WorldNetDaily: Anthropologist resigns in 'dating disaster'

The disaster involved has nothing to do with inappropriate inter-office romances. Rather, this goes to the heart of the inherent problem with anthropology and its sister discipline, archaeology. To paraphrase Larry Pearce, the latest man to edit James Ussher's Annals of the World, scientific law in anthropology or archaeology is good perhaps for thirty years, until more evidence comes in to force its repeal. Usually that evidence is another dig, or another find in an existing dig, that the prevailing theory or "law" cannot adequately explain. But sometimes that evidence is evidence that the writer of the earlier scientific law is guilty of worse than mere "reversible error," and is in fact guilty of fraud.

Such is the case now with Reiner Protsch von Zieten, who once had "established" that Neanderthal man lived in Northern Europe. If you thought that Piltdown and Peking Man were celebrated frauds, now imagine a man making an academic career of such fraud for thirty years! The evidence? Skulls supposed to be more than twenty thousand years old are now found to be just a little over thirty-three hundred years old (which would make them contemporary with Ruth and Boaz), or else only two hundred fifty years old (dating back to the French-Indian War)!

"We are having to rewrite prehistory," moans one former colleague. "Anthropology now has to revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 B.C.," sighs another. Ah, when will those anti-religious skeptics ever learn? Do those people propose to shake the foundations of the Bible with a siege tower built on this sort of shifting sand? This would be uproariously funny were it not so sad.