The lying stones of Wurzburg and Marrakech

Natural History, April, 1998 by Stephen Jay Gould

We tend to think of fakery as an activity dedicated to minor moments of forgivable fun (from the whoopee cushion to the squirting lapel flower) or harmless embellishment (from my grandfather's vivid tales of the Dempsey-Firpo fight he never attended to the 250,000 people who swear they were there when Bobby Thomson hit his home ruff in a stadium with a maximum capacity of some 50,000).

But fakery can also become a serious and truly tragic business, warping (or even destroying) the lives of thousands, and misdirecting entire professions into sterility for generations. Scoundrels may find the matrix of temptation irresistible, for immediate gains in money and power can be so great, while human gullibility grants the skillful forger an apparently limitless field of operation. The van Gogh Sunflowers bought in 1987 by a Japanese insurance company for nearly 40 million dollars - then a record price for a painting - may well be a forged copy made in about 1900 by the stockbroker and artist manque Emile Schuffenecker. The phony Piltdown Man, artlessly confected from the jaw of an orangutan and a modern human cranium, derailed the profession of paleoanthropology for forty years until exposed as a fake in the early 1950s.

Earlier examples cast an even longer and broader net of disappointment. A large body of medieval and Renaissance scholarship depended upon the documents of Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-Great Hermes), a body of work attributed to Thoth, the Egyptian God of Wisdom, and once viewed as equal in insight (not to mention antiquity) to biblical and classical sources - until exposed as a set of forgeries compiled largely in the third century A.D. And how can we possibly measure the pain of thousands of pious Jews who abandoned their possessions and towns to follow the false messiah Shabbetai Tzevi to Jerusalem in the apocalyptic year of 1666 - only to learn that their leader, imprisoned by the Sultan and threatened with torture, had converted to Islam, been renamed Mehmed Efendi, and made the sultan's personal doorkeeper.

The most famous story of fraud in my own field of paleontology may not qualify for this first rank in the genre but has surely won both general fame and staying power by persisting for more than 250 years. Like all great legends, this story has a canonical form, replete with conventional moral messages and told without any variation in content across the centuries. Moreover, this canonical form bears little relationship to the actual course of events as best reconstructed from available evidence. Finally, to cite one more common property of legends, the correction of canonical errors gains further value in teaching us some important lessons about how we use and abuse our own history. Thus, the old tale merits yet another retelling, which I first provide in the canonical (and false) version known to so many generations of students (and no doubt remembered by many readers of this magazine from their college courses in natural science).

In 1726, Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer, an insufferably pompous and dilettantish professor and physician from the town of Wurzburg, published a volume, the Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (or Wurzburg lithography), documenting in copious words and twenty-one plates a remarkable series of fossils that he had found on a mountain adjacent to the city. These fossils displayed a great array of objects, all nearly exposed in three-dimensional relief on the surface of flattened stones. The great majority depicted organisms, nearly all complete and including remarkable features of behavior and soft anatomy that would never be preserved in conventional fossils - lizards in their skins, birds complete with beak and eyes, spiders with their webs, bees feeding on flowers, snails next to their eggs, and frogs copulating. But others showed heavenly objects - comets with tails, the crescent Moon with rays, and the Sun all effulgent with a glowing central face of human form. Still others depicted Hebrew letters, nearly all spelling out the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God - YHWH, usually transliterated by Christian Europe as Jehovah.

Beringer did recognize the difference between his stones and conventional fossils, and he didn't state a dogmatic opinion about their nature. Still, he didn't doubt their authenticity, and he did dismiss claims that they had been carved by human hands, either recently in an attempt to defraud or long ago for pagan purposes.

Alas, after publishing his book and trumpeting the contents, Beringer found out that he had indeed been duped, presumably by his students playing a prank. (Some sources say that he finally acknowledged trickery when he noted his own name written in Hebrew letters on one stone.) According to legend, the brokenhearted Beringer then impoverished himself by attempting to buy back all copies of his book and died dispirited just a few years later. Beringer's false fossils have been known ever since as Lugensteine, or "lying stones."