Feorag at The Pagan Prattle passed along this curious news item about an anthropological fraud in Germany. It's also a case of an academic con man—I think Horowitz would just love this Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten of the University of Frankfurt:

During their investigation, the university discovered that Prof Protsch, 65, a flamboyant figure with a fondness for gold watches, Porsches and Cuban cigars, was unable to work his own carbon-dating machine.

He also boasted of having flats in New York, Florida and California, where, he claimed, he hung out with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steffi Graf. Even the professor's aristocratic title, "von Zieten", appears to be bogus.

Porsches? Gold watches? Movie and sports stars? How come none of the scientists I know live that kind of lifestyle?

He's also been discovered to have attempted to sell off the university's chimpanzee skull collection, and a number of their scientific specimen's have since been found to be headless: I guess you can keep yourself in Havanas if you're willing to sell off your scientific artifacts.

Most seriously, he has been corrupting scientific data for a long time. He's not a hugely influential name in science and his "discoveries" haven't been that earthshaking (I'd never heard of him before, and his Hahnhöfersand Man, Binshof-Speyer Woman, and Paderborn-Sande Man are specimens I hadn't heard of, either), but he is apparently one of the European authorities people have sent specimens to for carbon dating. He can't even operate his own equipment, and apparently he's just been making up dates! There may be a number of scientists who are going to have to re-evaluate their data.

That's not the kind of thing you can get away with indefinitely, though. He was caught when his specimens were double-checked by a second and more reputable source, and the inconsistencies started to spill out. I'm sure we'll hear more from creationists crowing about this, but they won't bother to explain that it was real scientists who found him out. And, unfortunately, it's also a black mark for the scientific community that this joker was able to commit fraud for thirty years.

There are also some other ugly undercurrents to the story.

Far from being the descendant of a dashing general in the hussars, the professor was the son of a Nazi MP, Wilhelm Protsch, Der Spiegel magazine revealed last October.

The university is investigating how thousands of documents lodged in the anthropology department relating to the Nazis' gruesome scientific experiments in the 1930s were mysteriously shredded, allegedly under the professor's instructions.

Protsch has lost his job, but I think he deserves rather more severe punishment than that, if even half these allegations prove true.

Since afarensis took the trouble to find additional links to this story, but my software mangled them, I've reformatted them and include them here: