The Lying Stones of Marrakech Read online

  Part V, on scientific subjects with more obvious and explicit social consequences (and often, unacknowledged social origins as well), also uses biography, but in a different way to link past stories with present realities—to convey the lesson that claims for objectivity based on pure discovery often replay episodes buried in history, and proving (upon exhumation and linkage) that our modern certainties flounder within the same complexities of social context and mental blockage: Spencer’s social Darwinism, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and modern eugenics (chapter 17); contemporary boasts about the discovery of genes for specific behaviors, Davenport’s heritability of wanderlust, and the old medical theory of humors (18); Dolly the cloned sheep, the nature of identical twins, and the decapitation of Louis XVI (19); J.B.S. Haldane on the “humaneness” of poison gas in warfare, and the role and status of unpredictability in science (20).

  Finally, part VI abandons biography for another device of essayists: major themes (about evolution’s different expression across scales of size and time) cast into the epitome of odd or intriguing particulars: fossil embryos nearly 600 million years old (21); three stories about measurable evolution in snails, lizards, and fishes (22), conventionally misinterpreted as modest enough to prove the efficacy of Darwin’s mechanism extended across the immensity of geological time, but far too rapid and convulsive to convey any such meaning when properly read at this grand and unfamiliar scale; and avoidance in antipathy among several Christian groups (23) that “share” Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre (the traditional site of Christ’s crucifixion).

  At this equipoise, with one more foray into the breach yet to come, I can only thank readers who have joined me on this rocky journey. For only the conjunction of growing fellowship and increasing knowledge—a loop of ethical and intellectual, emotional and rational feedback that positively rings with the optimism of potential survival, maybe even transcendence, in this endlessly fascinating world of woe—can validate the accident of our existence by our free decision to make maximal use of those simple gifts that nature and evolution have granted us.

  I

  Episodes

  in

  the Birth

  of

  Paleontology

  The Nature of Fossils

  and the

  History of the Earth

  1

  The

  Lying Stones

  of Marrakech

  WE TEND TO THINK OF FAKERY AS AN ACTIVITY DEDIcated to minor moments of forgivable fun (from the whoopie cushion to the squirting lapel flower), or harmless embellishment (from my grandfather’s vivid eyewitness 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 run in a stadium with a maximal capacity of some fifty thousand).

  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 25 million pounds sterling—then a record price for a painting—may well be a forged copy made around 1900 by the stockbroker and artist manqué 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 so many 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 persistence 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 standard form bears little relationship to the actual course of events as best reconstructed from available evidence. Finally, to cite the third common property of such legends, a correction of the conventional tale wins added and general value in teaching us important lessons about how we use and abuse our own history. Thus, the old story 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 from their college courses in natural science).

  In 1726, Dr. Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer, an insufferably pompous and dilettantish professor and physician from the town of Würzburg, published a volume, the Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (Würzburg 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 portrayed a large array of objects, all neatly exposed in three-dimensional relief on the surface of flattened stones. The great majority depicted organisms, nearly all complete, including remarkable features of behavior and soft anatomy that had never been noted in conventional fossils—lizards in their skin, birds complete with beaks 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—YHVH, 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. But he didn’t doubt their authenticity either, 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 realized that he had indeed been duped, presumably by his students playing a prank. (Some sources say that he finally acknowledged the trickery when he found 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 Lügensteine, or “lying stones.”

  To illustrate the pedigree of the canonical tale, I cite the version given in the most famous paleontological treatise of the early nineteenth century, Dr. James Parkinson’s Organic Remains of a Former World (volume 1, 1804). Parkinson, a physician by training and a fine paleontologist by avocation, identified and gave his name to the degenerative disease that continues to puzzle and trouble us today. He wrote of his colleague Beringer:

  One work, published in 1726, deserves to be particularly noticed; since it plainly demonstrates, that learning may not be sufficient to prevent an unsuspecting man, from becoming the dupe of excessive credulity. It is worthy of being mentioned on another account: the quantity of censure and ridicule, to which its author was exposed, served, not only to render his cotemporaries [sic] less liable to imposition; but also more cautious in indulging in unsupported hypotheses…. We are here presented with the representation of stones said to bear petrifactions of birds; some with spread, others with closed, wing
s: bees and wasps, both resting in their curiously constructed cells, and in the act of sipping honey from expanded flowers … and, to complete the absurdity, petrifactions representing the sun, moon, stars, and comets: with many others too monstrous and ridiculous to deserve even mention. These stones, artfully prepared, had been intentionally deposited in a mountain, which he was in the habit of exploring, purposely to dupe the enthusiastic collector. Unfortunately, the silly and cruel trick, succeeded in so far, as to occasion to him, who was the subject of it, so great a degree of mortification, as, it is said, shortened his days.

  All components of the standard story line, complete with moral messages, have already fallen into place—the absurdity of the fossils, the gullibility of the professor, the personal tragedy of his undoing, and the two attendant lessons for aspiring young scientists: do not engage in speculation beyond available evidence, and do not stray from the empirical method of direct observation.

  In this century’s earlier and standard work on the history of geology (The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences, published in 1934), Frank Dawson Adams provides some embellishments that had accumulated over the years, including the unforgettable story, for which not a shred of evidence has ever existed, that Beringer capitulated when he found his own name in Hebrew letters on one of his stones. Adams’s verbatim “borrowing” of Parkinson’s last line also illustrates another reason for invariance of the canonical tale: later retellings copy their material from earlier sources:

  Some sons of Belial among his students prepared a number of artificial fossils by moulding forms of various living or imaginary things in clay which was then baked hard and scattered in fragments about on the hillsides where Beringer was wont to search for fossils…. The distressing climax was reached, however, when later he one day found a fragment bearing his own name upon it. So great was his chagrin and mortification in discovering that he had been made the subject of a cruel and silly hoax, that he endeavored to buy up the whole edition of his work. In doing so he impoverished himself and it is said shortened his days.

  Modern textbooks tend to present a caricatured “triumphalist” account in their “obligatory” introductory pages on the history of their discipline—the view that science marches inexorably forward from dark superstition toward the refining light of truth. Thus, Beringer’s story tends to acquire the additional moral that his undoing at least had the good effect of destroying old nonsense about the inorganic or mysterious origin of fossils—as in this text for first-year students, published in 1961:

  The idea that fossils were merely sports of nature was finally killed by ridicule in the early part of the eighteenth century. Johann Beringer, a professor at the University of Würzburg, enthusiastically argued against the organic nature of fossils. In 1726, he published a paleontological work … which included drawings of many true fossils but also of objects that represented the sun, the moon, stars, and Hebraic letters. It was not till later, when Beringer found a “fossil” with his own name on it, that he realized that his students, tired of his teachings, had planted these “fossils” and carefully led him to discover them for himself.

  A recent trip to Morocco turned my thoughts to Beringer. For several years, I have watched, with increasing fascination and puzzlement, the virtual “takeover” of rock shops throughout the world by striking fossils from Morocco—primarily straight-shelled nautiloids (much older relatives of the coiled and modern chambered nautilus) preserved in black marbles and limestones, and usually sold as large, beautifully polished slabs intended for table or dresser tops. I wondered where these rocks occurred in such fantastic abundance; had the High Atlas Mountains been quarried away to sea level? I wanted to make sure that Morocco itself still existed as a discrete entity and not only as disaggregated fragments, fashioning the world’s coffee tables.

  I discovered that most of these fossils come from quarries in the rocky deserts, well and due east of Marrakech, and not from the intervening mountains. I also learned something else that alleviated my fears about imminent dispersal of an entire patrimony. Moroccan rock salesmen dot the landscape in limitless variety—from young boys hawking a specimen or two at every hairpin turn on the mountain roads, to impromptu stands at every lookout point, to large and formal shops in the cities and towns. The aggregate volume of rock must be immense, but the majority of items offered for sale are either entirely phony or at least strongly “enhanced.” My focus of interest shifted dramatically: from worrying about sources and limits to studying the ranges and differential expertises of a major industry dedicated to the manufacture of fake fossils.

  I must judge some “enhancements” as quite clever—as when the strong ribs on the shell of a genuine ammonite are extended by carving into the smallest and innermost whorls and then “improved” in regular expression on the outer coil. But other “ammonites” have simply been carved from scratch on a smoothed rock surface, or even cast in clay and then glued into a prepared hole in the rock. Other fakes can only be deemed absurd—as in my favorite example of a wormlike “thing” with circles on its back, grooves on both sides, eyes on a head shield, and a double projection, like a snake’s forked tongue, extending out in front. (In this case the forger, too clever by half, at least recognized the correct principle of parts and counterparts—for the “complete” specimen includes two pieces that fit together, the projecting “fossil” on one slab, and the negative impression on the other, where the animal supposedly cast its form into the surrounding sediment. The forger even carved negative circles and grooves into the counterpart image, although these impressions do not match the projecting, and supposedly corresponding, embellishments on the “fossil” itself.)

  But one style of fakery emerges as a kind of “industry standard,” as defined by constant repetition and presence in all shops. (Whatever the unique and personal items offered for sale in any shop, this vin ordinaire of the genre always appears in abundance.) These “standards” feature small (up to four or six inches in length) flattened stones with a prominent creature spread out in three dimensions on the surface. The fossils span a full range from plausible “trilobites,” to arthropods (crabs, lobsters, and scorpions, for example) with external hard parts that might conceivably fossilize (though never in such complete exactitude), to small vertebrates (mostly frogs and lizards) with a soft exterior, including such delicate features as fingers and eyes that cannot be preserved in the geological record.

  After much scrutiny, I finally worked out the usual mode of manufacture. The fossil fakes are plaster casts, often remarkably well done. (The lizard that I bought, as seen in the accompanying photograph, must have been cast from life, for a magnifying glass reveals the individual pores and scales of the skin.) The forger cuts a flat surface on a real rock and then cements the plaster cast to this substrate. (If you look carefully from the side, you can always make out the junction of rock and plaster.) Some fakes have been crudely confected, but the best examples match the color and form of rock to overlying plaster so cleverly that distinctions become nearly invisible.

  A fake fossil reptile from a Moroccan rock shop. Done in plaster from a live cast and then glued to the rock.

  When I first set eyes on these fakes, I experienced the weirdest sense of déjà vu, an odd juxtaposition of old and new that sent shivers of fascination and discomfort up and down my spine—a feeling greatly enhanced by a day just spent in the medina of Fez, the ancient walled town that has scarcely been altered by a millennium of surrounding change, where only mules and donkeys carry the goods of commerce, and where high walls, labyrinthine streets, tiny open shops, and calls to prayer, enhanced during the fast of Ramadan, mark a world seemingly untouched by time, and conjuring up every stereotype held by an uninformed West about a “mysterious East.” I looked at these standard fakes, and I saw Beringer’s Lügensteine of 1726. The two styles are so uncannily similar that I wondered, at first, if the modern forgers had explicitly copied the plates of the Lithographiae Wirceburgensis—
a silly idea that I dropped as soon as I returned and consulted my copy of Beringer’s original. But the similarities remain overwhelming. I purchased two examples—a scorpion of sorts and a lizard—as virtual dead ringers for Beringer’s Lügensteine, and I present a visual comparison of the two sets of fakes, separated by 250 years and a different process of manufacture (carved in Germany, cast in Morocco). I only wonder if the proprietor believed my assurances, rendered in my best commercial French, that I was a professional paleontologist, and that his wares were faux, absolument et sans doute—or if he thought that I had just devised a bargaining tactic more clever than most.

  The striking similarity between the most famous fake in the history of paleontology (Beringer’s Lügensteine, or “lying stones,” of 1726) and a modem Moroccan fabrication.

  But an odd similarity across disparate cultures and centuries doesn’t provide a rich enough theme for an essay. I extracted sufficient generality only when I realized that this maximal likeness in appearance correlates with a difference in meaning that couldn’t be more profound. A primary strategy of the experimental method in science works by a principle known since Roman times as ceteris paribus (“all other things being equal”)—that is, if you wish to understand a controlling difference between two systems, keep all other features constant, for the difference may then be attributed to the only factor that you have allowed to vary. If, for example, you wish to test the effect of a new diet pill, try to establish two matched groups—folks of the same age, sex, weight, nutrition, health, habits, ethnicity, and so on. Then give the pill to one group and a placebo to the other (without telling the subjects what they have received, for such knowledge would, in itself, establish inequality based on differing psychological expectations).The technique, needless to say, does not work perfectly (for true ceteris paribus can never be obtained), but if the pill group loses a lot of weight, and the placebo group remains as obese as before, you may conclude that the pill probably works as hoped.