The creationists who believe the world and everything in it was created by a giant pink bunny must have been praying extra hard these past few days:
It appeared to be one of archaeology’s most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old – and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals.
This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten – a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist – told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull.
However, the professor’s 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other “stone age” relics.
Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous “falsehoods and manipulations”. According to experts, his deceptions may mean an entire tranche of the history of man’s development will have to be rewritten.
This sort of thing (Scieno-Teutonic dissembling) really irritates me because it gives ammo to the forces of darkness.