People sure do love their doodads.

Their whoseits, whatsits, and thingamabobs. They especially love thingamabobs made by other humans a long time ago.

I mean, you probably don’t have  your own collection of artifacts, but you were probably dragged to at least one museum full of them as a kid. But over the centuries, our  love of ancient artifacts, and the ego boost that comes with owning them, has led to a lot of forgeries. And those fakes sometimes fooled  even experts for years.

So let’s just take a quick look at four famous forgeries and the scientific sleuthing that took them down. [♫INTRO] In 1933, curators at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled three terracotta statues rom an ancient Italian  civilization called Etruria. The trio included one giant statue  of an Etrus life-sized statue, and one giant head more than a meter tall. The museum had acquired  them between 1915 and 1921, and was finally ready to show them off.

Unlike other similar artifacts  from the 6th century BCE, these were not only nearly complete, they also retained their bright paint jobs. Now, if that sounds too good to be true, some experts in the 1930s thought so, too. Questions rolled in quickly: Did the taller warrior’s legs seem  out of proportion to its torso?

Was there something strange about the paint? Someone even claimed that there were crushed-up beer bottles in  the clay, making it sparkle. Then in 1936, a rumor came in:  an art dealer had visited Rome and heard stories about a  small team of art forgers named Alfredo Adolfo Fioravanti  and the Riccardi brothers.

According to the gossip, they decided to grow their pottery repair business into art fraud, and had created the Etruscan  statue trio from scratch. The museum investigated the accusations briefly, but defended their new display. It’s hard to say exactly why the Met’s own experts dismissed the warnings.

You know, besides nobody wanting  to admit they were duped. And if the statues were real, they’d be an amazing opportunity to learn about  Etruscan art and culture. But suspicions persisted for decades.

By the late 1950s, the Met decided  it was time to take a second look. They started with the paint. Earlier that decade, a ceramic chemist named Theodore Schumann figured out  how the ancient Greeks managed to create a black glaze for their  pottery without using black pigments.

He found that first, the pottery would be covered with a mixture of water and ferric oxide. That’s the stuff that makes rust red. Then, it would be fired in a kiln.

If there was lots of air flow, that  ferric oxide glaze would turn out, you guessed it, red. But by adding damp wood to the fire  and cutting off air to the kiln, you wound up baking your  pottery in carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide and steam would  react with the glaze to turn red ferric oxide into ferrous  oxide and magnetic iron oxide.

Both of which are black. And the Etruscans would have  used the same technique. So by 1958, the museum’s technical  team knew what to look for: iron and oxygen.

Anything else was a red flag. Or, should I say, black flag. Two years later, an investigation  found, drumroll please: manganese.

And lots... lots of manganese. That was a huge nail in the  Etruscan warriors’ coffin, but there were a few more loose ends to tie up. For one, the sheer abundance  of paint was pretty suspicious.

The last time a piece of painted  Etruscan pottery had been found, the paint washed off in the rain,  so it ought to be delicate stuff. Too delicate to have stuck around  in such a state on those statues. Then there was the fact that  other terracotta statues from the era had a lot of holes punched in them.

This helped with air flow, so that the clay could dry without cracking before firing. Meanwhile, the Met’s warriors  only had one vent hole each. And again, what was up with the  weird proportions on the big statue?

Well, the answers eventually rolled in, thanks to some old-fashioned sleuthing. Dietrich von Bothmer, an art historian and curator at the Met, dug into the paperwork. He found that the art dealer  who bought the warriors for the Met had previously  dealt in other forgeries, which normally would have set off  an investigation all on its own.

And a bit more digging through  diaries and letters connected that art dealer to Fioravanti  and the Riccardi brothers! The same trio that the museum  was warned about in 1936. Bothmer met with Fioravanti himself in early 1961, and he explained the whole fraud.

The crew built their statues from  the ground up in an empty building. But due to the limited space,  they started to run out of room, resulting in those strange proportions. They would also knock over the  statues to break them into pieces, so they knew they didn’t need to  fire each statue as one single piece, requiring way fewer vent holes.

Fioravanti still had the thumb of  one warrior that fit perfectly on the statue’s hand, like a  terracotta Cinderella’s slipper. If that alone couldn’t seal the deal,  the signed deposition certainly did. By 1961, the Met had to admit their mistake: the statues were the first fakes  bought and displayed at the museum.

It only took them 28 years to figure it out. But that’s not as bad as our next entry. Imagine you’re a really big  fan of Sir Francis Drake, the English admiral who sailed  around the globe in the late 1500s.

All your friends know how big a fan you are. And one day, you tell them you  have the most amazing news: a shopkeeper showed up at your  office with the Elizabethan-era brass plate that officially commemorated  Drake’s arrival in California! your friends, though, are not happy for you. Actually, they’re acting really awkward.

If it’s 1936, you might just  be Professor Herbert E.

Bolton: director of The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, a major Francis Drake fanboy, and a member of a California historical society  that is notorious for its pranks. Hmmm. Bolton died fully believing  he had the real Drake Plate. But 24 years later, in 1977, scientists  came to a different conclusion, thanks to a careful chemical  analysis of the plate, and comparison to genuine  14th to 18th century brass.

Brass is an alloy, a metal  made by combining other metals. It’s mainly a mix of zinc and copper. But 16th-century alloy-making  was an imperfect process, and would have introduced a bunch of other metals, like antimony, lead, nickel, even silver and gold!

The analysis of Bolton’s brass  plate revealed a clean combo of 35% zinc and 65% copper, evenly  mixed and mechanically rolled flat. That meant it was probably  made in the early 1900s, not in Drake’s day. But the questions remained: Who made this fake, and why?

In 2003, historians at UC Berkeley  called out the most likely culprits: five of Bolton’s friends and fellow history buffs who took a practical joke a little too far. The idea for the bogus brass  plate apparently started with G. Ezra Dane, who along  with Bolton was a member of E.

Clampus Vitus, the prank-prone  California history society also known as the Clampers. Man! People back in the day!

Doin’ their own thing! And while the Clampers’ leaders  could not sanction Dane’s buffoonery, he found 4 friends to help him out. LIke try and imagine this pitch  meeting where Dane’s like, Hey guys, wouldn’t it be funny  if we fashion a brass plate, chisel in the text like, “The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake,” and then heat it over a fire to develop a realistic patina  to resemble 1500s brass, and hammer on it, and then  cover it with dirt and ash and aging chemicals, and  then dump it into a park near Drake’s Bay where it’s gonna realistically maybe wash ashore and be found by someone?

Absolutely Dane! That sounds like a great idea! We think it's somewhat likely that the forgers may have planned to  bring Bolton to the drop site so that he could stumble onto it, and then it would be like fun, and like, "Ah!

We had planted that there!" But unfortunately for everybody someone else got there first: a shop clerk found the plate at the top of a ridge, kept it in his car for a few months, and then brought it to Bolton  after noticing the inscribed date, “1579,” and the name “Drake.” Yes, Bolton’s Francis Drake  fandom was that well-known. And he believed the ruse so  much he bought it for $3,500. That’s about $80,000 today.

In his defense, Francis Drake said he’d left a brass plate where he landed in California, so any proper Drake fan would  want to find it and show it off. But had Bolton taken a  moment and actually bothered to do any scientific tests  to check its authenticity… he probably would have come across one very obvious sign it was a fake.. Because in fluorescent paint,  the pranksters had written the society’s initials, ECV,  on the back of the plate.

They wanted Bolton to figure it out! They just didn’t want him to pay $80,000 for it! They tried to drop hints.

In the  years shortly after the “discovery,” Clamper spoofs like an obviously-fake brass plate, a fake ad for a novelty brass company  called Late the Brasse Bottom, which I guess it was funny  back then, and a booklet titled “Ye Preposterous Booke of Brasse”. Those may all have been attempts to nudge Bolton to take a second look at his prized possession. But apparently, none of that worked.

And eventually, it became  too awkward to tell Bolton and every other historian he’d  convinced that they’d all been tricked. Most of the forgers literally  took the truth to their graves. Three of the four died in the 1940s,  well before Bolton’s death in 1953.

But until the forgery was revealed, California took the plate so seriously, it was featured at the World’s Fair of 1939. Decades later, a copy of it was  even gifted to Queen Elizabeth II. The last man standing, Lorenz  Noll, told the story bit by bit, until researchers finally put the pieces together.

Almost 70 years after the whole thing started. However, the real brass plate might  still be out there, somewhere. Maybe another Drake stan will dig it up.

Or perhaps I should say, a  more brilliant Drake stan, because of this ad. This SciShow video is supported by Brilliant: an online learning platform  that helps you build real knowledge through lessons  you’ll actually remember. And the reason they can do that is down to their innovative course designs.

You’ll grow your problem-solving  and critical thinking skills, no memorization required. Their lessons and knowledge checks are fun in that scratch-your-brain-just-right kind of way. Plus, they offer daily encouragement to keep you engaged and on-track, so you can feel good about actually  finishing what you started.

Brilliant will help you make  learning part of your daily routine, and who doesn’t want to get smarter all the time? To try Brilliant for free,  visit brilliant.org/scishow, scan the QR code onscreen, or click on the link in the video description. You’ll also get 20% off an  annual premium subscription.

Now let’s turn to the oldest  artifact forgeries on this list. The story of which also involves a lot of digging. In the 1980s and 90s, a  Japanese archaeologist named Shinichi Fujimura changed the way people thought about the ancient history of human life in Japan.

He worked on more than 150  archaeological sites during his career, and was so good at finding artifacts, he eventually got the nickname “divine hands”. His first finds in 1981 included  stone tools that dated to about 40,000 years old about 10,000 years older than similar artifacts at the time. Then in 2000, Fujimura beat  his own record by, well, a lot.

He found tools more than 600,000 years old. His findings led to textbooks  literally getting rewritten; the story of Stone Age Japan and the origins of Japanese people kept getting older and older. But behind the scenes, other  archaeologists were expressing doubt about the age of the  artifacts Fujimura was finding.

They didn’t have much proof, however. At the time, the main way that  archaeologists were dating these stone tools was based on where they were  buried in layers of volcanic ash. Basically, each time a volcano erupts, it creates a layer of ash  with a unique chemical makeup, called a marker tephra.

Geologists map out the history  of eruptions and ash layers, and then if archaeologists find something cool beneath a layer of ash, it has  to be older than that eruption. But you can’t exactly dig  artifacts up a second time, so archaeologists didn’t have a good way to double-check Fujimura's claims. Enter, some intrepid reporters from Japan’s third largest daily newspaper.

In September and October, 2000, they placed hidden cameras at two of Fujimura’s archaeological sites. And they caught him red-handed. The images showed him taking real stone tools, some from his personal collection, and burying them under extremely  old volcanic ash early in the morning so that he or his colleagues  would dig them up the next day.

Fujimura quickly confessed and apologized, but the front-page news  immediately set off a reevaluation of all of his work and the standards  of Japanese archaeology at large. After all, that reliance on  volcanic ash for artifact dating made it easy for Fujimura to commit fraud. It also didn’t hurt that  Japanese archaeology didn’t have a system for peer review, relying instead on trust and reputation when people  made history-changing claims.

Meanwhile, towns and cities  near major discoveries benefited from the limelight, through pride  in their history and tourism. So it was really hard to  challenge Fujimura’s work until those journalists and their  hidden cameras finally caught him. Some folks chalked up his actions  to the stress of maintaining his reputation and job during a really  difficult period for Japan’s economy.

But when his lies were exposed, he  spent some time hospitalized for his mental health, changed his  name, and moved to a new town. But once the truth was out, the field  took the time to put things right. An investigation of Fujimura’s  work concluded that all of the dig sites he’d been involved with  had been faked to some degree.

His artifacts were removed from museums, and the archaeological nonprofit  that he helped lead was disbanded. Textbooks were re-re-written  based on legitimate findings. Now, the best evidence puts Japan’s Paleolithic period at about 37,000 to 16,000 years ago.

And in 2010, the Japanese  Palaeolithic Research Association, which formed in 2003, released  a database of more than 10,000 paleolithic sites to increase communication and transparency in the field. They also recently released a version in English! The great power of science is self-correcting, and the discovery of this  paleontology hoax created space for new research to set the record straight.

For our final forgery, we’re  looking at another time someone used real artifacts to tell a fake story.  But instead of rocks, it’s swords. That’s cooler, let’s be honest. In 2024, eight ancient Iranian swords were seized at the United Kingdom border.

Because they weren’t bound for a museum, but for the illicit antiquities market. Can you imagine? Carrying the swords?

I’m like, that’s gonna put off  some of the metal detectors. And when people are willing to  pay big money for the coolest, rarest collectibles, that gives forgers even more motivation to create realistic,  wallet-tempting fakes. These eight swords were especially interesting because they were made of both bronze and iron.

Given their age, they would  be a physical representation of Iran’s transition from the  Bronze Age to the Iron Age. In other words, when people finally figured out how to smelt iron ore and make steel, and started switching to making things like swords out of a stronger alloy. And if you’re going to find an artifact from that transition anywhere, it  would come from ancient Iran. 3,000 years ago, it was the place to  be for innovation in metalworking.

Collectors, including museums, have been big fans of ancient Iranian swords since 1928, when a large cache of Iron Age weapons was discovered in the northwestern  province of Luristan. And as everyone scrambled to  get their own genuine article, forgeries filtered into the market. But it can be tough to  analyze fully metal objects.

You generally don’t want to use  a technique that can damage them, just in case they’re real. And  something like X-rays isn’t gonna work, because metal just lights up solid white. So the eight swords intercepted  in the UK were perfect candidates for a new type of  imaging called neutron tomography.

Neutrons are neutrally-charged particles normally found at the centers of atoms, along with protons. But if you’ve got the right  equipment like they have at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire you can create a beam of individual neutrons. Or, more specifically, brief pulses of neutrons, to reduce the risk for your important artifacts.

When the neutrons hit the  sword, they create gamma rays. Those are basically the same as x-rays, but with a shorter wavelength and more energy. Assuming you have a way to  capture those gamma rays, you can create a map of both the  sword’s surface and interior, including details on what  different parts of it are made of.

So scientists were able to ask: what parts of these swords were iron, what parts were bronze, and what parts were glue? As it turns out, there was quite a bit of glue. There was also evidence of modern drilling, including holes and, in one  sword, fragments of a drill bit!

So, unfortunately, these eight swords were not from that bronze-to-iron-age transition. Instead, it looks like forgers  took the blades of ancient bronze swords and the hilts of iron swords  and put them together for profit. The resulting “Frankenstein” swords we have now are a lot less useful for  understanding ancient sword design.

For now, the collection is on  display at the British Museum, and they promise they’ll repatriate  them to Iran when they’re done. We’re watching you, British  Museum. You better do that.

And I guess they’ll be done  when they say they are. Very British. [♫OUTRO]