The city of Glosel in France is often called the local Piltdown, after a town in southern England where fossilized remains were mistaken for the missing transition link from ape to man. Similarly, scientists and archaeologists are still arguing about what was found in the 1920s in one of the pits of Glosel.
It all started when a cow from a local farmer fell into a hole. When people crawled for the animal, they found that it was not just a hole, but a whole underground tunnel, which is about three meters long. The walls of the tunnel were lined with clay bricks with a glassy surface; some of the bricks had some kind of drawings and inscriptions. Inside the tunnel were human bones, pottery fragments, and a polished stone ax.
Local teachers immediately became interested in the place. Together with a 17-year-old boy, one of the inhabitants of the house, in the courtyard of which the pit was discovered, they began to conduct their own archaeological investigation. Later, they were joined by another teacher, doctor and aspiring archaeologist. As a result of further excavations, bones, tablets, silicon tools and stones with inscriptions on them were taken out of the ground. According to the first published report, the finds were attributed to the Neolithic. The farm even organized a small private museum with ancient artifacts exhibited in it.
But archaeologists in France treated the findings with suspicion. The fact is that some of the exhibits belonged to a later period: these are stone axes, roughly sculpted pots, and ceramics of various shapes. The most mysterious find was a few dozen bricks with inscriptions in an unknown language. In total, about five thousand exhibits were presented in the museum. And after the director of the National Museum of Antiquities became interested in the found artifacts and declared France the center of an ancient civilization, tourists began to actively come here.
Skeptics, however, continued to view the findings as highly suspicious. First, they were alarmed by the fact that the artifacts belonged to different periods, and were found in the same thin layer of soil. Secondly, it was surprising that many of the items were intact, which rarely happens during such archaeological excavations. Thirdly, when studying stone axes, it turned out that they were processed using steel tools.
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Then the international anthropological congress decided to send a special commission of researchers who were supposed to find out on the spot whether the objects found are real ancient artifacts or not. On the first day of excavations, archaeologists did not find anything, but on the second day they began to come across the same items as those kept in the farmer's museum. Scientists began to suspect that artifacts were being planted on them. As a result, archaeologists concluded that the materials found in Glosel are not of archaeological value.
After some time, police arrived at the farm and seized the exhibits presented in the museum. As a result of detailed research, it turned out that many bone and stone artifacts were made using metal tools, and the composition of the clay from which the pots were made included fragments of cotton cloth and moss, so they could not be burned and dissolved in water. Woe archaeologists were accused of fraud, they were even sued.
However, 25 years later, when scientists were able to determine the age of various finds using thermoluminescence, it turned out that the Glosel artifacts were subsidized from 600 BC. before 200 AD What is most surprising is that materials of this kind have not been found anywhere else in France. Among the exhibits should have been fragments of Celtic or Halo-Roman ceramics corresponding to that place and time, but there were none. Therefore, scientists still have not been able to put the final point in this contradiction.