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NARRATOR: What's this?
The plate of brass, which the 16th Century explorer,
Sir Francis Drake left on the coast of America.
This fossil changed sciences idea of evolution.
But was it faked like this?
Did two schoolboys fool the world with this decorated bone
or is it a masterpiece of Stone Age art?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke,
author of "2001" and inventor of the communication satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
of this and other world's.
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I'm visiting a piece of old England.
All the classic ingredients are here,
the golf course with its sweeping green links,
a country club with all the trappings, a red brick post
office, and an Anglican church.
And as in any English suburb, the houses
are built in an eccentric mixture
of styles, Gothic, late Victorian,
and even Stockbroker Tutor.
Yet, this isn't England.
I haven't left Sri Lanka.
This is Nuwara Eliya, a town build as a hilltop health
resort by the British explorer, Sir Samuel Baker,
in the 19th Century.
Baker imported almost everything except the climate, vegetables.
shrubs, sheep, cows, a pack of foxhounds, and even
a blacksmith.
It's a brilliant fake, but it's not intended to fool anybody.
It is not always so easy to distinguish between a fake
and the real thing, as museums all over the world
have discovered, sometimes to their cost.
NARRATOR: In 1579, Sir Francis Drake was circling the world.
He needed to stop to repair his ship.
His Chaplin's account of the voyage
says that Drake landed somewhere on the west coast of America.
In a small bay, he came ashore and put up a brass plate,
claiming the land for Queen Elizabeth.
He named the place, Nova Albion, or New Britain.
GEORGE EPISON (VOICEOVER): Does this look like the place, Jeff?
It was around here.
It could have been a little further over.
NARRATOR: These two men believe that they could be standing
on the very spot where Drake staked
his claim with the brass plate.
One of them, George Epison, is convinced this is the place.
He has spent years trying to prove it.
The other, Jefferson Graves, could unwittingly once have
held the proof in his hand.
[BACKGROUND CONVERSATION]
In the early 1930s as a child, he
came to this spot for a picnic with his parents and a friend.
He was digging in the soil when something caught his eye.
All of a sudden, I saw something shiny.
And I ran over and started digging at that place.
And then pretty soon this shiny thing,
it was getting bigger and bigger.
And I started pulling at it.
And I was trying to get it up.
And it looked like something strange.
NARRATOR: He says he picked up a rectangular brass plate.
On the way home in the car Jefferson was examining
the strange markings on it.
Suddenly, his friend grabbed the plate
and threw it out of the window.
The parents drove on.
And that would've been the end.
[CHURCH BELLS RINGING]
But in 1936, the plate turned up again.
it was found in Marin County and passed through a chain of hands
until it came here to the Bancroft Library at Berkeley.
Historian, Dr. Herbert Bolton, was Director of the Bancroft.
He was delighted.
For years, he told his students how thrilling it
will be if Drakes plate of brass turned up.
And suddenly it had been found and was in his care.
He declared it authentic, placed it in his library,
and paid a reward to the finder.
Bolton's reputation was so great that no one thought
to question his declaration.
But when he died, doubt started to creep in.
Specialists in Elizabethan English
was suspicious of the wording.
The plate of brass was reexamined.
ANTHONY BLISS (VOICEOVER): Unfortunately, we
don't find this artifact terribly convincing.
There are too many things wrong with it.
At first glance, the lettering is quite peculiar.
The way of referring to the queen, for example, is odd.
It's says, "Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth of England," which
is not the way anyone in the 16th Century
would have referred to the Monarch.
It would've been, Elizabeth by the grace of God,
Queen of England or some such formula.
But certainly not this.
The letter forms as well are really quite curious.
The way an N is made simply as a,
not with a diagonal as we would expect,
but with a bar across the top.
In context, you can see it's an N.
But it looks for all the world like a Greek Pi.
NARRATOR: Once the scholars had voiced their doubts,
the scientists were called in.
Dr. Frank Asaro holds the Nobel Prize
for his work in chemistry.
In 1977, he was us to look at the metal
from which the plate was made.
He and his team drilled brass from the side of it
and analyzed what they found.
Our findings do not tell us what the age of the plate is.
But what we did find out was that it was so extremely pure
in the extraneous elements that we look for that it could not
have been made in Drake's time.
The plate of brass is made from copper and zinc.
They did not have copper of that purity
available in Drake's time.
Zinc of that purity was not available in Drake's time.
And they did not have the technology
to make the composition of the plate of brass at that time.
NARRATOR: Not only was the brass too pure,
but the plate seemed to have been
made using modern techniques.
In the 16th Century, brass was hammered into shape.
But this plate bore all the signs of the 20th Century
rolling mill.
It was a standard thickness throughout.
The plate of brass is very close to an eighth
of an inch thick.
It's homogeneous to one one-thousandth of an inch.
Within our ability to measure, it corresponds exactly
with the specifications for the number
eight gauge of the American Wire Gauge Standard
used in the 1930s.
NARRATOR: Back at Agart Beach, George Epison's faith
is undaunted by science or scholars.
He's sure that the log of Drake's explorations
and the description of the bay where he came ashore
point to this place.
With his metal detector, he's combed
every inch of the sand looking for other things
Drake may have left.
Oh I love detecting down here.
And I kind of hear mummers here out in the ocean like voices.
And there are sea dogs that come around, keep me company.
It's sometimes a little spooky, but very interesting.
I love it.
NARRATOR: If, as he believes, the plate of brass is genuine,
then this would indeed be a historic place.
He swore never to give up his campaign,
to have it recognized.
This is our country's oldest and rarest
document, even rarer than the Constitution of American.
It's very historic and should be acknowledged.
NARRATOR: But if he's wrong and the scientists
have proved it a fake, how could the hoax have happened?
At Berkeley, they think they know.
They blame a history professor with a little too much
enthusiasm.
He used to say in class that Drake's plate must be out there
waiting to be discovered.
Well, we've always supposed that that would
be an invitation to students to get together
and produce what was wanted.
And we very much think that's the most likely explanation
of how this came into being.
Professor Bolton was very charismatic man.
After I read his lectures, I wanted to go out
and find the plate of brass.
I can't give you his exact words,
but the ending of his speech was the order
on the plate is there.
Now go out and find it.
NARRATOR: The Natural History Museum in London
is home to the world's most famous collection
of scientific specimens.
The material kept here has provided science
with the information on which the natural history
of the planet has been written.
Specimens, like this fly encased in amber,
resin which solidified 40 million years ago.
Since it emerged from the collection
of the German entomologist, Herman Lowe in 1850,
it's been regarded as a prize exhibit,
for the insect inside this amber is
a member of the house fly family,
which still exists today.
Scientists were amazed to find it had been around so long.
And the natural history of flies was revised
to include this rare discovery.
Until one day, a student was hired to classify
the museums and the collection.
Andrew Ross was using a lamp at the time.
And I thought, wow, amazing specimen.
And then suddenly, a crack appeared around
the fly just around here.
This actually caused from the gentle warmth
from the microscope that I was using.
And this had me very worried, because such
an important specimen, and then a crack
suddenly appearing around it. And thought, oh, no.
Now what do I do?
And I quickly put it away.
I hoped no one would notice it.
But then I thought, no. That's a bit strange.
It shouldn't be doing that.
And then I looked at the slide from the side.
And then everything became clear because someone
had taken a piece of amber.
They cut it in half, hollowed the piece out, put a fly
in some kind of molten resin, and glued
the two bits back together.
NARRATOR: The fact that it was a common house fly
should've alerted the experts.
ANDREW ROSS (VOICEOVER): The fly they chose is a species called
Fannia Scalaris, known as the Latrine fly because it
lives around toilets.
And it's a very advanced fly.
And 150 years ago, there was probably
hundreds of them flying around.
And it was probably just the nearest
fly to hand, perhaps lying on a windowsill somewhere.
NARRATOR: His discovery solved two problems
troubling entomologists.
Why was this the only living species
to be found as a fossil?
And why have no other prehistoric latrine flies
been found?
It's quite satisfying to find that important specimen is
a fake.
Naturally, this solved a lot of problems
because many entomologists have used
this particular species of an example of how long
species of flied can live for.
And they argued that the fossil record of insects
is very poor because there's only one specimen
and there should be a millions of others preserved in resin
that are still living today.
And we now know that the fossil record is much better
and all the insects preserved in amber are extinct.
In science, accusations of fraud and fakery
usually have two results.
One, is heated argument.
The other is a thorough and often agonized
reassessment of what were thought established facts.
This is certainly true in 1985 when Sir Fred Hoyle
and other eminent scientists claimed
that one of the most important fossils ever discovered
was a fake.
It's called Archaeopteryx.
And for more than a century, it had
been hailed as the vital missing link between dinosaurs
and modern birds.
Suddenly, it looked as all the textbooks on evolution
would have to be rewritten.
NARRATOR: Curiously, all the Archaeopteryx fossils
have been found in one small corner of southern Germany
around this stone quarry in Solnhofen.
The story goes that in 1861, the first specimen
appeared when a quarry workmen split a limestone slab.
Over the years, a handful of other Archaeopteryx fossils
emerged from the rock.
From them, the experts reconstructed
this extraordinary creature.
Hailed as the missing link between dinosaurs
and modern birds, it was thought to have
flown 150 million years ago.
Fossil hunters believed the bones survived for two reasons.
The first was that they fell to their deaths
in prehistoric slime.
150 million years ago, this idea here was a shallow sea
with lagoons at they're edges.
Scientists suppose that Archaeopteryx has been living
nearby on-- naturally on trees or bushes, on land,
but perhaps, by thunderstorms, had been driven into the sea
and was drowned.
NARRATOR: The fossils were also preserved
because the mud solidified to the hardest of limestones.
THEO KRESS (VOICEOVER): Archaeopteryx
has been well preserved only here up to now
because this stone is so hard and has
not been attacked by nature.
NARRATOR: Those who believe that all the Archaeopteryx
fossils are fake, point to another characteristic
of the stone.
It's so finely grained that it produces
the best lithographic plates.
Artists can etch the most detailed pictures on them.
Hoax theorists argue that a 19th Century fossil hunter
engraved an Archaeopteryx.
In Canada, one investigator believes
the essential ingredient for the hoax
can be found in anyone's back garde Craig
Willis thinks he knows exactly what
the 19th Century forager did.
Willis spotted three things that alerted him.
The first was about the feathers.
All of the specimens of the Archaeopteryx exhibit
impressions of feathers, which are typical of modern birds
that are capable of flight.
And the feature that stands out the most
is the fact that they all exhibit this off center quill,
or this asymmetric design, which is characteristic of the flight
feathers of all modern birds.
NARRATOR: Also, the Archaeopteryx
did not seem to have the bone structure
of a creature that could fly.
CRAIG WILLIS (VOICEOVER): Not a single one of these exhibited
the characteristic breast bone, which
is the point of attachment for the huge flight muscles
required for flapping flight.
NARRATOR: Finally, Willis argued that the bones
lay flat in the stone.
A three-dimensional creature should have produced
a three-dimensional fossil.
To make his fake fossil, he needs some Solnhofen limestone
and some chemicals.
All of these were available in the mid 19th Century,
when the Archaeopteryx appeared.
First, he rubs a fine powder from the limestone block.
He now adds sodium silicate.
He believes this is the crucial ingredient.
It makes the powdered rock reset into stone
indistinguishable from the original.
What I'm going to do, basically,
is make an impression of the surface of the feather.
A hoaxer would have greased the feather
so that no traces of down remained to give the game away.
And just apply a few drops of the sodium
silicate to the surface.
And I just take the tip of my finger,
and I make a nice feather-sized puddle.
And with the powdered limestone, which I've already prepared,
I just add it.
I then take the feather and place
the feather onto the surface of the mixture like so.
NARRATOR: Once the feather is clamped
into the artificial mud, it takes
only minutes to set before Willis can check on his work.
CRAIG WILLIS (VOICEOVER): Now, once the feather has been
actually carefully peeled away from the service,
there are a couple of features that are striking.
In terms of the texture and the color of the synthetic stone,
it's virtually indistinguishable from me background.
And if you get up very close to it using a good quality
magnifier, such as a jeweler's lens,
it's quite easy to detect all of the very finest detail
of the structure of the feathers,
such as have been noted by investigators who have actually
examined the Archaeopteryx fossils under
a scanning electron microscope.
NARRATOR: Comparison with the Archaeopteryx fossil
confirms Willis's belief.
I'm absolutely convinced that all of the Archaeopteryx,
or the alleged Archaeopteryx fossils,
we're absolutely brilliantly executed forgeries,
using a process, if not identical to the one
that I've just described, and in all its basic features,
very, very similar.
NARRATOR: But back at the Solnhofen quarry,
they don't believe that Willis and the critics
have cracked the case.
Only two years ago, this quarry man discovered the world's
seventh Archaeopteryx.
He says it was in a place no forager could've gotten into,
deep inside a limestone block.
[SPEAKING GERMAN]
INTERPRETER: I was working away with hammer and chisel.
And I was throwing away material we couldn't use.
As I was doing so, I realized there
was a fossil in this stone.
I recognized it as an Archaeopteryx
by the number of its claws.
A dinosaurs has five claws, and an archaeopteryx, only three.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE (VOICEOVER): When they're trying to work out
whether a find is genuine, archaeologists always
check to make sure that there's nothing
suspicious about the circumstances of its discovery.
So when, in 1911, two English school boys claimed that they'd
found a masterpiece of prehistoric art during a break
from class is not surprising that at first investigators
thought the lads had cooked up an elaborate practical joke.
NARRATOR: The Sherborne bone is on its way from London
to the McDonald Archaeological Institute in Cambridge.
To scientists amazement, it's taken 80 years
to establish the truth.
It's latest investigator is Dr. Francesco D'Errico.
I brought from the Natural History Museum
the Sherborne bone with the engraving
of a horse, as you can see.
And please have a look at it.
NARRATOR: On the bone is a carving of a horse's head.
It's been claimed that the bone and the carving
are as much as 10,000 years old.
The story began early this century at a boy's
public school in Dorset.
Sherborne became the unwitting focus for this long
running archaeological mystery.
The Sherborne bone was apparently
discovered in the quarry in the school's grounds.
Retired Sherborne master, Jim Gibb,
as follows the twists and turns of the controversy.
In 1911, two new boys went for a walk up to the quarries
and found this bone with a horse's head scratched on it.
They took it to their day room in the house.
Older boys rubbished it and Cortese, one of the new boys
who found it, decided to throw it into the fire.
He was stopped by an older boy, who said,
give it to the science master.
It's probably genuine.
NARRATOR: The science master did indeed wonder
if the bone might be genuine.
He took it to be examined by experts at the British Museum.
They declared it was the work of Stone Age man.
But not everyone was convinced.
15 years after the bone was found,
the first doubts were emerging when an Oxford scientist,
Professor Solis, said he suspected it
was a schoolboy hoax after all.
The debate has continued over decades.
Now, Dr. Robert Krasinski or the Natural History
Museum in London, is hoping for a verdict from Doctor D'Errico.
Tell me what you can see-- what you conclude about it.
Well, we have a number of things to look at,
to check the authenticity of the engravings--
the shape of engravings and difference in patterner.
NARRATOR: The patterner is the surface texture of the bone.
And Dr. D'Errico knows if the bone and the carving
are the same age, the patterner will be uniform.
But if the carving is more modern, differences will show.
The carved lines will be covered in much less sediment
than the rest of the bone.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO (VOICEOVER): The bone seems to contain
any traces of the sediment.
You you don't see any patterner where
you have the incised lines.
FRANCESCO D'ERRICO (VOICEOVER): No.
The line seems clear, even quite white.
And the surface of the bone is light brown.
So the difference of patterner here
is not a good indication for the authenticity of the engraving.
But I think we have to do something
more to be sure of it.
NARRATOR: The bone and the carving are of different ages.
The museum turned to Oxford University.
Is has one of the world's leading
carbon-14 dating laboratories.
scientist's regard this as probably the most
accurate method available.
The bone was sent to Dr. Robert Hedges.
When we were given the Sherborne bone,
our aim is to date the time when the animal whose bone it was
was living.
This is the powder that we would take
from the bone to begin with.
And that bone powder contains some protein.
We can extract the protein, which is a very tiny amount.
And this very tiny amount of protein
contains the original carbon atoms
that were part of the animal when it was alive.
And it's in these carbon atoms that we measure how much
radiocarbon still survives.
And the amount that survives tells us
how long ago the animal lived.
The longer ago, the less the radiocarbon.
But we found that the bone was about 600 years old.
And of course, this means it's much too young
to have been covered with an engraving
made in Paleolithic times.
So it must have been done very, very
much more recently than that.
NARRATOR: At Sherborne, Jim Gibb accepts the verdict of science.
But he still has faith in the integrity of the two boys
who found the bone.
I think the whole thing was done by older boys, probably
only a year or two older.
They knew a bit about Paleolithic art
because the science master lectured on it.
And the history of the story I think makes it genuine.
But, of course, I was wrong.
Though museum curators may lose sleep
worrying if they're exhibits are fakes, I think the rest of us
secretly enjoy the idea that perhaps we're being coned.
That's why some artists who fake paintings only
become successful when they're caught,
like the British painter, Tom Keating, whose
fraudulent old masters came to be valued almost as highly
is a real things, which all goes to show
that the pleasure provided by a truly ingenious hoax,
can be absolutely genuine.
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