@asomd2021 @akulkis00 @voxday I thought I answered the piltdown man question alr

@asomd2021@akulkis00@voxday I thought I answered the piltdown man question already.

THere are plenty of frauds in history – piltdown being a perfect example. So is the shroud of turin, the voynich manuscript and pretty much every christian relic without exception. My particular interest is in art forgery because my early training is in the fine arts. But it turns out to be relatively easy to spot fraud in the arts. Fraud succeeds for the same reason fraudulent christian relics succeeded: because people want to believe it.

My favorites as a child were the frauds at Ripley’s Believe it or Not. I read the books and went to the museum. I asked so many questions the manager gave young me a handfull of books for free. 😉

Now, it was quite a bit easier to produce frauds before genetics. Now we know pretty much the boundaries of mankind – especially from what we’ve learned over the past ten years or so.

The primary problem we have is that people want to make up stories to explain their archeological and anthropological findings – and it turns out that these stories tend to be pretty much wrong all the time. This is why people like me study the economics, trade, and technology of primitives because almost always it’s “economics in everything” so to speak. The same is true of history. A study of laws and court records falsifies the entirety of writing of the scholars, theologians, and philosophers, who are largely tring to create narratives that will influence current policy.

So if you find x, y, or z, falsehoods they are irrelevant in the face of hundreds of thousands of bits of evidence that isn’t false. And the desperation with which one clings to outliers only demonstrates one is seeking to preserve a cherished lie.