructure, none of which need to be ignored to decry its role in suburbanization with all its concomitant evils—social inequality, poverty, crime—and the combustion of fossil fuels resulting in the anthropogenic climate change that has initiated a sixth mass extinction event. Indeed the benefits pale when juxtaposed with these harms. The problem is that, in the debate about the potential harms of computing technology and the Internet, the effects have not yet been proven. While educators on the front lines may be saying, “Hey, these cognitive abilities appear to be waning or are being allowed to wither, and the Internet may be why,” it’s easy enough to say there’s no proof that the Internet is causing this. In his book The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Nicholas Carr does his best to offer such proof in the form of university studies involving students, but his most compelling evidence that “intellectual technologies” change the way we our brains work—and therefore could be changing them for the worse—takes the form of examples he takes from history. The technology that helped to develop cartography, he argues, also helped to change the entire way people view the world around them, the way we make sense of the world. Maps, essentially, resulted in a kind of abstract thought that did not previously exist. This was certainly a technology that changed the way we think for the better, unless we consider its contribution to colonialism. But consider another technology: the mechanical clock. Although time measuring technology existed even in antiquity, in the form of sundials, water clocks, incense clocks and candle clocks, in the Middle Ages, monks popularized mechanical clocks in order to better time their prayer schedules with exactitude, and from the swinging bells of church towers, the technology spread across the world, until every community had its own clock, and as they were miniaturized, they became a staple of households, and eventually watches filled many a pocket, a ticking handheld device that let its owner easily access the world of mechanical time. Clocks were a clear forerunner of computers in this regard, as now most of us carry one of those powerful devices in our pockets. Prior to the advent of mechanical clocks, people conceived of their lives in natural cycles and measured their days according to circadian rhythms and their years according to seasons and harvests. Yes time-keeping had long been a practice, but before movable type and the printing press, the common person was likely not consulting calendars or thinking in those terms. Thus, time-keeping devices changed the way people measured their lives, introducing the elements of haste and stress, turning us all into a species of clock watchers.

With the mention of the printing press, we bring up perhaps the best example of an information and communication technology that changed the world in ways analogous to what we see in the digital age with the Internet. Just as today the power of information has been democratized, giving easier access to knowledge and literature, in the same way the invention of the printing press brought literature to the masses in the time of the scribal system, when books were copied by hand in monasteries, written in Latin, accessible only to the elite, and controlled by the Catholic Church. Ecclesiastical authorities were right to fear the advent of this technology, because it meant they would lose their monopoly on knowledge. It resulted in so-called “vulgar” language translations of the Bible and other works, such that the masses could read them for themselves, and it led to increased literacy, the development of modern literary art, and the success of the scientific enlightenment. Indeed, this technology would prove to be the death knell for Catholic control of medieval Europe as it would greatly contribute to the Protestant Reformation. And this, of course, was only a bad thing for those attached to the old ways, and was a wonderful thing for humanity and human intellect. This is a common argument raised by those who want to discount modern concerns about the Internet and other technology. There are always naysayers, they point out, and look how they were always wrong. For example, Socrates iselieveed that the invention of writing was a great evil because it would result in the weakening of memory. And books were stupidly condemned by Martin Luther, who had himself benefited so greatly from the printing press in the promulgation of his 95 theses, when he claimed, “The multitude of books is a great evil.” Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, known for his educational theory, is strangely quoted as saying “I hate books,” and British historian and man of letters Thomas Carlyle once stated, “Books are a triviality.” Also ironically, books were decried by someone who famously made his living and reputation by writing, Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote, “The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age.” And finally, Benjamin Disraeli, a novelist and Prime Minister of England, once said, “Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race.…The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.” Look what fools you find yourself in company with, the defenders of the Internet will say, confident that they will be on the right side of history.

A depiction of Johannes Gutenberg and his press.

However, as is common with such arguments, they are cherry picking. It is absurd to suggest that as late as the 19th century people still discounted the importance of the printing press and its contribution to the advancement of our species. In fact, all of these examples, even going all the way back to Socrates, are taken out of context and don’t really represent the arguments being made. In Plato’s Phaedrus, when Socrates engages in a dialogue with Phaedrus about writing, he previously states, “Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing,” and his argument is actually that writing “is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth,” going on to explain that writing is more like painting, static and unchanging and thus inferior to instruction by a living teacher who can respond to questions. So we see his position is far more nuanced than just “writing bad.” As for Martin Luther’s supposed ironic condemnation of printing presses, he is also quoted as saying “Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one,” and the conclusion of his quote about the “multitude of books” being “a great evil” shows he was only talking about people’s motivation for writing: “every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name; others for the sake of mere gain.” Likewise, Rousseau said he hated books because, as he said in his next sentence, “they only teach people to talk about what they do not understand,” a sentiment very similar to that expressed by Socrates so many centuries earlier. Carlyle, for his part, called books a triviality because, as he went on to say, “Life alone is great,” which we can see was not an attack on the technology of printing at all but more a recommendation to put books down and touch grass once in a while. Poe called the multiplication of books in his time an evil because, “it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information, by throwing in the reader’s way piles of lumber, in which he must painfully grope for the scraps of useful matter, peradventure interspersed.” And in the same way, in between calling books a curse and the invention of printing a misfortune, Disraeli explained that, “Nine-tenths of all existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.” So we can see that most examples typically given to demonstrate that people had the same sort of misguided concerns about books that we have about the Internet today are either disingenuous or misinformed, and these last examples, which were actually concerns about information overload and misinformation, are even more pressing today, with the Internet, than they were in the 19th century! Indeed, what Socrates says about those who only read instead of engaging in his Socratic dialogues is also a very apt description of people today learning solely from the Internet, that repository of quick answers ready for hasty retrieval, by searching up a fact on Wikipedia or skimming an article’s headline as a quick way to seem informed: “they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

The Victorian Internet, the telegraph, has likewise been claimed to have Inflamed widespread fears and anger, but this too may not be so accurate. Henry David Thoreau is said to have been skeptical about telegraphy, but if we read his actual words, we find he was only skeptical of their usefulness, not their harms. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” he said, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” So he was really just throwing shade at regions he thought were provincial or unsophisticated. Sometimes it’s pointed out that as soon as the optical telegraph was demonstrated in France, it was immediately destroyed by a fearful mob. In truth, though, this was during the Paris Commune, shortly before their insurrection, when revolutionary sentiment was at a fever pitch, and the telegraph was destroyed not out of technofear but because it was feared that the contraption was being used to send secret messages to royalists in Temple Prison. Still, we see here an early example of machine-breaking as a response to technological misgivings, and this may serve as our central historical example instructing us where skepticism and fear of technology may lead us today. Breaking machines in the workplace as a form of organized resistance dates back to the late 17th century in England, though rather than acts of sabotage inspired by actual technofear, many of these early instances can be seen more as threats to employers used to win concessions for industrial workers—kind of a give-us-what-we-want-or-we-break-your-stuff approach. In the early 19th century, though, among English textile workers specifically, in the cotton, wool, and hosiery trades, this labor movement became cohesive, organized, and aimed specifically at the destruction of the large stocking frames, cotton looms, and wool shearers that had in recent years left so many handcrafters out of work. These rebels came under cover of darkness, broke windows with hatchets and stones, fired muskets into newly-built factories, and destroyed these offending machines with massive blacksmith hammers. According to newspaper reports and their own proclamations, they followed a leader named General Ludd, or King Ludd, and they would not stop breaking these infernal devices until the Industrial Revolution that had destroyed their lives and communities was reversed. Thus they came to be known as the Luddites. Between 1811 and 1817, these outlaws, who actually rose up around Nottinghamshire, in the same area as the mythical Robin Hood, systematically destroyed property and engaged in shoot outs with those who began to stay overnight at their factories to defend their expensive machines. People were injured, and lives were lost. Eventually, the government dispatched more than 10,000 soldiers to quell the disturbance, and numerous Luddites were hanged. One couldn’t say that these troops were defending the status quo, since really, it was the Luddites who wanted things to stay as they long had been. Instead, the government was defending its economic interests. Today Luddites are remembered as enemies of progress, but was it really progress they resisted? Was it even a fear of technology that animated them?

Artist’s rendering of General Ludd, the fictitious leader of the Luddites.

Today, it is understood that there really was no leader named General Ludd or King Ludd commanding these rebels, though some among them may have used the name as a nom de guerre, a pseudonym used during wartime. Some suspect the name referred to the mythical founder of London, King Lud, who was said to be buried beneath Ludgate. Alternatively, according to claims that made their way into contemporary newspapers, the Luddites may have taken their name from a local teen boy named Ned Ludd who was maybe a little slow or maybe a bit bullied, who when whipped for being sluggish at his work on a knitting frame grew angry and destroyed the machine. By this theory, the boy and this incident was so well-remembered locally that whenever a machine was smashed or broken, it was said that Ned Ludd had been there. And it is claimed the name even became a verb, meaning the act of rising in anger at an employer and damaging workplace property, such that an angry weaver might want to “Ned Ludd” his frame loom. None of this can be confirmed, but whatever was true of their origins and leaders, it is certainly not true that they feared or misunderstood machines. And it’s not really accurate even to say they hated the technology that they sought to destroy or that they blamed the technology for their situations. These were artisans who had long worked with the same technology, just on a smaller scale. What these laborers resented, what they actually rebelled against, was their loss of autonomy, the construction of these machines at such a scale that the human operators became mere appendages to the device rather than the other way around. And most of all, they were protesting the loss of work and the working conditions they were being forced into in order to find any work. In the late 18th century, these artisans plied their trades in small workshops, among close friends and family. They took great pride in their work, and they were able to determine their own work hours. They were a literal cottage industry, in that they worked in rural cottages, surrounded by their children, and if at any time they tired of their labor, they could take a break to work instead in their garden. Then within about 35 years, they saw their entire world transformed as huge five-story factories began appearing everywhere, full of monstrous machines that could do the work of numerous such artisans. Soon thousands upon thousands of such handcrafters found themselves out of work, and in order to continue supporting their families in the trade they had pursued all their life, they had to accept inhuman conditions in these mills and factories, where they were forced to work long unceasing hours in high temperatures with noise so deafening they had to learn to read lips. And it wasn’t just their lives that they saw the Industrial Revolution destroying, it was their entire country, as factories darkened the skies with smoke and mills polluted the waterways with filth. Yes, their actions were criminal, but Luddites had legitimate grievances. It is unfair and inaccurate to depict them today as foolish naysayers or backward holdouts who feared anything new.

At its heart, the Luddite movement was a labor movement. Karl Marx saw in their struggle and other European worker revolts, an inevitable cycle moving toward the overthrow of capitalism. In Marx’s view, technology was a central tool of the worker’s oppression. Those who owned the means of production thus determined how the proletariat could be exploited for their labor and dehumanized, reducing them to wage slaves. It is hard not to see the story of the Luddites through the lens of Marxist thought, and it is likewise hard not to compare their struggle with the struggle of modern organized labor, who likewise protest the mechanization and automation of their industries. From longshoremen, to transportation workers, from farmers to food service workers, labor unions everywhere are fighting this trend toward the replacement of workers with robots. But the most powerful tool of organized labor, the strike, could backfire because some fear that withholding labor would only encourage employers to automate jobs. Robots don’t worry about being scabs, after all, and don’t require wages, breaks, or any time off. If there’s ever a work stoppage, it’s just a matter of performing repairs. They are the ideal employee because they have no dignity and make no demands. But where does that leave human beings? We see this struggle against technology elsewhere as well, in the current entertainment industry strike of writers and screen actors. And in their case, they too fear being replaced. In a nightmare future, corporate production companies have all their film and television scripts written by artificial intelligence, and they need no longer pay actors if through deepfake technology a virtual performance can be generated. So we come back inevitably to the fears of an artificial intelligence and how it may surpass and supplant us. Humanity has long been simultaneously fascinated and horrified by this notion of artificial beings able to fool our eyes and replace us. Such a simulacrum was in ancient times called an automaton, and it was long thought they might be created with clockwork. The word automaton indicates more than just robotics, however, which we see companies like Boston Dynamics making astounding strides in today. The word indicates a machine with a will of its own, which would furthermore indicate an intelligence. The hypothetical point at which artificial intelligence surpasses our own and makes humanity obsolete is called the Singularity, and there is an argument to be made that such a thing may be impossible. Indeed, we may even quibble and say that what we call artificial intelligence today, in the form of bots like ChatGPT, is not actually genuine intelligence but rather a simulacrum of it, the mere resemblance of thought through language patterns and algorithms for generating responses to prompts. However, one of the first tests of whether a machine has achieved intelligence is called the imitation game, or the Turing test, named after Alan Turing, who proposed it in 1950. By this test, a human evaluator would engage in a text conversation with both another human being and with a machine, and if the person could not tell the which was a person and which a machine, it could be said that the machine had exhibited intelligent behavior. By this admittedly rudimentary measure, then, we do now have true artificial intelligence. So the question then becomes, what should be done about it?

The disastrous risks of unsafe technology were well known in the Industrial Era in the form of boiler explosions. Image credit: Mark Wahl.

As Nicholas Carr characterizes this debate in his book, The Shallows, the conflict is over whether we take an instrumentalist or a determinist view of technology. Is technology just a tool that is neutral, subservient to our commands, or has it developed out of our control, such that now we must adapt to its new paradigm? Put simply, do we still use it or do we in some ways serve it? Certainly the Luddites would have told us that it is the latter. But regardless of this debate, it seems we can all agree that a tool used by us can still be dangerous, can be misused, and in such cases, when a technology poses a harm to society, measures must be taken to prevent its misuse. For example, the invention of the steam engine was the catalyst for the Industrial Revolution that followed, a truly disruptive technology, as we may say today. But we might also call it explosive, because boilers had this inconvenient tendency to explode. The catastrophic risk of this technology could not be ignored, but it could be mitigated with further improvements to the technology and, more importantly here, the imposition of safety practices to prevent such harm. The Industrial revolution that the steam engine made possible led to terrible environmental harms and labor conditions, and these would eventually be mitigated through legislation to reduce pollution, expand workers’ rights, and improve working environments. It is labor unions at the forefront of this fight right now, but it is legislators who must go on to address these technofears. Certainly there is a strong case to be made for the regulation of automation in all industries, and especially of artificial intelligence. As for other concerns about what harmful cognitive effects information and communication technologies may be having on all us, the only solution may be the encouragement to use with caution and education regarding self-care and digital detox. After all, machines like the one on which I researched and wrote this are far too ubiquitous for modern Luddites to break, and the way things work now, if all computers crashed and the Internet failed, it would put far more of us out of work.

Further Reading

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Newport, Cal. “The Myth of Technophobia.” WIRED, 18 Sep. 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/weve-never-feared-tech-as-much-as-we-think-we-have/.

Plato. Phaedrus. The Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. Basic Books, 1996.

The Hunt for Lost Nazi Gold Trains

Throughout the decades since the end of World War II, the idea of lost Nazi gold has intrigued numerous researchers, animated many a conspiracy theorist, led to a great deal of lawsuits, and inspired an entire subculture of treasure hunters. The Nazis were known to have drained and hoarded their own gold reserves, looted gold and other valuables from the countries they invaded, and seized the wealth of the Jews they worked to systematically erase from the Earth. While some of this plunder was seized by Allied forces and much of the rest of it disappeared into the Swiss banking system, it seems a reasonable enough notion that somewhere, some deposit remains awaiting discovery. This prospect seems especially plausible to those who live in Poland, or more specifically, Lower Silesia, in southwest Poland, where the idea of buried German treasure has long been an absolute reality. Between 1945 and 1947, after Germany retreated from Poland and Soviet forces entered the region and pushed all remaining Germans out, nearly 2 million Germans were forced to leave their homes, which afterward were tenanted by Polish refugees displaced from Central Poland and areas of the east annexed by the Soviet Union. What they found were empty homes, but soon they discovered that the German residents, forced suddenly from their homes, had often buried their valuables, hoping to return to find them later. So caches of jewelry, furs, silken clothes, and porcelain dishware were frequently found when tilling fields or digging up gardens, buried in chests and jars and sometimes even in coffins. Many of the settlers of the area became speculators in treasure, digging for and selling the goods they found, and since then, treasure hunting has become a central aspect of the Polish culture there. There are numerous rumors of larger treasure deposits, not just the worldly belongings of Germans forced from their homes, but hoards of Nazi gold buried underground or sealed in secret tunnels. The most well-known of these legends is that of the Nazi Gold Train, a train carrying riches untold, looted by the Nazis, shipped by rail to avoid its falling into enemy hands, and then hidden away somewhere there in Poland. This old legend became modern news in 2015 when a group of treasure hunters claimed to have discovered the location in which the elusive gold train had been buried. They had used ground penetrating radar, and they had informed the Polish government of their discovery in accordance with local laws. Thus, before they even attempted to dig up what they’d found, their discovery was trumpeted the world over, and a kind of modern gold rush ensued, with other treasure hunters hopping on planes to poke around in the Polish woods. Quite disappointingly, no gold train had ever been discovered, and historians insist that there is no reason to believe that such a gold train is even in Poland. It is tempting, then, to dismiss the entire notion of a lost Nazi gold train as an urban legend, if it were not for the fact that such a gold train certainly did exist.

Indy atop a Nazi plunder train in The Dial of Destiny.

Welcome to Historical Blindness. As that Adventure theme tells you, this is yet another installment of my longest-running series yet, exploring the truth behind the MacGuffins and legends of the Indiana Jones films. This will actually be my last installment in the series, as I’ve gone through the previous films and am now digging into the new film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Don’t worry, though! Any spoilers here are few and minor. If you saw the film, or even if you didn’t, you know even from the title that the MacGuffin is not a Nazi gold train. Instead, the dial of the title is a fictionalized version of the Antikythera Mechanism, a mysterious ancient device with gears, which they attribute to the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Though the film handles them in an entirely fictional way, the Antikythera Mechanism and the technology attributed to Archimedes are extremely interesting subjects. I anticipate eventually devoting an episode of the podcast to exploring claims about ancient advanced technology, in which I could talk about these topics as well as others, like the claims of advanced technology attributed to Egyptians and other ancient cultures. But for topics wholly associated with Indiana Jones films, the Nazi Gold Train is going to conclude our series. Early on, it seems, the first drafts of the screenplay for this new Indy film were focused almost entirely on the lost Nazi Gold Train legend. In the end, the film we got only featured an opening scene on a “plunder train” that was carrying a lot of looted goods, including valuable art and ancient artifacts. It certainly makes for a rousing first sequence in the film, one that even features another relic that I recently devoted an episode to discussing! But there is no sense in the finished product that this film is exploring the real legend of the Nazi gold train. And perhaps that is a good thing, because the true story of the Nazi gold train—the only one we know really existed—is not one of adventure and mystical artifacts. It’s a story of national chauvinism, slow dehumanization of the other, and genocide, of the destruction and plunder of a helpless minority. And the use of this story in dubious claims of buried gold made by treasure hunters in Poland today is at the very least in bad taste, and at worst, is in a way another kind of plundering, a pillaging of tragedy for a good story.  

The true story of the Nazi Gold Train takes place not in Poland, but in Hungary, and it’s hard to call it a story of lost Nazi gold, as it’s manifestly a story of stolen Jewish wealth. What happened to the Jewish population in Hungary is made even more tragic by the fact that for a long time, Hungary was a very welcoming place for eastern European Jews. After Hungary achieved independence in 1867 under a Dual Monarchy as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a series of laws granted Hungarian Jews equal rights. Jewish immigration was encouraged by the government, and European Jews assimilated by adopting the Magyar language, thereby swelling the Magyar-speaking minority and ensuring the political leadership of the Magyar-speaking peoples. Anti-Semitism lurked in the background but was unpopular as Hungarian Jews prospered and contributed to the wealth of the nation. Things changed after World War I, when Hungarian Communist revolutionary Béla Kun established the radical, violently repressive, and short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. As a result of this brief experiment in Communism, anti-Semitism surged. As has so often been the case throughout history, Jews were blamed for any Bolshevist activity, and from 1920 to 1944, the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the far right gained acceptance even among centrists. As has always been typical of such anti-Semitic rhetoric, it was clearly contradictory in its main arguments. Jews were said to be too prosperous for how small a portion of the population they represented, but also somehow too numerous. They were said to be too influential as capitalists, being too well represented among industrialists and bankers, but were also, simultaneously, Bolsheviks who wanted to overthrow the Capitalist order. They were too foreign, too separate from Hungarian culture, but simultaneously too dominant, and their religion was too exclusive and insular, but somehow also threatening to the supremacy of Christianity. And developing alongside this resentment of the Jews in Hungary was a peculiarly Hungarian brand of racial pride and nationalism, called Hungarism, which was similar to that which was developing among Germans. This movement was inspired by Turanism, a pseudoscientific pan-nationalist ideology that was inspired by the ideologies of pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism. According to this pan-Turanianism, Hungarians, or more exclusively Magyars, along with other Turkic tribes, were descended from a “Uralo-Altaic race” who were the real Semites of the Bible. Thus Jusus was a Magyar, the Bible was written in a variation of the Magyar language, and Hungarians should be thanked for all of Western Christian civilization. If this sounds familiar, it should. It shares much in common with both Nazi ideology and other harmful pseudo-anthropological claims like those associated with British Israelism, the Black Hebrew Israelites, and the Christian Identity movement, all of which have developed or were founded on the same brand of virulent anti-Semitism.

Hungarian Jews arrive at Auschwitz

1920 brought down another domino that would eventually push Hungary in the direction of the Third Reich with the ratification of the Treaty of Trianon, which completely dismembered Hungary as a state and awarded much of her territory and Magyar-speaking populations to Austria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Ever since that time, alongside the rising anti-Semitism rose a political movement to restore the borders and regain these territories, a goal that partnership with the Nazis would eventually help them achieve. But still it was a slow process, a slow descent into Fascism. The far right Hungarist factions calling for extreme anti-Semitic legislation were kept at bay and did not achieve a political majority for some time because mainstream political factions pacified them by passing watered-down anti-Semitic laws in the 1930s. These laws sought to limit Jewish presence in certain professions, causing tens of thousands of Jews to lose their careers. One result of such legislation was that Jews, who had previously been considered Magyars because of their adoption of the language and were at most considered a religious minority, were thereafter defined as a distinct race, as was the case in Nazi Germany. And while centrists thought they were pacifying the far right with such laws, they were really legitimizing them and helping to spread their anti-Semitic views. With the rise of other far right leaders, and the influence of the Nazis who had political agents on their payroll starting explicitly Nazi factions and parties, more anti-Semitic legislation was passed, excluding Jews from any public sector employment, revoking their citizenship, banning intermarriage with them, and generally removing them from the economy and national life altogether. One of the last pieces of legislation enacted by the Hungarian government was the confiscation of Jewish property, framed as a contribution to the war effort. During this time, Hungary had allied itself with Nazi Germany, which made good on its promises to win them back the land they’d lost in the Treaty of Trianon, in the process increasing even further the Hungarian population of Jews. The solution of the far right was deportation: shipping Jewish refugees out of Hungarian territories and into German-controlled regions where they would supposedly be resettled. But many of these refugees were sent to their deaths, as they were sent right into the path of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen who were gunning down Jews in those regions and burying them in mass graves. Thus Hungary had begun to play a concrete role in the Holocaust.

In Hungary’s defense, when the nature of the Nazi’s Final Solution to the “Jewish Problem” became more apparent, government ministers ceased their deportation of Jewish refugees, and the country moved toward neutrality and even began making diplomatic overtures with the Allied powers. By that time, though, it was too late. Since the Annexation of Austria, Hungary was right on the southern border of Nazi territory, and Hitler was not about to let his enemies flank him and seize Hungary’s resources. Additionally, the destruction of the large Jewish community in Hungary would be a major step toward the completion of his Final Solution. So in 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary and propped up a collaborationist regime there. They then set about deporting the largest remaining population of European Jews, seizing their material wealth and placing them on trains bound for Auschwitz and death. So we see, the real story of the Nazi Gold Train starts with other trains, laden not with valuables but with human beings who were shunted away to their destruction. Much of the wealth of Hungarian Jews had already been surrendered and redistributed prior to the German invasion, and a great deal more was looted by their German occupiers before it could be loaded onto a train and sent out of Hungary. In December of 1944, the transportable items that had been protected from looting were loaded onto a train. Twenty-four cars were laden with the valuables of Hungarian Jews, but lest we think of this as gold bullion and chests overflowing with gems like some pirate booty, it should be noted that most of it was mundane, the earthly belongings of 800,000 people that had been deemed to be of some monetary worth: furniture, sewing machines, cameras, binoculars, carpets, dishes, and stamp collections. Yes, some gold and paper money and some pearl and diamond jewelry were among the items, but most of that sort of thing had already been looted in Budapest. Still, the train that escaped Hungary before the advance of the Red Army is estimated to have contained valuables worth billions of dollars today. The fate of some of its looted goods is largely unknown. We know that after passing into German territory, some of it was transferred onto trucks, never to be seen again, and we further know that the commander of the train took trunks of gold and disappeared into Switzerland. As for the rest of it, in May of 1945, the train was seized by Allied troops, and despite pressure from a Hungarian Jewish organization seeking the return of whatever valuables remained on the train, the U.S. Government kept it and auctioned off most of it. Even to this day, the fate of some 200 works of art taken from the train remains unknown. The details of what was done with these seized goods by the U.S. was not made public until 1999, after which a lawsuit was filed by Hungarian Holocaust survivors. The U.S. government settled for $25 million and apologized, while insisting these were just “shortcomings in the restitution efforts,” due to the “application of several policies,” and that “the conduct of its personnel was appropriate in most respects.” One might imagine what went unsaid, that the Soviet Army was at the time occupying Hungary, and the U.S. did not want to surrender the Gold Train’s wealth to their rivals, even if refusing to do so ran counter to U.S. policy. So we see that this true story of the Nazi Gold Train is far less sexy and mysterious than that told by Polish treasure hunters. It is not a story of buried gold, but rather of genocide, first and most importantly, and thereafter of plundering on all sides.

An American soldier guards the Hungarian Gold Train. Image courtesy the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Apparently, though, there was more than one lost Nazi Gold Train legend circulating around Europe. According to local lore in Poland, there was another such train laden with gold and other valuables being sent through Poland in 1945 in hopes of keeping the resources out of Soviet hands. According to this legend, this gold train vanished near Walbrzych. Or at least, this is the story told by some treasure hunters, such as Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, who claimed to have found the hiding place of this train in 2015. By their telling, there was a long history to this legend, and the Communist Polish Army long searched for this train. Curiously, though, the existence of this local legend is just as difficult to confirm as the location of any buried treasure. Certainly there is a culture of treasure hunting in Poland, as I spoke about at the top of this episode, and there are numerous legends and facts that contribute to rumors of hidden Nazi Gold, one being that the Nazis did indeed use the forced labor of concentration camp prisoners to excavate a complex of secret underground tunnels beneath a castle in Walbrzych in Lower Silesia. The castle was to be a new headquarters for Hitler, and the tunnels would form a kind of bunker city underground. The tunnel complex was never completed, though, and was abandoned, its entrances long ago collapsed, but unsurprisingly, legend claims that the Nazis, unable to take up residence in the tunnels, still used them to secret away their deposits of ill-gotten gold. And there are even very specific legends about the Nazi gold that may be hidden in that region. The central claim of lost Nazi gold in Poland revolves around a German police chief at Breslau named Herbert Klose, who under interrogation in 1944 said that he had helped hoard and secure the gold and valuables of that city’s residents. According to Klose, these chests of gold and valuables were buried somewhere. Searches for Klose’s gold trove and other buried Nazi treasure in Poland became so widespread during the second half of the 20th century that a sort of guild for treasure hunters was organized, the Lower Silesian Research Group, and the prospect of the discovery of such a treasure even prompted the Polish government to pass specific laws requiring treasure hunters to declare their finds and surrender 90% of their value to the state. The idea that Klose’s treasure is out there somewhere, perhaps buried in a disused Nazi tunnel in Lower Silesia, drives an entire subculture and cottage industry. And it was among these treasure hunters that the legend of another gold train, this one leaving Breslau with Klose’s treasure and perhaps with secret German weapons inside, was conceived. But is there any historical basis for this legend?

While there is certainly truth behind the stories of hidden underground Nazi tunnels in Poland, which were excavated with slave labor and explosives under a top-secret project called Riese, or “giant,” all the rest of these treasure tales are likely urban legends. While there appears to be some corroboration for the story about Herbert Klose’s buried Nazi gold from his interrogation, there is no sense whatsoever of where that looted gold may have ended up. Klose himself said that he had been unable to take part in the hiding of those chests of gold because he had been injured in a fall from a horse. Thus there is no reason to believe those chests were ever put onto a train or taken very far away from Breslau, or modern day Wrocław, at all. Likely, those chests were simply looted by the Germans tasked with hiding them, or by others who encountered them, as was the case with the gold plundered from Hungarian Jews. As for the story of a Gold train loaded up in Breslau and vanishing near Walbrzych, where the Riese tunnels had been dug, that appears to have no historical basis whatsoever. It is claimed that this was a long well-known rumor in Poland, but in fact, it appears to have originated from one man, Tadeusz Słowikowski. Like many of the treasure hunters of Poland, he is a former miner who turned to treasure hunting when there was no longer any mining work to employ him. Słowikowski claims that he was told about the vanishing gold train back in the 1950s by a German. The entire story of this gold train’s existence, of its being loaded with plunder in Breslau and disappearing somewhere near Wałbrzych, appears to have been started by his account of having been told such a tale. That’s it. The claim that this was a longstanding belief in Poland and that the Polish government had long been in search of this train appears to be entirely false, as far as I can determine. Instead, it is just a story told by one treasure hunter and believed by other treasure hunters, and it should be noted that many other treasure hunters in Poland don’t believe in this Gold Train’s existence, preferring instead to focus on the promise of Klose’s buried chests and other caches of German valuables.

An American soldier guards the Hungarian Gold Train. Photo credit: Chmee2, (CC BY-SA 3.0)

On August 28th, 2015, the head of conservation at Poland’s culture ministry held a press conference at which he announced an astonishing find. Two treasure hunters had learned of the location of the fabled lost Nazi gold train from an anonymous source: a man who had been involved in burying the train had made a deathbed confession to them. These men then claimed to have confirmed with 99% certainty using ground-penetrating radar, that an armored train had been buried at around the 65th kilometer of the Polish State Railway’s Wałbrzych line. These treasure hunters, who at first kept their anonymity, were following local law by disclosing their discovery before the find’s excavation in order to claim their 10% finder’s fee. The national heritage minister’s press conference set off a sensation, and Polish military had to be dispatched to the area to keep away other treasure hunters, who arrived in droves armed with metal detectors and other gear, hoping to find a piece of the treasure for themselves. Acting out of an abundance of caution, the military searched the area for landmines or other booby traps, after which a non-invasive exploration of the site commenced. The location and the ground-penetrating radar findings were examined by mining specialists and geologists, and these experts protested that the findings in no way represented proof positive of the presence of a buried train at the site, suggesting that perhaps the treasure hunters had detected one of the subterranean tunnels of Project Riese, but not an actual train. Nevertheless, the treasure hunters, who eventually revealed their identities as Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, stuck tenaciously to their claim. With further pressure, a complete excavation of the site was eventually arranged, with engineers and demolitionists, and with the involvement of archaeologists and chemical experts on the chance they encountered hazardous buried war materials. In a stunning letdown akin to Geraldo Rivera’s opening of an empty vault on live television, the dig was shut down after nothing was discovered and further radar indicated that what had previously been detected at the site was nothing more than underground ice formations. The dig cost upwards of $130,000, but that was okay with the government, because all the excitement had actually driven tourism to the area, boosting the economy by around $200 million. One town official was quoted as saying, “Whether the explorers find anything or not, …the gold train has already arrived."

In retrospect, it’s surprising that Poland’s head of National Heritage took the treasure hunters seriously at all. Perhaps their presentation of the ground-penetrating radar findings was very persuasive, but the mere fact that their entire theory was based on an unverifiable deathbed confession, the details of which have never been released as far as I can find, made their entire claim unreliable from the outset. In fact, this subculture of Nazi gold hunters active in Poland is simply not known for credible research. Instead, many rely on mystical divining practices, as was revealed in a 2016 New Yorker piece by Jake Halpern, in which he traveled to Poland and interviewed numerous such individuals. One treasure hunter showed him how he uses divining rods to find secret underground tunnels. Some may swear by the practice of dowsing for such tasks, but this treasure hunter also showed the journalist a bizarre looking dowsing rod with a glass device attached to it that he claimed pointed the way toward gold. I think even farmers who dowse for water would admit that this sounds like a load of hogwash. Added to their mystical superstitions, these treasure hunters harbor a lot of paranoia and indulge in conspiracy speculation. Many believe they are followed by secret agents of some surviving Nazi organization, which they call “guards.” They partake of the conspiracy theories I refuted in my episode on the death of Hitler, that far more Nazi leaders escaped Germany than is known, and that they maintain an international spy network, looking after their hidden treasures and likely planning some future Fourth Reich. And as for the contents of the Nazi train they search for, they let their speculation run wild. In it, they expect not only to find gold and other such treasures, but perhaps also the long lost amber panels and gilded mirrors of Russia’s famous Amber Room, disassembled by Nazis in 1944. Or perhaps, as some of these Polish treasure hunters claim, the train will hold secret German war technology, their Wunderwaffe, or “wonder-weapons,” like the fabled Nazi Bell claimed by some conspiracy theorists to be a genuine time travel device, or maybe even good old-fashioned flying saucers!

The location where Polish treasure hunters believed they had found their gold train. Photo credit: RafalSs (CC BY-SA 4.0)

But there is a pretty basic problem with all of these notions. First, if the Nazis remained active and posted agents in Poland to safeguard their treasure caches, then wouldn’t they just have retrieved the treasure for themselves long before now? And even if we dismiss that paranoid idea, there is the fact that the Soviet forces took control of this region shortly after the Germans abandoned it, and trophy brigades scoured the area for any valuables, including the castle beneath which the tunnels had been built. They would likely have seized any remaining treasure. And finally, there is witness testimony describing how the Germans took everything with them before the Red Army arrived, even ripping the piping out of the tunnels they had built in order to deny such raw materials to their enemies. It seems unlikely they would have left behind great riches and wonder weapons for the Soviets to find. But such arguments won’t dissuade dyed-in-wool treasure hunters like Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter. The two continued to insisted that they need only dig deeper to find their gold train. They led another dig in 2017 that also failed to turn up their treasure, and Koper continues his search for gold, in the form of a hunt for more funding to continue his digs. In 2019, he got lucky and stumbled upon some half-a-century-old renaissance wall portraits beneath the plaster of an old palace he was renovating nowhere near the site he still believes to be the resting place of his Nazi gold train. I guess it goes to show that if you just keep searching, you may find some treasure, even if you’re hunting for something that doesn’t actually exist.

Until next time, remember, historical myths and urban legends make great fodder for sensational news stories. Back in 2015-2016, you may have heard about the supposed gold train in Poland, but then did not hear how it turned out to not be true. So…I’m not saying to distrust all news media, but I am saying to take seemingly extraordinary stories like these with a big pinch of salt.

 Further Reading

Alexander, Harriet. “Did A Deathbed Confession Reveal the Location of Nazi Gold Train?” The Telegraph, 28 Aug. 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/11830226/Nazi-gold-train-found-live.html.

Halpern, Jake. “The Nazi Underground.” The New Yorker, vol. 92, no. 13, 2 May 2016, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/09/searching-for-nazi-gold.

Gitau, Beatrice. “Deathbed Confession Reveals Location of Nazi Train That Might Contain Gold.” The Christian Science Monitor, 28 Aug. 2015, www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2015/0828/Deathbed-confession-reveals-location-of-Nazi-train-that-might-contain-gold.

Rębała, Monika, and Sara Miller Llana. “Legend Realized? Discovery of Lost Nazi 'Gold Train' Invigorates Polish Town.” The Christian Science Monitor, 4 Sep. 2015, www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2015/0904/Legend-realized-Discovery-of-lost-Nazi-gold-train-invigorates-Polish-town.

Zweig, Ronald W. The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary. William Morrow, 2002.

The Piltdown Fraud: Fundamentalists Favorite Fake Fossil

When you hear the word “creature,” what comes to mind? We think of an animal, perhaps, a “lower” form of life, since the word can bear a negative connotation when applied to human beings. If a person is seen as a creature, it may be because they are seen as a servile tool being used by another, their creature. If you play Dungeons and Dragons, maybe you think of it as any living thing, but do you think of it as a tacitly religious term, supporting the notion of Creationism, of the origin of organisms through an act of divine creation rather than through the natural process of evolution? If we look at the etymology, “creature” comes from the Latin verb for creation. We might interpret this only to mean that organisms are created through reproduction, but the word was long historically associated in Old French with the notion of all the world as God’s Creation. Thus a creature is part of Creation. It’s not surprising that ancient religious ideas about our origins remain woven into the very fabric of our language, even though science has helped us achieve a clearer understanding of the evolution of populations through natural selection. Throughout the 20th century, Creationism has lost its cultural cachet as a viable scientific idea. Those who would like to see divine creation taught as a coequal scientific theory have had to rebrand the idea as Creation Science and Intelligent Design, but offering no actual testable, reproducible, or falsifiable evidence, their claims cannot be considered science and to enforce their instruction in science classrooms would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment separating church and state, as has been decided in numerous Supreme Court challenges, most recently in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in 2005. Tellingly, in searching for some scientific proof for their religious belief, Creationists rely on outmoded thought.  A favorite “proof” of Intelligent Design is the metaphor of a watch in a field, and how if one found such a complex device, it is far more logical to reason that it was created by some intelligent inventor and left there rather than formed by natural forces. This pithy analogy actually was first used in 1802, by Anglican clergyman William Paley, and even at the time it was absolutely deconstructed and shown to be fallacious by Enlightenment scholar David Hume. But more than that, Charles Darwin, who had previously been convinced by Paley’s arguments, would eventually disprove them through his observations of gradual changes in populations, demonstrating how complex organic structures could take shape over generations as inherited features. Beyond long discredited ideas like that, Creationists also seize on the idea of a “Missing Link,” suggesting that proof of evolution requires proof of an intermediate state between lower and higher life forms, and they complain that such links are exactly that, missing from the fossil record. Of course, many a Creationist might dismiss the fossil record altogether as a kind of prank planted into the Earth to test the faith of Christians, as they have claimed about dinosaur bones in their insistence on the young age of the Earth. But this idea of a Missing Link also derives from outdated ideas. It partakes of the ancient philosophy of the Great Chain of Being, in which there is a hierarchy of lower and higher animals, each creature having been formed perfectly with all its distinctions by God. What Darwin and evolutionary science have shown is that there was not a linear chain of species, but rather a kind of tree of life branching in many directions from various roots. Thus, paleontologists prefer the term “intermediate” or “transitional form,” and though Creationists may claim that these “links” are missing, in fact they were even found in Darwin’s lifetime. In 1863, he learned of the discovery of Archaeopteryx, a fossil that shows feathers and other anatomical structures peculiar to birds as well as saurian features, demonstrating the evolution of dinosaurs into birds. Beyond that, the fossils of intermediate forms revealing the evolution of many other species, including mollusks, fish, whales, and horses, have been discovered. But Creationists cry out for the Missing Link connecting monkeys to human beings, often demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, which does not assert that Homo sapiens are descended from monkeys but rather that they both are descended from a common ancestor, which would be recognized as an entirely different species. And despite what preachers may tell their congregations from the pulpit, there is no shortage of these intermediate forms either. Paleontologists have pieced together the timeline of our evolution from the earliest apes in the Miocene epoch between 23 and 5 million years ago, with the first evidence of bipedal movement occurring after the last of our common ancestors with gorillas and chimps, as evidenced in Sahelanthropus tchadensis. In the Pliocene, we see the development of our Hominin ancestors and the early use of stone tools, with the transitional species Ardipithecus and Australopithecus, like the fossil named “Lucy,” who was bipedal but had a small skull. From the Pleistocene epoch, paleontologists have pieced together some 20 or so transitional hominin forms, some our own ancestors and some from other branches of the tree of life: Heidelberg Man and Java Man—both examples of Homo erectus—the Old Man of La Chapelle, a Neanderthal; The Taung Child, Peking Man, the Little Lady of Flores. The list goes on and on, even up to 2008, when the 9-year-old son of a paleontologist in South Africa found a new and distinct subspecies of Australopithecus named sediba. When pressed on the fossil evidence, though, Creationists are likely to just dismiss all of it as untrustworthy, casting doubt based on the fact that there have, in the past, been fake fossils. In this, they are cherry picking, placing undue emphasis on one notorious hoax that eventually was exposed by scientists themselves. This is Historical Blindness. I’m Nathaniel Lloyd, and here I need to tread carefully, gently brushing the dust away to reveal a fascinating and extremely significant hoax while also recording its context in order to refute Creationists who tout it as evidence that evolutionary theory generally cannot be believed. Thank you for joining me as I discuss The Piltdown Fraud: Misuse of a False Fossil.  

After the last blog post on the crystal skull forgeries, it made sense for me to move from one archaeological fraud to the story of this paleontological fraud, which I have long wanted to discuss. However, as I indicated, I am very conscious of how topics on this blog can actually be taken out of context to support misinformation. For example, I had a podcast listener write me last summer to tell me that my episode on MK-Ultra led them to give more credence to other conspiracy theories involving the CIA, including their involvement in the JFK assassination. While I can absolutely understand the story of MK-Ultra leading one to healthy sense of mistrust when it comes to the U.S. intelligence apparatus, my discussion of their publicly exposed efforts to develop mind control technology in no way stands as evidence in support of any other conspiracy claims. Likewise, recently, I noticed someone using promotional materials for my podcast to promote the Tartaria conspiracy theory. Though I was recently kicked off of TikTok when I was posting about my episodes on the death of Hitler and the Hitler’s diaries hoax—I believe because of one disgruntled admirer of Hitler who defaced my posts with pro-Hitler sentiments and who I believe may have wrongfully reported me as spreading hate speech (when in fact he was)—I have still been able to search TikTok on my desktop browser. While researching the last patron exclusive minisode, which went into the republic of the Russian Federation sometimes called Tataria, I did an image search to find a map, and I discovered that numerous promoters of the ridiculous Tartaria fraud are using the title card I created for my episode as the background for their little talking head videos. It’s a historic image of some brick layers working in the foreground with the Renaissance-style Iowa State Capitol looming in the background, and I added the title “The Lost Empire of Tartaria.” It was part of my ruse as an April Fool’s joke to act like there was something to this baseless conspiracy delusion in the episode’s cold open, but now I’m kicking myself, because the image is being widely used to promote those false claims. If only I’d been clear from the start and called it “The Myth of the Lost Empire of Tartaria,” or something, then they couldn’t use it or would have to put in more effort to make their own image. So I’ve decided that, from now on, my titles will make it abundantly clear when a topic I’m tackling is total bunk, and I will be doing all I can, at the beginning of episodes and and these accompanying blog posts, to clarify the truth, to debunk from the outset rather than playing it coy and building up to the reality of things. Because of that, at the beginning of this post, I want to talk a bit more about the flaws in Creationist arguments before I really dig into the one example of a fossil hoax they’re so fond of touting.

A diagram demonstrating the similarity of hominoid skeletal structure.

Proponents of Intelligent Design as a scientific theory will delve into very specific biological minutiae in order to argue that evolution cannot be true. They will say that there is no way eyes could have evolved because they are too complex, or that the propeller-like flagellum of bacteria are too complicated and must have been engineered. Actually, these are just the old “watch in a field” argument wearing different clothes, and in reality, biologists have observed more primitive versions of light-sensing organs and simpler flagellae, demonstrating the fact that these structures too developed slowly over time. And it’s funny that Creationists would point to bacteria to prove their views, since on a microevolutionary level, we see evolution today in the form of bacteria adapting to resist antibiotics. The fact is that almost all Creationists believe in evolutionary theory at the microevolutionary level, since few can reasonably deny the truth of viruses evolving resistant variants or insects evolving resistance to pesticide, and the common practices of plant and animal breeding show clearly how traits are inherited and change populations in sometimes dramatic ways. It’s usually only the implications of macroevolution, which involves speciation, that they reject. Perhaps the most common objection that Creationists rely on is that evolution is “just a theory,” and theories aren’t proven fact or necessarily true, and they will try to suggest that intelligent design is equally a theory by the dictionary definition, in that it too is an idea to explain something. But this relies on a grammar school understanding of the scientific process. The scientific community uses the term “theory” to denote an explanation that is substantiated with evidence. In reality, evolution meets the criteria of being considered a fact, as according to the National Academy of Sciences, a fact is “an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as ‘true.’” Therefore, I will mostly try to refer to evolutionary science, rather than evolutionary theory, in order to avoid any hairsplitting over terminology. Creationists will claim that there is no scientific consensus, cherry-picking an outlier academic here or there that seems to be anti-evolution. This is just false, though, as was shown in numerous independent surveys of academic literature since the 1990s, conducted in efforts to determine the prominence of Intelligent Design views in academia, which found that no scientific studies supporting the claims of so-called “Creation Science” are published at all. The closest thing to it are papers by anti-evolution authors that do little more than highlight areas of uncertainty that the scientific community does not dispute. And any claims that academic publishers censor them and refuse to publish the findings of “Creation Science” are also refuted by the statements of major scholarly journal editors that few such manuscripts are even submitted for their consideration. The fact is that evolution science is consensus among experts because it has never been falsified by evidence. In other words, all study has helped to prove it’s true. Yes, evolutionary biologists disagree with each other on particulars, but not on the principles of evolutionary biology generally. This disagreement is part of the scientific process, and it’s why frauds like Piltdown Man are inevitably exposed.

In the autumn of 1812, rumors in the British press had begun to circulate that there had been an important paleontological find in Sussex, at Piltdown in Southern England. At a momentous meeting of the Geological Society of London, in December of that year, this find was finally revealed. Arthur Smith Woodward, a geologist with the British Museum, revealed that earlier that year, his friend Charles Dawson, a solicitor and amateur antiquarian, had written to him about a curious gravel pit near Barkham Manor, a Georgian mansion dating to the 18th century. Dawson told him that he had been curious of the brown flintstones in the gravel, as stone of that sort was known to have been used for crafting tools in the Stone Age. Dawson had asked the workers in the pit to keep an eye out for anything interesting, and on a return visit, one of them handed him a piece of an unusually thick skull. After finding yet another piece of what appeared to be the same skull in the gravel bed on a subsequent visit, Dawson had reached out to Woodward, and the two had undertaken a careful excavation of the pit throughout that summer. At first, they kept their efforts secret, bringing in only the French Jesuit prehistorian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. They discovered seven fragments of the same skull, as well as half of a jaw with two intact molars, and in the same context, they discovered various Paleolithic stone tools and the fossilized bones of horses, deer, hippopotomi, elephants, and mastodon, which appeared to confirm the great age of the fossilized human remains. By summer the following year, Woodward had completed a reconstruction of the skull and presented it to anatomists at the International Congress of Medicine, and the importance of the find became even clearer. While Piltdown Man appeared to have an apelike jaw and thick skull, it had a braincase that would accommodate a fully-developed modern human brain. There were definite features of both ape and man present in the reconstruction, even in just the jaw fragment alone, which showed apelike morphology and yet had deep-rooted molars like those of a human. So it appeared that the much sought after “Missing Link” had been discovered, right there in England, just 44 miles from London, a hub of modern scholarship in paleontology. And more than that, this new find appeared to confirm what most British paleontologists and evolutionary biologists theorized at the time. And perhaps more importantly, it also appealed to everyday English men and women everywhere, stoking nationalism and inflating racial pride.

The Piltdown skull reconstruction

At the beginning of the 20th century, a notion had arisen among the paleo-intelligentsia that the large brain of Homo sapiens must have developed first, perhaps at the end of the Pliocene and beginning of the Pleistocene, before the loss of other apelike features in hominins. Previous candidates for the Missing Link had been the various Neanderthal fossils found in Germany and France, or Homo erectus, as observed in the Java Man fossil discovered in the 1890s. Those were at the time rejected as early human fossils because of their small braincases. In fact, Neanderthals had larger braincases but seemed smaller because it was more elongated. Regardless, Arthur Smith Woodward’s reconstruction of the Piltdown skull was seized on as an example of a seemingly transitional form between ape and man that showed early development of a large brain. It must be remembered that during this time, the old pseudoscience of craniometry, which attributed intelligence and personality traits to cranial measurements, was still clinging to life in academia. But Piltdown was also seized on for less academic reasons. Almost all major early human fossils to date had been discovered elsewhere in Europe. The Old Man of La Chappelle was discovered in France, the Engis skull in Belgium, and most galling to the English during the years preceding the Great War, several important fossils had been discovered in Germany, including the Feldhofer skull found in a valley from which Neanderthals take their name, and more recently, Homo heidelbergensis, found in Heidelberg. The British were desperate for some fossil man of their own, and this yearning can be discerned even in the first letter Dawson wrote to Woodward, in which he suggested his find “will rival H. heidelbergensis.” Not only would a British fossil allow British paleontologists an opportunity to study an important site without having to travel abroad, and not only would it allow them some bragging rights against their German rivals, but there was also the sense that finding the Missing Link in one’s country indicated that your country must have been the cradle of humanity and therefore of civilization. British paleontologists were eager to accept the Piltdown Man fraud because they wanted to believe in it. It meant they were right about the development of braincases, but it also meant that, though this might have gone without saying, maybe, just maybe, the first human being was English. And as if to emphasize this idea, the following year at the Piltdown site, a new tool was discovered, this one carved from an elephant bone—the earliest known bone tool—and it was shaped much like a cricket bat. It seemed the first man not only an Englishman but also a cricket player!

To be fair, paleontologists had some valid reasons for giving weight to the discovery as well. The specimens were seen by Smith Woodward, a respected expert, being picked up from a gravel bed in which had also been found paleolithic tools and extinct animal fossils. The context of the find alone appeared to confirm the legitimacy of the find, and this field site was widely photographed and visited by scientists who gave credence to the claim and lent it further legitimacy. As one might expect from a putative Missing Link, Piltdown Man very quickly became arguably the most famous fossil in the world. Even during the initial excavation of the gravel bed in Sussex it drew the attention of the aristocratic tenants living in area manor houses like the nearby Barkham Manor. Those who’ve watched Downton Abbey might imagine it vividly: “Some workmen are digging near the road causing quite the disturbance, and they say they’ve found some old bones there. How exciting!” During 1913, the Piltdown excavation became a popular day trip for Edwardian ladies and gentlemen, dressed in their finest picnicking clothes and driving out to have a look at the place where the Missing Link had been found. The number of photographs taken of the site and of the reconstruction of the Piltdown skull further propagated the hoax even among those who would never examine the actual fossils themselves. They were displayed in museums and used in education. One Belgian museum conservator even created a reconstruction of a living Piltdown Man from the waist up, a kind of noble looking humanlike ape, and this work of art was mass produced as a stereoscope card with the caption “Early Man.” Before long it was not only scholars who had staked their reputations on Piltdown, it was museums and media companies, and they were not just intellectually invested but also financially. This investment resulted in Piltdown being peddled as the end-all find of paleontology, to the detriment of legitimate new finds. For example, in 1925, more than a decade into the life of the Piltdown hoax, it was still going so strong that when the Taung Child, an almost 3 million year old fossil, was discovered in South Africa and showed a small braincase with more human features—exactly the opposite of what Piltdown showed—it was dismissed as a baby chimp. Piltdown not only fooled the scientific community, it also perpetuated a false notion about the evolution of human traits, as now it is more widely accepted that our large human brains were not among the first of our traits to develop.

A portrait of the scientists who examined the Piltdown fossil. Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward are pictured in the back right.

It should be said, however, that acceptance of the Piltdown fossils was not universal and wholehearted. Of course, even then the fundamentalists cast doubt on the find, as they would on any transitional fossil that appeared to confirm Darwinian evolution. Most famously, the lawyer William Jennings Bryan, who had been a progressive reformer in the Democratic Party and later in his career turned his attention to religious fundamentalist causes, acting as the prosecutor in the Scopes Monkey Trial, said of the Piltdown fossil, “The evolutionists have attempted to prove by circumstantial evidence (resemblances)that man is descended from the brute…. If they find a stray tooth in a gravel pit, they hold a conclave and fashion a creature such as they suppose the possessor of the tooth to have been, and then they shout derisively at Moses.” All bluster aside, in this instance, fundamentalist mistrust would be proven justified. But the fact is that there were scientists who also doubted Piltdown from the beginning. There was Arthur Keith, a museum conservator associated with the Royal College of Surgeons, who suggested that Woodward’s reconstruction of the skull was manifestly inaccurate. There was David Waterston, an anatomist with King’s College, who said the apelike jaw could not possibly have been from the same creature as the humanlike skull, despite the humanlike rooting of its molars, arguing they were two entirely different fossils. Across the Atlantic, in America, there were further grumblings by Gerrit Miller of the U.S. National Museum, who likewise believed the skull and jaw fragments were from two distinct fossil creatures. Eventually these holdouts were converted by further discoveries. In 1913, after some reservations were expressed about the suspicious fact that no eyetooth, or canine, had been found, as a canine tooth would certainly help to determine how apelike the Piltdown creature had been, suddenly an eyetooth was discovered in the gravel pit by the Jesuit, De Chardin, and it matched perfectly with Woodward’s reconstruction of what the half-ape and half-human canine might look like. And in 1915, finally laying to rest all doubts that the two fossils had been from different creatures, Dawson just happened to discover an entirely different set of fossil remains two miles distant from the first site, complete with very similar skull fragments and another human-like molar, along with a Pleistocene-era rhinoceros tooth to provide some sense of its age. This finally quieted most critics, although some continued to doubt. Decades later, their doubts would be vindicated, as scientific testing proved that, not only were the skull and jaw fragments from different creatures, as long suspected by some, but also that the whole thing had been a carefully crafted fraud.

In the 1940s, as misgivings and suspicions about Piltdown had steadily resurged, a way to test the fossils was discovered. The fragments that comprise the Java Man fossil had recently been proven to have come from a single individual through fluorine testing. Throughout a creature’s lifetime, its bones absorb the same amount of fluorine from the water it drinks, so a test of fossilized remains could determine whether fragments were all from the same creature by determining if they all contained the same amount of fluorine. When the tests were conducted in 1948, sure enough, the jaw and skull contained differing levels of fluorine, proving that despite their being found close together and being the exact same brownish color, they were not from a single creature. Since this initial debunking, further chemical tests were able to prove that the remains are far younger than originally believed, despite having been found with animal remains from the Pleistocene, suggesting they may have been planted there. And any further doubts about whether it had been a deliberate hoax evaporated when powerful modern microscopes revealed that the fossils had been doctored. As long suspected by many, the skull fragments were human, unusually thick but within normal human ranges, and the mandible and teeth were from a young orangutan. The hoaxer or hoaxers knew what they were doing. They had filed down teeth in an orangutan jaw to make them appear more human, and they had even gone so far as to drill into the mandible to widen the root holes and make the molars appear more deeply rooted in the human fashion, filling in the roots with gravel and putty. And they had artificially aged all of the fragments with an iron solution to give them all the exact same brown hue. Since these discoveries, the central mystery surrounding Piltdown has been the identity of the hoaxer. Was it a single person or a conspiracy? There have been many suspects. The most outrageous is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who lived nearby and regularly golfed near the Piltdown site and was known to collect fossils and enjoy a good practical joke. It has been suggested that Doyle, a believer in spiritualism, might have been motivated to make the scientific community and their focus on materialism look foolish in retaliation for their scorn for spiritualism. Another suspect was a young member of the Natural History Museum staff, Martin Hinton. In 1970, a trunk of his was discovered that contained bones that had been filed and stained in the same manner as the Piltdown fragments. According to this theory, Hinton had some personal and intellectual differences with Arthur Smith Woodward and wanted to make him look the fool. The major problem with these theories, as I see it, is that both men went to their deaths without ever revealing that they had played the prank, the whole point of which would have been that it is revealed to be a fraud and thus make those who believed it look foolish.

Charles Dawson, the prime suspect in the forgery.

The most likely scenario involves one or all of the three men who initially undertook the excavation of Piltdown in secrecy, Arthur Smith Woodward, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Charles Dawson. Indeed, those who believe in a conspiracy to perpetrate the hoax typically focus on these three. De Chardin is interesting as a suspect because he personally found the eyetooth, but he was a serious scientist who would later help to discover the authentic fossil remains of Peking Man in China. The theory put forward of why he would be involved is also rather flimsy, suggesting that as a Frenchman he just wanted to make British paleontologists look foolish. According to those who knew him best, this was not in his character. As for Arthur Smith Woodward, I think it is safe to exclude him from any such conspiracy altogether. We have the evidence of the letters from Dawson to Woodward showing that he had been drawn to the Piltdown site after fragments were already discovered there, and the fact is that, after Charles Dawson died in 1916, Woodward continued to search for more fossils at Piltdown for nearly 30 years, never finding anything else. Indeed the very fact that Dawson was present at the discovery of or personally dug up every Piltdown find and that nothing else was ever found after his passing seems to implicate him the most. And there are further indications of his guilt as well. Though he was an amateur, he had long sought recognition among the scholarly community. He had a long-standing certificate of candidacy for the Royal Society that he renewed every year until his death, though he was never accepted. And he may not have shrunk from unethical efforts to receive that recognition. Before the Piltdown affair, he had written two volumes of a history of Hastings Castle and was afterward accused of plagiarizing most of it. One early version of the story he told about discovering the first skull fragment actually said that the worker who handed it to him said they thought it was a coconut, and this is actually identical to the story of the discovery of Java Man, indicating he may have even plagiarized his claims about finding the Piltdown fossil. And according to the most recent scientific investigations into the Piltdown hoax, published by Dawson’s beloved Royal Society, the inexpert forgery of the skull, which appears to have resulted in cracks and damage that had to be mended and covered up with putty, show that the forger was an amateur like Dawson, not a trained paleontologist like Woodward or De Chardin, or even a museum conservator like Martin Hinton. Furthermore, the techniques used by the forger are so consistent that they act as a signature, indicating one forger. In fact, in 2003, an archaeologist examined his antiquarian collection and found several fake artifacts, some showing the same telltale filing of teeth. Add to this the fact that bringing in an accomplice would have introduced a far greater likelihood of exposure, and all signs point to Charles Dawson alone fabricating the Piltdown fragments and either pretending to find them in the Piltdown gravel or planting them where he knew his dupes would see them.

As a means of casting doubt on the consensus of the scientific community, the Piltdown fraud is perfect ammunition for Creationists. It does show that academics are prone to error, like any human beings, and that they seek to preserve and support their own pet theories, their prejudices. It also shows how peer pressure does exist, and casting doubt on accepted views can be discouraged. But it also shows how science inevitably corrects itself because of the power of evidence and falsifiability. The scientific process wins out in the end, and the fact is that, with the development of sophisticated tests such as have been used to reveal Piltdown, a hoax of such a massive scale could not happen again. No, scientists are not infallible, but they may be more likely to examine their preconceptions than theologians, as their entire worldview is based on the correction of false ideas and the empirical building of knowledge. This is not to say that scientists know everything about our origins either. It’s true that we do not yet know with any certainty how life originated, although biochemists have a strong idea of how it may have begun from basic building blocks, and astrochemists have provided some further idea of how comets may have brought those building blocks to Earth. But the thing is, we don’t have to know how life first appeared to acknowledge the fact of how it has evolved. And there are many, many people of strong religious faith who accept this. Some of the keenest minds in Christianity don’t reject science but rather reconcile their faith with the fact of evolution. Darwin himself had been on the path of becoming a clergyman before taking an interest in natural history, and he said himself that he had “never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.” The Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had reconciled his Christian faith with the principles of evolution, as had Raymond Dart, the discoverer of the Taung Child. Famous novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis reconciled the two with this elegant and concise turn of phrase: “For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself.” And the influential evangelist Billy Graham admitted “The bible is not a book of science” and reconciled his faith with biological evolution by stating, “I believe that God created man, …whether it came by an evolutionary process…or not.” Even the last two Popes have reconciled with science, with Benedict XVI calling them “complementary—rather than mutually exclusive—realities” and Francis asserting that “[t]he evolution of nature does not contrast with the notion of creation.” I think fundamentalists can learn a thing or two from these figures. If one feels their faith is threatened by science, then their faith is simply not very strong, because the fact is that faith and science are neither compatible nor in conflict. They are entirely unrelated realms of human thought…that were clearly developed following the evolution of larger brains.

Until next time, remember, When the latest scientific discovery is trumpeted in the press, give it a few years before you start placing too much weight on it.

 Further Reading

Black, Riley. “What’s a ‘Missing Link’?” Smithsonian, 6 March 2018, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/whats-missing-link-180968327/.

De Groote, Isabelle, et al. “New genetic and morphological evidence suggests a single hoaxer created ‘Piltdown man.’” Royal Society Open Science, 1 Aug. 2016, doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160328.

Kramer, Brad. “Famous Christians Who Believed Evolution is Compatible with Christian Faith.” BioLogos, 8 Aug. 2018, biologos.org/articles/famous-christians-who-believed-evolution-is-compatible-with-christian-faith?gad=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwldKmBhCCARIsAP-0rfziunqkYPe1whthvBLbHKBKcNaeqiGV-WOGIWIphFPx2ltaDLI7j90aAgOsEALw_wcB.

Price, Michael. “Study reveals culprit behind Piltdown Man, one of science's most famous hoaxes.” Science, 9 Aug. 2016, www.science.org/content/article/study-reveals-culprit-behind-piltdown-man-one-science-s-most-famous-hoaxes.

Pyne, Lydia. Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils. Viking, 2016.

Rennie, John. “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense.” Scientific American, 1 July 2002, www.scientificamerican.com/article/15-answers-to-creationist/.

“What Is the Evidence for Evolution?” BioLogos, 4 Nov. 2022, biologos.org/common-questions/what-is-the-evidence-for-evolution?gad=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwldKmBhCCARIsAP-0rfyUG_nCH4_0o0BRikNSP-5JtaRjCLjY2PfAvqwuQfKirToWTc8uDHIaAhu4EALw_wcB.

The Forging of the Crystal Skulls

There is no denying that the use of crystals to ensure health and wellness is ancient, as the modern purveyors of crystal healing will surely tell you. What they won’t tell you is that their use today differs fundamentally from their use in the past. Yes, crystals were used, as were almost every other precious stone, in the form of amulets worn for protection and good fortune in ancient Greece and Egypt. Different minerals were believed to have different uses or affect us in different ways, and as we have seen with all lore associated with magic and alchemy, these beliefs persisted, crossed cultural barriers, and evolved through the years into the Middle Ages, when the medicinal and magical properties of crystals and other minerals were catalogued in medical papyri and grimoires. But the use of crystals by New Age gurus today really is not based on historical practices, which fell out of favor in the 17th century as the medicinal powers attributed to crystals began to be attributed instead to the Christian God and his angels. New Age crystal healing really was invented in the 1980s, mostly attributed to the work of Katrina Raphaell, who took what had always been a folk tradition that relied on the placebo effect and transformed it into a modern pseudoscience with an elaborate mythos behind it. According to her, the “science” of crystal healing originated in Atlantis, which as so many have claimed through the ages, was a technologically advanced civilization that, according to Raphaell and the New Age movement, used crystals for telepathic purposes. She claims to possess and teach the supposedly Atlantean art of arranging crystals on the body in such a way that they activate the chakras, allowing one to access deeper levels of consciousness that enable self-healing. And of course, she sells the crystals that are needed. Crystals have become a billion dollar industry since the advent of the New Age movement, and the price can really be hiked if the crystal is claimed to be from Atlantis. Considering this phenomenon and subculture, it is perhaps unsurprising that the most famous and fabled of all crystal artifacts, the crystal skulls that appeared in the possession the Mesoamerican antiquities dealers between the 1870s and the 1930s, would eventually be claimed to have come from Atlantis and have the ability to heal or to kill, to reveal the past or the future. But even dismissing these claims out of hand, the simple claim that these crystal skulls are genuine Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican artifacts cannot be credited. Thus these hoax objects have a false history that has since been encircled by further false claims and pseudohistory, making them a perfect topic for this blog.

This is another of my posts exploring on the lore of the MacGuffins featured in Indiana Jones films, as obviously the fourth film, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, featured a crystal skull as its main MacGuffin. Unlike some of the preceding films, which actually seemed well-read in the lore they explored, this one just mentions that Indy was “obsessed with the Mitchell-Hedges skull” in college… and that’s about it. The crystal skull in the film is not claimed to be one of the known crystal skulls and is shaped differently to look like an elongated skull, thus to connect with Peruvian skull modification and then, of course, to aliens. It might at first seem unrealistic to suggest that an archaeology student would be obsessed with the crystal skull, knowing as we do today that all of them were fakes, but that’s not really accurate. When the aforementioned Mitchell-Hedges skull came to the attention of the scholarly community in the 1930s, since it corresponded with another crystal skull in the possession of the British Museum, it actually did generate some interest. The timeline does not really work, though, since the watershed moment, a major article in the anthropology journal Man, did not come until 1936, at which time Indy was already a professor and international relic-hunter, not a student at University of Chicago. But it’s close enough for jazz, and indeed, the crystal skulls did interest some in the scholarly community at first, as they were at the time preoccupied with craniometry, but more so they interested the general public, especially in France, where these crystal skulls seem to have first appeared. In mid- to late-19th century Europe, there was a real market for trinkets symbolic of death, sold as mementos mori, kept to remind one of the inevitability of death. And in France in particular, a burgeoning industry of macabre art was booming. Stereoscopic cards were becoming more and more popular at the time. These were pairs of nearly identical photographs or prints that appeared three dimensional when viewed in a stereoscope. Think of the viewfinder toys of your youth, if you grew up in the eighties. Increasingly popular in France was a style of stereoscope card called Diableries, in which sculptures or devils and skeletons, often making satirical commentary on the corruption of Napoleon III and his court, came to life, with special effects like a red glow in the eyes of skulls when the lighting was right. Amplifying this was the French interest in Mexican culture, occasioned by Louis Napoleon’s invasion of the country and installment of Austrian archduke Maximilian von Hapsburg as its emperor. Anyone boasting even a passing familiarity with Mesoamerican cultures must be aware of the depiction of skeletons and skulls in their art going all the way back to the Aztecs. The Spanish tried to suppress skull art as pagan, but it remains common in the culture today, in syncretistic coexistence with Catholic traditions. When crystal skulls began to be sold in France in the latter half of the 19th-century, claimed to be Mesoamerican artifacts, they appealed to the European taste for the macabre as well as for the exotic.

A “Diablery,” image courtesy The London Stereoscopic Company.

These first crystal skulls were quite small, perhaps an inch high, and they each had a hole drilled vertically through them from the top of the skull downward, such that they could be worn like a bead. According to my principal source, the extensive work of Jane MacLaren Walsh on this subject, cited below, one of the first such crystal skulls was acquired in Mexico by a British banker sometime in the 1850s, and then two more were displayed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. A fourth was purchased in 1874 by the national museum, and a fifth in 1880. The Smithsonian purchased one from Mexico in 1886. There should have been more caution about the provenance and authenticity of these small crystal skull beads from the start, however, because there was nothing else like them in Mesoamerican art. As it turns out, it was exceedingly rare to find quartz artifacts, at least in controlled archaeological digs, whose finds can be trusted to be genuine. In fact, the sole piece of carved crystal known to have ever been discovered in a pre-Columbian Mesoamerican dig, at Monte Albán in southern Mexico, was a crystal goblet whose rough tool marks indicate the inability of Mesoamerican artists working with stone tools to achieve the kinds of workmanship we see in pretty much all crystal skulls. Any other Mesoamerican artifacts made of crystal are simply small ornaments, like beads. In fact, the Smithsonian’s crystal skull bead was determined in the 1950s to have been carved using a modern lapidary wheel, making it a definite fake, though the hole drilled through it may have been accomplished using more rudimentary tools. This raised the possibility that these small crystal skulls were genuine Mesoamerican crystal beads that had been altered using modern tools in order to make them appeal to European buyers. Indeed, an 18th century South American painting of Saint Teresa of Ávila depicts her wearing just such a skull charm on her rosary. It has been suggested that these skull beads, like the crucifix, may have represented a reminder of Christ’s Passion, which occurred on Golgotha, the hill on which he was crucified, whose name meant “place of the Skull.” This would suggest yet another, older market for such an artifact, giving further reason for their manufacture. But if these first crystal skulls were manufactured in the 19th century, or if they were perhaps simply 18th-century Spanish religious baubles misrepresented as ancient Mesoamerican artifacts, who was responsible for them? As it turns out, one man can be connected, at least circumstantially, to all of them. The two skulls exhibited in Paris at the Exhibition Universelle in 1867 were both from the collection of a French antiquities dealer who served as the official archaeologist of Emperor Maximilian in Mexico, where all the rest of the similar crystal skull beads had been sold to collectors. And this man, Eugène Boban, would later be tied to the emergence of the first life-size crystal skulls.

Boban had left Paris for the Americas at 19 years old, hoping to avoid Napoleon III’s draft and to strike gold in California. Unsuccessful in the gold fields, he came to Mexico City in 1857 and found a new way to strike it rich. After learning Spanish and the indigenous language of Nahuatl, he reinvented himself as an antiquities trader, doing a brisk business selling Aztec artifacts to tourists. About 20 years later, a Smithsonian archaeologist who visited the city warned his fellow scholars about the shops on every corner selling fake artifacts. It was this burgeoning trade in spurious antiquities that Boban helped to spearhead. When, after civil war, the Zapotec native Benito Juarez became president and began dismantling the Catholic churches that had been built on top of Aztec temples, Boban benefitted by acquiring a great deal of Spanish artifacts and art. Then, when Louis Napoleon invaded and established Maximilian as the Mexican Emperor, he benefited again, becoming the “antiquarian to the Emperor,” and amassing a large collection of pagan artifacts. It was Napoleon III’s Commission Scientifique that sent his collection to Paris to be exhibited in 1867, and two years later, Boban went there himself, hoping to sell his collection and finally get rich. He opened a curio shop called Antiquites Mexicaines. During his time there, he became a source for real skulls, which he sold and donated to anthropologists and anatomists. Perhaps having already observed the interest in small crystal skull baubles, and knowing the market for life-size skulls, he seems to have put the two together when he began exhibiting and offering for sale ever larger crystal skulls. In 1878, he sold a collection of small crystal skulls and one grapefruit-sized skull, which also had a hole drilled through it like all the others. Then in 1881, he began to display a life-size crystal skull with no hole drilled through it. These skulls came into his possession while he was in France, so either he had a pipeline direct from Mexico, where artifacts unlike any others ever seen before were promptly shipped to his antiquities shop, or he somehow found and purchased these artifacts from another dealer or a forger whose name he never revealed, or he simply made them himself. Even at the time there was suspicion about them. When his larger crystal skulls were exhibited publicly in Paris, they were displayed with the caveat that “the authenticity appears doubtful.” Unable to sell his life-size crystal skull, Boban returned with it to Mexico and began asserting it was a genuine Aztec artifact that had been discovered in a dig at Veracruz and attempting to sell it to the National Museum of Mexico. When the provenance and authenticity of the skull was challenged before its sale to the museum, and Boban accused of fraud, he hastily took his collection and fled to New York, where he thereafter managed to sell his crystal skull to Tiffany & Co. for an exorbitant price. About ten years later, Tiffany’s sold it to the British Museum, where for a long time it was displayed alongside genuine Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican artifacts as if it were authentic.

Eugène Boban with his collection of Mexican antiquities.

Cut to about 50 years later, in 1943, when a man named Frederick Mitchell-Hedges bid £400 in a Sotheby’s auction to acquire another crystal skull. This one was different from Boban’s skull in that it was more finely polished, more anatomically realistic, and the jaw was of a separate piece, removable from the rest of the skull. Otherwise, though, it was of almost the same exact shape, which fact had garnered interest in the object years earlier, when the anthropological journal Man published a 1936 article consisting of a morphological comparison of the Boban skull in the British Museum and this new skull, which the article indicated was in the possession of one Sydney Burney. After Mitchell-Hedges obtained the skull, he immediately began making unsupported claims about its age and the method by which it was made, saying in a letter to his brother that “scientists put the date at pre-1800 B.C., and they estimate it took five generations passing from Father to son, to complete.” Mitchell-Hedges kept this crystal skull in his possession for the next 16 years, until his death in 1959, and thereafter, it passed into the possession of his adopted daughter Anna Mitchell-Hedges. Since her death in 2007, it has been in the care of her widower, Bill Homann. The story of the Mitchell-Hedges skull is not one of dubious provenance. We know very little about where it came from. It apparently came into Sydney Burney’s possession in 1933 from an undisclosed source. Burney was a London art dealer. It makes sense that he would buy the object and then approach museums with his find in order to ascertain its potential worth, afterward putting it up for auction to the highest bidder. We have no reason to think he forged the item himself, but we do have good reason to suspect that it may have come from the same source as Boban’s skull, since analysis indicates they were carved according to the exact dimensions of the same skull. Whether Boban fabricated both of them or both were carved by some unknown forger, or the latter was copied from the former somehow, we may never know. The story of the Mitchell-Hedges skull is rather more interesting in the way that it gathered myth and legend through the years, like a snowball growing as it tumbles down a snowy slope, false claims accreting as it passed through the decades and through the hands of those who sought to profit from it. And it all began with Mitchell-Hedges himself, whose life story should have demonstrated his lack of credibility from the start.

Frederick Mitchell-Hedges loved a big fish story…literally. He was a wealthy man who spent his time pursuing the hobby of deep-sea fishing, and capitalizing on his hobby by selling stories about his supposed adventures. The fish that got away in his stories, which he published in articles and books, were always giant, man-eating monsters, and Hearst newspapers paid him to spin his yarns. Soon his tales turned to fantastical pseudo-archaeological claims. He claimed to have discovered tribes uncontacted by civilization, to have found unknown continents, and to have been the first to explore the ruins of amazing lost civilizations. In 1927, he claimed to have been assaulted and robbed of some important anthropological artifacts, including papers and shrunken heads, but the Daily Express newspaper exposed this claim as a hoax. Mitchell-Hedges then tried to sue the newspaper for libel the next year, but he lost the suit and under cross-examination was revealed to be something of an imposter when it came to his claims as an explorer. In his 1931 book, Land of Wonder and Fear, he capitalized on these dubious claims, such as having discovered the Mayan city of Lubaantún in British Honduras, though archaeologists and European residents of the area protested that the ruins he had visited, by motor car, had been well-known for a long time. A few years after buying the Burney crystal skull in 1943, and immediately mythologizing it with claims that it was 2000 years old—far older than Boban had ever claimed his “Aztec” skull to be—he had changed his story and begun claiming that he had discovered it himself in the 1930s. Within another five years, he published a new book, Danger My Ally, in which he embellished the story of his crystal skull even further, claiming that it was 3,600 years old, and that somehow he knew it had been used by a Mayan High Priest for some occult ritual. “When the High Priest willed death,” he wrote, “with the help of the skull, death inevitably followed. It has been described as the embodiment of evil.” Thus the Mitchell-Hedges skull came to be called the Skull of Doom, which of course would have been a better name for an Indiana Jones film, if they hadn’t already made Temple of Doom. It seems possible that Mitchell-Hedges’s fictionalizing of the crystal skull’s paranormal powers was inspired by a piece of short fiction published in 1936 called The Crystal Skull. In this story, the author Jack McLaren tells the story of a stolen crystal skull that gives its wielder some kind of psychic powers. Whether Mitchell-Hedges read that story or dreamed up his tall tales on his own, this was just the beginning of the claims of supernatural or occult powers that would eventually surround the Mitchell-Hedges skull.

Mitchell-Hedges (left), as pictured on the cover of one of his books. Image courtesy Archaeology magazine.

The majority of the paranormal claims made about the Mitchell-Hedges skull and crystal skulls generally, were made after Anna Mitchell-Hedges had inherited the object. Like her adopted father before her, she changed the story of where the skull had come from, likely in an effort to provide some more credible provenance. Now she claimed that it was not Frederick Mitchell-Hedges who found it, but rather that she had found it herself when she accompanied him on a certain expedition to the lost Mayan city of Lubaantún. And in order to account for the well-documented fact that her adopted father had bought the crystal skull from London art dealer Sydney Burney, she later claimed that he had borrowed money from Burney and left the skull as security, that he’d merely put the skull in hock until he could redeem it. But of course, it had been auctioned at Sotheby’s, not bought directly back from Burney, and a letter about the skull from Burney to the American Museum of Natural History indicates that it had been in Burney’s possession for a full decade before it was sold at Sotheby’s. More than this, Anna Mitchell-Hedges’s story about finding the skull continually changed. She found it in 1924, or was it 1926 or ’27 or ’28? She remembered being lowered down into a cave, or was it the interior of a pyramid? Or rather, she had climbed to the top of the pyramid and found it under the stones of a fallen altar. And after all, eventually, she recalled that it had been her birthday when she discovered it. Odd that this would slip her mind for so long. Since other archaeologists who were at the Lubaantún site in 1927 and 1928 and asserted that neither Frederick nor Anna Mitchell-Hedges were there at the time, she eventually decided it must have been 1924, making her only 17 years old. The further problem here is that Frederick Mitchell-Hedges wrote extensively about his expeditions, and he did not mention bringing a 17-year-old daughter with him. He wrote about other women he brought, though. For example, he writes about his companion and the bankroller of his expeditions, Lady Richmond Brown, and he even mentions that his secretary, Jane, traveled with him. He even goes into great detail about bringing a pet monkey named Michael along, who became ill on the expedition and whom he had to shoot to put out of his misery, burying him with all the ceremony of a loved one. As scholar Jane MacLaren Walsh points out, it is certainly strange that he would devote more time to his secretary and his pet monkey than to his own teenage daughter in recording the events of the expedition, especially if it were she who had discovered a life-size crystal skull on her birthday. That, it seems, would certainly have made it into the book. Instead, in Danger My Ally, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges is coy about where and when he supposedly found the skull, saying only, “How it came into my possession, I have reason for not revealing.”

Once Anna had acquired the coveted Mitchell-Hedges skull, it wasn’t long before some former associates of her father came around to encourage her to profit from it. Specifically, Frank Dorland, an art dealer from San Francsico, convinced her that he could “launch a programme about the skull” that would raise its worth and drive up its potential price. Dorland had done this before for Anna father. In 1953, six years before his death, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges had purchased a religious icon that was likely one of many copies of a famed icon, the Black Virgin of Kazan. With Dorland’s help, though, Mitchell-Hedges had been able to promote his icon as the original Kazan icon, lost in 1904. Failing that, he asserted that it was at least a certain 16th-century copy of the original, the “Fátima image,” which was lost in 1917 and was just as sought after. Dorland continued his promotion of the Mitchell-Hedges icon for years after Frederick’s death, managing to get it exhibited in New York’s World Trade Fair in 1964. By that time, he had also contracted with Anna Mitchell-Hedges to promote the crystal skull, and he did so by amplifying the idea that it was a supernatural object. He took to calling it “The Skull of Divine Mystery,” “The Skull of Knowledge,” and “The Godshead Skull.” In documents sent to the director of the Museum of the American Indian, it was claimed that the skull could protect against the evil eye, that it “carries protection from heaven” and “defeats all evils of witchcraft,” claiming that it wielded “benevolent divine magic dealing with heaven and angelic forces.” The fingerprints of Dorland’s marketing of the skull seem apparent here, and after this, his “programme” seemed focused on getting books published that further mythologized the crystal skull as a talisman of occult power. In 1970, a book appeared called Phrenology, about the pseudoscience of studying the bumps on people’s skulls in order to determine their personality traits. But the book was more than a simple phrenology manual. It was written by Sybil Leek, a self-proclaimed psychic medium and probably the best-known representative of witchcraft in England. She wrote some 60 books in her lifetime, on astrology, numerology, faith healing, reincarnation, et cetera, and the cover of her book on phrenology pictured the Mitchell-Hedges skull. In it, she made strange claims that the skull was not actually Mesoamerican but had been carried to the New World by… and maybe you can guess who… that’s right, the Knights Templar. After this book’s publication, Anna Mitchell-Hedges was upset with Dorland, not so much about the claims Leek made in it, but rather that the English witch said the skull belonged to Frank Dorland. In order to pacify her, Dorland arranged for another book to be published by a novelist named Richard Garvin. This 1973 book, with the kind of eye-catching occult cover art that grabbed readers’ attention in those years, was called The Crystal Skull, and in it, it was suggested that the skull originated in Atlantis, that it was evil, that it brought death to those who would not revere it and could be used as a terrible weapon in the wrong hands.

The beguiling cover of the 1974 book that helped popularize the Crystal Skull legend. Image used under Fair Use.

So we see that the mythologizing of crystal skulls as objects of occult power started with the yarn-spinner Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, and continued after his death with his adopted daughter and with Frank Dorland, his old partner in marketing dubious artifacts. From the 1970s onward, it is possible to trace all outlandish paranormal claims about crystal skulls, including their ability to hypnotize and impart knowledge when one looks into their eyes, as depicted in the Indiana Jones film, back to these efforts at marketing an artifact that previously had only been viewed as a ritual object, if not as a fraud. In the book that Frank Dorland commissioned, the author insinuated that archaeologists dismissed it and scientists refused to study it “because they cannot come to grips with the fact that there may be a knowledge demonstrated here which is beyond our civilized comprehension.” And this, as usual, is the ultimate joke. As I have argued before, such claims just show a fundamental lack of understanding of the scholarly community and academic study and publishing, as a scientifically verifiable discovery of something seemingly supernatural would be sought after. It would mean fame, which would mean funding. And in fact, my principal source for this episode, the anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh, a Smithsonian archivist, has done more than dig up all the history of the crystal skulls, from Boban to Mitchell-Hedges. She has also subjected the Mitchell-Hedges skull to the scientific testing that it was long claimed scientists refused to conduct. What she found was that, indeed, the Mitchell-Hedges skull appeared to be an exact copy of the Boban skull in its dimensions, but that the anatomical details of its eye sockets, nasal cavity, teeth and jaw were more correct, which leads to the conclusion that a later forger was attempting to capitalize on the Boban skull while also improving on its workmanship. Using ultraviolent light, computerized tomography, and scanning electron microscopy, Walsh confirmed that the Mitchell-Hedges skull showed signs of having been carved with high-speed wheeled rotary carving using diamond-coated, hard metal tools that have only been available in modern times. Thus, the Mitchell-Hedges skull was likely forged sometime in the 1930s, before it came into Sydney Burney’s possession. Likewise, similar testing was conducted on the Boban skull that demonstrated it too had been carved using wheeled rotary technology that would have been in use in the 19th century. Considering this evidence, it is safe to dismiss all the crystal skulls as forged artifacts, and all the claims made about their provenance and paranormal powers as nothing but hoaxes.

At first blush, one might think that these hoax artifacts are a ridiculous MacGuffin for Indiana Jones to quest after, since as an archaeologist in the 1950s, when that film was set, he likely would not have given much credence to the stories of crystal skulls. But of course, if we were to judge his character based on the real-life authenticity of the objects he searches for, then the notion that he and his father believed the Holy Grail was a real object makes them seem just as ridiculous. Based on the idea that he thought the literary invention of the Holy Grail might have been real, and that he was obsessed with the Mitchell-Hedges skull, we might begin to view Indy as a credulous dupe and a pseudo-archaeologist. But we must remember that these are action-adventure films with science-fiction/fantasy elements, and for such a story, the crystal skulls are kind of perfect MacGuffins to weave into a story about the search for a lost city of gold founded by ancient aliens. Even though the execution wasn’t great, I suppose I see what they were going for and can’t fault them for trying. Interestingly, there is one more connection between the story of the crystal skulls and the Indiana Jones films. The golden idol that Indy snatches from a booby-trapped ruin in South America in Raiders of the Lost Ark is apparently modeled after a statuette of the goddess Tlazolteotl on display at the Dumbarton Oaks museum in Washington, D.C. The provenance of this statuette was questionable, and because images of this deity do not typically depict her in a squatting position giving birth, as is the case with this piece, some suggestions of its inauthenticity have arisen. As it turns out, Eugène Boban played a significant part in the original acquisition of this piece, and when Jane MacLaren Walsh, who was piecing together Boban’s frauds more than a hundred years later, analyzed the statuette, she again discovered evidence of modern rotary lapidary tools. Thus it seems more than one hoax artifact cooked up by the swindler Eugène Boban may have ended up inspiring the MacGuffins that famous archaeologist Indiana Jones risks his very life seeking out.

The Mitchell-Hedges skull. Image courtesy Archaeology magazine.

Until next time, when next you visit a museum, remember, even the objects displayed there and asserted to be of a certain age and origin, aren’t always as authentic as is claimed.

Further Reading

May, Brian. “Diableries: French Devil Tissue Stereos.” The London Stereoscopic Company, www.londonstereo.com/diableries/index.html.

Morant, G. M. “142. A Morphological Comparison of Two Crystal Skulls.” Man, vol. 36, 1936, pp. 105–07. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/2789341. Accessed 26 July 2023.

Walsh, Jane MacLaren, and David R Hunt. “The Fourth Skull: A Tale of Authenticity and Fraud.” The Appendix, vol. 1, no. 2, April 2013, theappendix.net/issues/2013/4/the-fourth-skull-a-tale-of-authenticity-and-fraud.

Walsh, Jane MacLaren. “The Dumbarton Oaks Tlazolteotl: Looking Beneath the Surface.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes, vol. 94, no. 1, 2008, pp. 7-43. OpenEdition Journals, journals.openedition.org/jsa/8623.

Walsh, Jane MacLaren. “Legend of the Crystal Skulls.” Archaeology, vol. 61, no. 3, 2008, pp. 36–41. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41780363. Accessed 26 July 2023.

Walsh, Jan Maclaren. “The Skull of Doom.” Archaeology, 27 May 2010, archive.archaeology.org/online/features/mitchell_hedges/.  

The Source of the Fountain of Youth Myth

The existence of Amazon warrior women was a mainstay of Western mythology. These women who fight on horseback and, it was sometimes said, had one of their breasts removed so as to better operate a bow, fought in the Trojan War according to Homer’s Iliad, one of the oldest surviving literary works of Europe, likely dating to the 8th century BCE. They did not cross over from myth to what might be considered history by some until around 450 BCE, when Greek historian Herodotus made reference to them as if they were real. When he encountered in Lycia a society that valued maternalism and traced kinship through matrilineal descent, he thought without evidence that they must be descended from the famous Amazons. And in describing the forerunners of the Sarmatian people, a matriarchal and equestrian culture, Herodotus writes “the story is as follows” and seemingly repeats an unsupported claim that their people were produced by some shipwrecked Amazons who procreated with Scythian men. While evidence has arisen to suggest real Eurasian warrior women inspired these tales, they fall squarely in the realm of myth, and evolved as they were embraced by other cultures. In Arabian legend, Alexander the Great was said to have married the Queen of the Amazons, and it was claimed that the homeland of the warrior women was on an island in the Indian Ocean, but in the Middle Ages, Arab cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi located this mythical island in the Atlantic Ocean, and here we start to see hints of the modern day legends that inspired Wonder Woman. Unsurprisingly, in the 15th and 16th centuries, when explorers believed that they might encounter any number of such mythical isles across the great sea, such as Antillia or the Fortunate Isles, the notion that any island they might happen upon could be the isle of the Amazons loomed in imaginations. As a result, when explorers did make landfall, they looked for indications of a matriarchal culture as evidence of such a discovery. Christopher Columbus wrote in the log of his first voyage that some natives told him, no doubt in response to some leading and poorly translated questions, that some nearby island was inhabited only by women, and that they received male visitation only during certain times of the year for reproductive purposes. Columbus was actually well-versed in such myths and in Greek and Arab classic literature generally. He latched onto such indications with alacrity, quick to twist any native tales, whether poorly understood or even fabricated in an effort to please him, as proof of the existence of such mythological locations. In reality, it seems, the natives he was questioning were actually referring to an island on which they kept female prisoners for forced breeding. But this would not be the last time that Columbus or other explorers mistakenly believed they had discovered a mythical site. Another such myth, that of the Fountain of Youth, the spring that originated in paradise and rejuvenated those who bathed in or drank from it, was also sometimes prominent in the thoughts of New World explorers, though we find when we look further into this myth that it has become even more a myth, a historical myth, falsely claimed to have been a legend among native tribes and inaccurately asserted to have been the obsession and sole objective of the conquistador Juan Ponce de León’s expedition to Florida.

While the story of Ponce de León and his discovery of Florida during the course of his obsessive search for the Fountain of Youth has made him a rather famous and romantic historical figure, some may be surprised to learn that previous to the 20th century there was little interest in him and his expedition in search of the mysterious island called sometimes Bimini and other times Beniny. In 1913, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the supposed discovery of Florida, a variety of historians wrote more on the 1513 voyage of Ponce de León than had been written about him since the beginning of the 17th century. What they found was certainly a figure of interest who had fallen between the cracks of historiography and deserved to be more widely known. Juan Ponce de León, a youth of 19 years from an influential family, is said to have served as a page and squire and perhaps to have fought Muslims in the Granada War before joining the crew of Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas, where he was present at the discovery of Puerto Rico. Lest anyone suspect that I glorify the memory of this man, it should be established that he was a conquistador at heart from the beginning. He was a nobody before 1504, and he won respect as well as a grant of land and native slaves for the large part he played in suppressing a Taíno rebellion on Higüey, a massacre described in nauseating detail by Bartolomé de las Casas. Four years later, after expanding Spanish colonization in the area, he was tasked by King Ferdinand with forcing all the remaining Taíno into servitude, mining gold for the Spanish coffers. And chasing gold, he then set out to explore and settle Puerto Rico, then called San Juan, and eventually would become the governor of the island. In 1513, however, having lost his governorship for reasons I will explain later, de León obtained a royal contract to seek out the rumored “islands of Beniny” northwest of Hispaniola, on the understanding that he would serve as their governor once settled. There are numerous myths associated with this journey that 20th century historians repeated based on 16th-century accounts, causing Ponce de León’s journey to be so thoroughly mythologized. One was that he landed at St. Augustine, the place where today in Florida an “Archaeological Park” daily attracts tourists as the site of his first landing. This land was purchased in 1868 by someone hoping to turn it into a tourist attraction, and lo and behold, within a few years of creating the park, one of his employees claimed to find a stone cross buried on the property, supposedly left by Ponce de León as a marker. As early as 1935, a historian riding the new popularity of stories about de León, T. Frederick Davis, tried to provide this claim with a veneer of scholarly respectability, claiming that navigational data showed his course would have taken him to St. Augustine. This interpretation of the data proved erroneous. In the 1950s, another historian, Edward Lawson,  argued that testimonies and other archaeological evidence indicating the existence of a populous native village at the site proved it was where de León landed, when in fact he would likely have avoided such a landing site where natives might have repelled their boats. In fact, Ponce de León’s log indicates he looked for a landing site in this area but found no amenable inlet or harbor and thus moved on. Another big myth perpetuated by 20th-century historians actively renewing interest in Ponce de León’s voyage was that he had discovered Florida. The land of Florida, or it was called back then, the islands of Beimini or Beniny, had already been systematically raided by Europeans in slaving expeditions. This was how King Ferdinand and Ponce de León even knew to sail north of San Juan Bautista to find the land. His real legacy, his actual discovery, the Gulf Stream, that ocean current that would become so important as a marine highway, was largely overlooked by historians for a long time, overshadowed by the misconception that he had discovered Florida and by the myth that the whole purpose of his venture was to find the fabled Fountain of Youth.

Depiction of Spanish massacre of natives, courtesy John Carter Brown Library (CC BY-SA 4.0)

To give a sense of how widespread and accepted the idea was, in 1985, the historian Robert Weddle wrote, “That the Fountain of Youth legend influenced Ponce de León’s discovery of Florida has long been accepted as fact,” and though it did not prove the truth of it, the statement that it was accepted was surely accurate. The aforementioned work of T. Frederick Davis in 1935 explicitly claimed the search for a “spring” that was capable of “restoring youth to the aged” as the “Purpose of the Voyage,” and he claimed that Ponce de León was drawn on this quest because there existed an “Indian legend” that this spring could be found on “an island called Bimini (supposed by the Spaniards to be one of the Lucayos, or as we call them now, the Bahamas).” To give a sense of the inaccuracies in this 20th-century historiography, the island of Beniny or Beimini for which de León searched was not in the Bahamas, though this confusion may have eventually led to those islands being called the Bahamas. To illustrate this fact, Ponce de León put ashore at the northernmost of the Bahama islands, Guanahani, for ten days to prepare for his northwestward voyage across the open sea in his effort to reach the island of Beniny (actually the mainland of North America) that he knew lay somewhere in that direction. But this error was repeated by numerous historians, as was the insistence that de León was in search of the Fountain of Youth, to the point that the inaccuracies appeared in editions of Collier’s Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Americana, and Encyclopedia Britannica, thereafter resulting in both myths being printed in school textbooks. The popularity in 20th-century historiography of the myth that Ponce de León was obsessed with finding the Fountain of Youth is sometimes blamed on the mythmaking of 19th-century American writer Washington Irving. Much as we saw Irving was largely responsible for myths surrounding Christopher Columbus, he also embellished the story of Ponce de León in some chapters of his 1831 work Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus. This work was produced just a little more than a decade after Spain renounced all claim to Florida to the U.S. in 1819, and we might consider this the first instance of a resurgence in interest in the voyage of Ponce de León, written with something of an axe to grind, as Irving depicts de León as vain and credulous. Even Irving acknowledges how far-fetched the idea seems that this conquistador would credit the tales he supposedly heard from natives about a river that restored youth when one bathed in it, writing: “It may seem incredible, at the present day, that a man of years and experience could yield any faith to a story which resembles the wild fiction of an Arabian tale; but the wonders and novelties breaking upon the world in that age of discovery almost realized the illusions of fable, and the imaginations of the Spanish voyagers had become so heated that they were capable of any stretch of credulity.” Whether or not Juan Ponce de León really was this credulous and truly had been searching for the Fountain of Youth will be further examined, but first let us examine the existence of the myth itself. Irving’s statement is at least true in this regard. As we have seen, the Spanish certainly chased after myths, and certainly transplanted their myths onto New World soil. And one of these transplanted myths certainly was that of the Fountain of Youth.

In my episode on Christopher Columbus, I explained how the idea of Earth’s roundness was not a novel idea Columbus had, as Washington Irving had suggested, but in truth, Columbus didn’t even believe the world was round. He had a notion that it was more pear-shaped, with a kind of nipple atop it, and atop this nipple, he believed, was the Garden of Eden at the point closest to heaven. While I call it a myth that Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth, it does seem clear that Columbus was searching for this Terrestrial Paradise. Columbus carried a book by Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, which claimed that the earthly paradise must exist on some phantom island in the Atlantic, such as the Fortunate Isles, and Columbus treated the text like the authoritative source on global geography. He believed that in the Garden of Eden, from the Tree of Life, sprang a great fountain that served as the source of all the great rivers of the world. Indeed, when he reached the mouth of the Orinoco near Trinidad on his third journey, he wrote back to his royal patrons that he must have found that font of life springing from Paradise, for he had never dreamed of such a massive freshwater river. Columbus’s ideas about a fountain of life springing from the Terrestrial Paradise did not come from actual scriptures but rather from medieval legend, which had been grafted onto scriptural accounts of the Garden of Eden. Some claim that the origin of the Fountain of Youth myth, like the Amazonian myth, can be traced back to Herodotus, who once wrote of a long-lived people he called the Icthyophagi, or fish eaters, whose longevity owed to the peculiar quality of a fountain in whose oily waters they bathed. The myth of the Fountain of Youth as we know it today, though, and as the Spanish knew it in the 16th century, first seems to have arisen in the Alexander Romance, which was first composed in the 4th-century CE in Greek and was through the centuries translated into numerous languages in the Middle East before being printed in European vernacular languages in the 13th century. It spoke of Alexander finding a land of flowers where they stumbled across a golden fountain, inset with crystal and surrounded by marble pillars, into which four times a day flowed magical waters from a statue of a golden lion, and when his men bathed in it, their health and vigor were renewed, such that they were younger and could hardly be recognized. The 12th-century letter of Prester John, that anonymous hoax that I devoted a whole episode to discussing a few years ago, also brought this legend to European imaginations. The writer of that fictional account of a Christian king in a magical land far to the East indicates that there is a spring, flowing out of Paradise into a grove at the foot of Mount Olympus, and if one drank from it, they would “suffer no infirmity from that day on” and would forever be exactly thirty-two years old. Then the fountain appeared again in another dubious and anonymous work I’ve mentioned before, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville written in the 14th century and attributed to an English knight who seems to have not existed. In this work, it is called the well of youth, is said to flow out of Paradise, prevent illness, and keep people young, and is placed in an imaginary Eastern city called Palombe. Given Columbus’s mistaken belief that he was sailing westward to reach the East, it was reasonable for him to think he might find such places as were described in these classical and medieval fantasies. But even other explorers and Spanish historians, after finally coming to the understanding that this was not the East they had set out to reach but rather a New World, a new continent to them, the rumors persisted, encouraged, it seems, but the myths of natives that seemed to indicate the fountain’s existence.

16th century depiction of the Fountain of Youth.

In 1516, in a letter to Pope Leo X, the Italian historian chronicling New World discoveries for Spain, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, mentioned a “notable fountain” on an island he called Boyuca, whose waters rejuvenated the old who drank them. In one of his later histories he also shared the story of a native who had been made a slave and baptized a Christian that his father had bathed in a magical fountain in Florida and been made young again. Some historians cite these early claims as evidence that the Fountain of Youth was a legend among natives and was the object of Ponce de León’s voyage, even though Martyr, who would have spoken with Ponce de León in his research, never claimed this. In fact, the story told to him by the captive native can easily be dismissed as unreliable, and also of a later origin. As for the original claim in the 1516 letter, some historians have, without evidence, suggested that Boyuca was actually Bimini, but in fact, this rumor Martyr was sharing was one heard on the expedition of Juan Díaz de Solís, and the description of where this isle of Boyuca supposedly resided seems to place it closer to the Bay of Honduras. Moreover, any and all claims made by the Spanish that the natives they encountered had their own myths of a Fountain of Youth are hard to credit. Bartolomé de Las Casas as well as Spanish friar Ramón Pané and others, after living with Caribbean natives and learning their languages, wrote numerous works detailing the nature of the customs and religion of the indigenous peoples of the West Indies, including accounts of their folktales and myths, and none mention anything resembling a Fountain of Youth. Each supposed rumor of a Fountain of Youth in the Caribbean, coaxed out of natives through poorly translated interrogation, rather tellingly placed the mythical spring in a different place. Thus we might presume that all such “rumors” were actually just natives, failing to entirely understand the meaning of the question, pointing the Spanish toward various ordinary sources of water.

But if the myth of the Fountain of Youth was real, and if some Spanish were questioning natives and looking for it in the New World, why shouldn’t we credit the idea that this was the object of Ponce de León’s voyage, as Washington Irving and so many 20th century historians claimed? This is a valid question, and it can be answered by looking at the sources relied on by those historians. The most cited of all sources that claim Juan Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth is the work of Antonio de Herrera, whose history of Ponce de León’s voyage, published in 1601, relied on the conquistador’s own log as primary source material. This very fact that it relied on Ponce de León’s log, as well as the fact that de Herrera was the official historiographer of Spain at the time, seems to lend his work credence, even though it was written some 80 years after the voyage. The problem is that nothing in Ponce de León’s log refers to the Fountain of Youth legend at all, and the only mentions of the myth appear in statements that de Herrera inserted, not based on the log at all. He never claims that the log reflects de León’s search for the fountain, or that any native guides were leading him to any rejuvenating spring. Once, he mentions the work of another author, Don d’Escalante Fontaneda, whose late 16th-century memoir claimed Ponce de León had been searching for the Fountain of Youth at a river in Florida called Jordan. And then at the end of his work, de Herrera simply says that Ponce de León never found that Fountain. This memoir by Fontaneda that de Herrera seems to have relied on for evidence of de León’s motivation is manifestly unreliable. Fontaneda was a colorful figure. He came from a noble family and like Ponce de León went into service at a young age, at just 13 years old. In 1549, he was shipwrecked in the Florida Keys, and while the natives there killed his shipmates, perhaps because of his youth they spared him, and he lived among these indigenous islanders for 17 years. Ten years after his rescue, he wrote his memoirs, and there is no reason to consider him an authority on the voyage of Ponce de León or much of anything beyond the culture of the particular natives he lived among on the Keys. Indeed, there is no River Jordan in Florida, and this appears to have been a kind of scriptural allusion to the river in which John the Baptist conducted the ritual of baptizing, which represents a kind of rebirth like the Fountain of Youth is said to provide, making the whole account more literary than historical.

17th century engraving of Juan Ponc e de León

There was, however, one principal, original source from which Fontaneda likely derived his account of Ponce de León’s search for the Fountain of Youth, written in 1535 by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Indeed, the fact that de Oviedo was his predecessor as Spain’s official historiographer likely compelled de Herrera to make sure his later account of Ponce de León’s voyage fell in line with the earlier one. De Oviedo speaks explicitly and derisively of de León as a vain and avaricious egotist and claims that searching for the Fountain of Youth was the sole purpose of his voyage, specifically because Ponce de León hoped that the fabled spring might cure his enflaquecimiento del sexo, literally his “emaciation of sex,” meaning his impotence. The fact that the myth of Ponce de León’s search for the Fountain of Youth originated with this claim, made 14 years after the conquistador had died and thus after he could protest, is ridiculous. It is libel, pure and simple, and there is evidence that it was false. Ponce de León was a portrait of machismo, just like his father, who sired dozens of illegitimate offspring. Having a philandering father and acting macho is surely no certain sign of virility, but Ponce de León fathered four children of his own with his wife, and it is known that he insisted on taking his mistress with him on his voyage. Some historians, seeking to bolster de Oviedo’s credibility, claimed that de León must have been older by the time of his voyage, thus suggesting his obvious virility must have been waning, but other historians have proven he was only 39 at the time. Then again, historians partial to de Oviedo’s myth about his search for the Fountain have suggested that it was not his own impotence he sought to cure with the waters of the Fountain, but that of King Ferdinand, who was older and had married a younger woman. But this is pure speculation, and there is no evidence of it. In fact, just as Ponce de León’s log makes absolutely no mention of the Fountain of Youth, so too his royal charter, the official patent issued by King Ferdinand, mentions nothing about searching for the Fountain of Youth. Rather, it indicates, in precise details, that the purpose and goal of his expedition was to explore and settle the large island of Beniny, which was actually not an island but the continental mainland, and which Ponce de León named Florida after his landing because of the flowers he admired there. In truth, as we know today, Ponce de León’s voyage was intended not to find a mythical fountain but to find gold and to expand the Spanish Empire, and on a more personal level, Ponce de León was seeking to reestablish his own power, which had recently been taken from him in a political struggle with Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus. Unprecedented rights had previously been granted to Columbus for his discoveries, and his son came to the New World to seize power, taking the position of Viceroy as his birthright and forcing Ponce de León out of power in Puerto Rico. King Ferdinand, who viewed Ponce de León as a faithful servant and resented the Columbus family’s growing power, encouraged de León to establish himself in Florida as both a reward and to ensure he still had loyal governors in the region. Though it is admittedly speculation, the fact that Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo wrote with such admiration about Christopher Columbus and was personally acquainted with Columbus’s son, Diego Colón, suggests that perhaps his blatant slander of Ponce de León was simply a matter of personal bias against a man he had only heard about from friends who maligned his memory.

It is astonishing and disconcerting that one nasty statement by a biased historian almost 500 years ago could result in a falsehood being perpetuated even today. We see in this story how one unsupported statement is repeated by other historians through the ages, relying only on the views of historians who came before them rather than on primary source material, none of which actually support the claim that Florida was discovered in an effort to find a magical spring that grants eternal youth. In my principal source, “Anatomy of an Historical Fantasy: The Ponce de León-Fountain of Youth Legend,” published in Revista de Historia de Americá in 1998, Douglas Peck details each step of the way how this myth migrated from its Eurasian roots to the New World, how Oviedo maliciously made an unfounded claim about Ponce de León’s vain preoccupation with it, and how this lie was carried through the centuries and embellished even by otherwise conscientious historians until it entered encyclopedias and textbooks. It took more than 450 years to set the record straight, and with the myth now firmly rooted as common knowledge in the minds of most Americans, who knows how long it will take to replace the myth in the public imagination. After all, the false version has become a foundational story in Florida. Starting in 1900 with a new owner, the St. Augustine Archaeological Park was aggressively marketed as the actual Fountain of Youth, where tourists can pay the price of admission and drink some sulphury-smelling spring water that they’re told was the object of Juan Ponce de León’s 16th-century expedition. Indeed, this has become something of a tourist industry, with numerous mineral springs laying claim to the title of the real Fountain of Youth. We might even see this as a theme in Florida’s culture generally, with elderly retirees from all over the country moving there to find a new lease on life, and adults all over the world flying there to visit Disney World and feel young again. We could even see a parallel in the current political culture of Florida under their governor, who is determined to take his state, and the country if he ever manages to win higher office, backward rather than forward. And the idea of our national political culture reverting to a juvenile or infantile state should really scare all of us. Today the concept of the Fountain of Youth survives mostly as a metaphor. Just as the Holy Grail and El Dorado have become metaphors for an ideal or perfect thing that we may pursue, so too the Fountain of Youth has come to represent anything that we may use or do or seek out that makes us healthy or young at heart. The term is used heavily in marketing health and wellness products, as well as aphrodisiacs. Though the products have changed, we find that the myth has long been used by snake-oil salesmen to hawk whatever frauds they have on hand, and looking at the history of this myth, we find that maybe it was always used as a kind of deceptive marketing scam, to sell tickets to theme parks, to sell the idea of Florida, to sell a romantic version of European colonialism, and to sell a version of history tainted by myth.

An old postcard for the “Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park” in St. Augustine, Florida

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Until next time, remember, even otherwise trustworthy and scrupulous historians are not immune to the spread of historical myths, but in due course, it seems, eventually, they do get revealed. 

Further Reading

Fuson, Robert H. Juan Ponce de Leon and the Spanish Discovery of Puerto Rico and Florida. University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Peck, Douglas T. “Anatomy of an Historical Fantasy: The Ponce de León-Fountain of Youth Legend.” Revista de Historia de América, no. 123, 1998, pp. 63–87. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20139991.