Minnesota Iceman Hoax

[Guest LAL]

This is a tricky dodge. It's not relevant what the public thought the last common ancestor between apes and humans was, the public had well in mind a bipedal apeman both in evolutionary terms and in entertainment, that would refer to a hominid well after the ape-human split.

No dodge at all. I was referring to the scientific view. Keith had suggested the gibbon model then changed his arm-swinging model for a knuckle-walking model. Le Gros Clark embraced it but the chief proponent later was Sherwood Washburn.

The public's view of "apemen" might better have been typified by Alley Oop.

[Guest LAL]

How obtuse are you going to be about this? Peking Man and Java Man got those names because of their similarity to humans, not because anyone ever thought they were, because that certainly wasn't the case. How do you think every species in the Homo genus got their names? After all, Homo is always taken to mean "man" in that context (handy man, erect man, Heidelberg man, etc).

Neanderthals were only thought to be human for the brief period of time before anthropology really even started, and even then people were coming up with crazy excuses for the differences between them and us. By the end of the 19th century, people knew exactly what Neanderthals were, and what they looked like (for the most part). Africanus was also known to be bipedal. Its pelvis and skull make that quite obvious. You keep on trying to assert that no one thought anyhting but a human can be bipedal, and that's just wrong. It's already been pointed out to you that scientists were fully aware of other hominins, and the general public was, too (which is really a separate thing, despite your efforts to lump them together). The concept of "cavemen" and "apemen" was a big part of public culture (and had been since the discovery of Neanderthal); lots of museums had Neanderthal displays, and plenty of movies and books had depictions of primitive ape men.

By the '60s, no one thought a "missing link" would look like a chimp. If that was the case, why do you think someone made Piltdown man 60 years before that?

Fair enough, you used that term in a quote (for some reason, I missed that). Sorry for mistakenly correcting you. I still stand by the correction in general, though; too many people misuse the term "Cro-magnon."

So you're from the sixties? <grabs flit gun>?

Piltdown passed muster for so long because it fit Sir Arthur Keith's idea that the big brain must have taken 20 million years to evolve and that the big brain came before bipedalism. (Bipedalism preceded it by some five million years.) Besides, it was English. Dart's Taung Baby was rejected (mostly) because it didn't fit with this idea. Dart and Broom were both "wild eccentrics", of course.

If, by the sixties, no one thought a "missing link" would look like a chimp why was it necessary for Tim White to state a few years ago that the idea the common ancestor looked like a chimp was simply wrong?

I'll pass on your condescending remark except to note "obtuse" was going out when I was in school - about a hundred years ago. Apology accepted on the other thing.

I'm saying the Australopithecines simply didn't seem to be a big topic of conversation out there in the "real" world until, possibly, after Don Johanson's book came out. When I told my mother I was reading it she said, "Oh, the redhead?"

But I digress. I don't think the Iceman looks one whit like a "caveman". Le Gros Clark announced africanus was a biped in 1950 but as far as I know it didn't make the headlines.

As Sanderson said, "the artist, who put it together, inserting several million hairs in a skin before it rotted or was preserved, would have to have had some concept to work from, and there is no such extant. This for the following reason. This body is not that of any known hominid or pongid and, what is much more significant, it does not conform to any reconstruction or artist's conception of any fossil man or ape or other anthropoid. Its general features and particular characters as detailed above display an extraordinary mixture of what have until now been assigned either to men or apes, but it also shows others that have never been assigned or attributed to any of either."

IOW, if it was a model what was it a model of?

[wolftrax]

But you say they're the same. So both were fake or both were real?

Is there some sort of communication break down here? Are we talking in circles? It was the same model the whole time, a fake.

Which one of Hansen's?

lol exactly.

I'm not saying Hansen couldn't have approached him, even in '64, with intent to have a model made. You heard the podcast. Langdon posted like that too. As I said, coffee seemed to be in order.

So because of lack of caffeine Hansen didn't have a model made and passed it off as a real apeman?

On JREF it was......skull popping out of the head and all that. I'm thinking of the picture (but haven't found it yet) that shows the arm and leg were the same length. The index worked out to 88 which was a fair match for Meldrum's estimated 80-90.

I really don't care what anyone else said, whether JREF or here.

If I ask you for a source we're playing games but if you ask me it isn't?

I didn't know the IM index for the Iceman, and I wanted you to back up your ascertain they all had the same IM index. I also wanted to be sure of what you were relying on for Patty's, but as I understand it Steindorf's recreation was using Green's measurements, and it didn't work. But yeah, you're playing games, you know that Hansen made the model, he paid somebody to construct the body and someone else to insert hairs in it.

No, you said he admitted he made it: "And he did make it, he admitted that. " Nowhere in the above does he say that he made it. He said he made diagrams and drawings and asked a sculptor to make a model of the thing.

Made it, paid somebody to make it for him, you're playing semantics here since throughout the thread you know I referred to Langdon's interview that he approached him and was referred to the people to have it made. That's ok, though, when someone has nothing to offer to the direct statements that Hansen had it made and it was a hoax, they tend to run in circles.

Well, sort of - he doesn't exactly say that.

Interesting he notes Hansen was urbane. That doesn't really help the Minnesota story either. I tend to think Hansen was telling the truth - I just don't know about what.

The part that has been confirmed by 3 other people, it was made. It wasn't real.

Napier came down on the agouti hair because higher primates don't have it. :

"But Sanderson makes a very significant observation that goes unremarked in Heuvelmans's report. The hairs, Sanderson avers, are agouti. On the face of it this is not a particularly soul-shaking item of information. Agouti is a condition where the hairs are composed of alternating bands of dark and light and is probably familiar to most people as the fur pattern of a squirrel. The agouti pattern is regarded as a phylogenetically ancient character that has become lost in evolution in certain groups as a result of increasing specialization. The agouti pattern of hair coloration is also extremely common amongst the primates. It is seen in the monkeys of both the New and Old Worlds; but at the higher levels of primate evolution-amongst the apes and man-it is completely unknown. That the Iceman should possess agouti-patterned hairs is a zoological improbability of the highest order. If we can take this observation of Sanderson's as valid, and there is no reason why we should not, then the likelihood that the Iceman is an artifact - a man-made object - is high."

Bears and squirrels have agouti hair but I don't think anyone has suggested bears descended from squirrels. In our former go-round I found out that the gene sequence for aguoti hair hasn't been lost in the higher primates - it's suppressed. Anyone know what kind of hair Ardipiths and Australopiths had?

Considering that higher primates don't have agouti hair, they most likely didn't have agouti hair.

No dodge at all. I was referring to the scientific view. Keith had suggested the gibbon model then changed his arm-swinging model for a knuckle-walking model. Le Gros Clark embraced it but the chief proponent later was Sherwood Washburn.

The public's view of "apemen" might better have been typified by Alley Oop.

This and your last post are a complete dodge. This wasn't about the last common ancestor. It had nothing to do with it. This was about an apeman, between man and ape.

There were a variety of films and magazine articles about apemen that fit the same model of the Iceman from long before the 60s.

[wolftrax]

Here we go, Neanderthal image from 1909:

[wolftrax]

You remember Burian, from Prehistoric Man 1960:

[wolftrax]

[Guest BlurryMonster]

So you're from the sixties? <grabs flit gun>?

Piltdown passed muster for so long because it fit Sir Arthur Keith's idea that the big brain must have taken 20 million years to evolve and that the big brain came before bipedalism. (Bipedalism preceded it by some five million years.) Besides, it was English. Dart's Taung Baby was rejected (mostly) because it didn't fit with this idea. Dart and Broom were both "wild eccentrics", of course.

If, by the sixties, no one thought a "missing link" would look like a chimp why was it necessary for Tim White to state a few years ago that the idea the common ancestor looked like a chimp was simply wrong?

I'll pass on your condescending remark except to note "obtuse" was going out when I was in school - about a hundred years ago. Apology accepted on the other thing.

I'm saying the Australopithecines simply didn't seem to be a big topic of conversation out there in the "real" world until, possibly, after Don Johanson's book came out. When I told my mother I was reading it she said, "Oh, the redhead?"

But I digress. I don't think the Iceman looks one whit like a "caveman". Le Gros Clark announced africanus was a biped in 1950 but as far as I know it didn't make the headlines.

As Sanderson said, "the artist, who put it together, inserting several million hairs in a skin before it rotted or was preserved, would have to have had some concept to work from, and there is no such extant. This for the following reason. This body is not that of any known hominid or pongid and, what is much more significant, it does not conform to any reconstruction or artist's conception of any fossil man or ape or other anthropoid. Its general features and particular characters as detailed above display an extraordinary mixture of what have until now been assigned either to men or apes, but it also shows others that have never been assigned or attributed to any of either."

IOW, if it was a model what was it a model of?

I wasn't trying to be condescending (nor did I mean that as an insult), I was asking you a serious question. It's clearly been demonstrated in this thread that your statements about no one knowing about non-human bipedalism are wrong, yet you keep ignoring that and acting like you're right. That seems to me like you don't want to actually discuss anything, you just want to be right.

The reason I brought up Piltdown man was because it was something presented as the perfect missing link for the time, which it was accepted as. Guess what? It was bipedal ( and since when were we talking about brain size?). Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about bipedal Ape Men in The Lost World. Museums have had Neanderthal displays since the 1800s. And, no, most people weren't thinking about Australopithicines back then, so what? Most people don't think about them now, either. That doesn't mean those people wouldn't know what an "ape man" would look like. The notion is a big part of popular culture and has been since the late nineteenth century.

Your statements about "missing links" and "common ancestors" are also mistaken (and not really relevant to the discussion). They refer to completely different things. "Missing link" is a defunct term that referred to an intermediate step between apes and humans. Basically, something that was half and half; in case you didn't know, no one uses the term because such a creature couldn't exist (evolution doesn't work that way). A common ancestor is something that both our ancestors and the ancestors of modern chimps and bonobos evolved from. Everyone thought it would look like a chimp because people just assumed that apes would progress upright from being quadrupeds to bipedalism. Tim White had to say that idea was wrong because a common ancestor was found, and it was bipedal.

[Guest LAL]

Is there some sort of communication break down here? Are we talking in circles? It was the same model the whole time, a fake.

In your opinion, anyway. Yes, what we have here is failure to communicate. Don't we always?

You say it was a fake. I say not proven.

lol exactly.

Glad you liked it.

So because of lack of caffeine Hansen didn't have a model made and passed it off as a real apeman?

Not at all what I said. I've never doubted Hansen had a model made. For purposes of display he probably didn't have signs up saying it was a model.

I may run afoul of the guidelines by being more specific about my impression of Langdon. Maybe that was just his style.

I really don't care what anyone else said, whether JREF or here.

I may have missed a few million posts on both boards since I actually have other things to do so please forgive me if I don't know exactly what discussion you were referring to.

I didn't know the IM index for the Iceman, and I wanted you to back up your ascertain they all had the same IM index. I also wanted to be sure of what you were relying on for Patty's, but as I understand it Steindorf's recreation was using Green's measurements, and it didn't work. But yeah, you're playing games, you know that Hansen made the model, he paid somebody to construct the body and someone else to insert hairs in it.

I backed it up, but that wasn't my original source; there are at least two that give it as 88.

I'll try to find the picture I have in mind. I thought it was in one of Murphy's books but I haven't found it yet. Since the IM index is a ratio Green's measurements shouldn't matter, should they?

Will you stop with the accusations? I posted quotes and links on the model. It was a couple who inserted the hairs. I'm still looking for the names.

Made it, paid somebody to make it for him, you're playing semantics here since throughout the thread you know I referred to Langdon's interview that he approached him and was referred to the people to have it made. That's ok, though, when someone has nothing to offer to the direct statements that Hansen had it made and it was a hoax, they tend to run in circles.

Whatever.

The part that has been confirmed by 3 other people, it was made. It wasn't real.

It confirmed there was a model (or models) made - just like Frank Hansen said in 1968 . What isn't confirmed is whether the original was a model and there was no corpse to begin with.

It's Lighten Up Time:

Considering that higher primates don't have agouti hair, they most likely didn't have agouti hair.

Yes, and who would have thought dinosaurs had feathers? Do we know exactly when the gene sequence was suppressed?

This and your last post are a complete dodge. This wasn't about the last common ancestor. It had nothing to do with it. This was about an apeman, between man and ape.

There were a variety of films and magazine articles about apemen that fit the same model of the Iceman from long before the 60s.

Oh, good grief. I'm not even going to try to answer that.

[wolftrax]

Good, so the game is over and you can actually talk about what problems you have with Napier's, Chambers, and Langdon's stories.

[Guest LAL]

I wasn't trying to be condescending (nor did I mean that as an insult), I was asking you a serious question. It's clearly been demonstrated in this thread that your statements about no one knowing about non-human bipedalism are wrong, yet you keep ignoring that and acting like you're right. That seems to me like you don't want to actually discuss anything, you just want to be right.

Do I know you from somewhere?

Apparently I'm not making myself clear. I did not say no one knew about non-human bipedalism. I'm saying it wasn't generally accepted in 1967 and very little of this was trickling down to the public. Frank Hansen was an Air Force man and a showman. I don't know of anything in his background that would indicate he had the knowledge or expertise to design and fake the whatever it was.

The reason I brought up Piltdown man was because it was something presented as the perfect missing link for the time, which it was accepted as. Guess what? It was bipedal ( and since when were we talking about brain size?). Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about bipedal Ape Men in The Lost World. Museums have had Neanderthal displays since the 1800s. And, no, most people weren't thinking about Australopithicines back then, so what? Most people don't think about them now, either. That doesn't mean those people wouldn't know what an "ape man" would look like. The notion is a big part of popular culture and has been since the late nineteenth century.

Granted, but with 10" wide feet and no club? </attempt at humor>

Your statements about "missing links" and "common ancestors" are also mistaken (and not really relevant to the discussion). They refer to completely different things. "Missing link" is a defunct term that referred to an intermediate step between apes and humans. Basically, something that was half and half; in case you didn't know, no one uses the term because such a creature couldn't exist (evolution doesn't work that way). A common ancestor is something that both our ancestors and the ancestors of modern chimps and bonobos evolved from. Everyone thought it would look like a chimp because people just assumed that apes would progress upright from being quadrupeds to bipedalism. Tim White had to say that idea was wrong because a common ancestor was found, and it was bipedal.

Ardi's a common ancestor now?

A word about me: I cut my Internet teeth on EvC debates ten years ago and I loathe the term "missing link" (which I'm careful to put in quotes any time I use it). I used it this time in reference to this:

I then discussed the matter with Loren Coleman who, when writing his book about Tom Slick, had contact with Stewart. Loren confirmed to me that the latter was very religious and referred to the opinion of Mark Hall, who had two separate interviews with Frank Hansen in the 1990s: "It appeared the owner did not value it (the Iceman) in the way many of us would... The true owner of the Iceman did not want to be the one who presented the 'missing link' that would undercut the truth of Biblical creation. The owner was interested in seeing people's reaction to the 'missing link' and so allowed the Iceman to be displayed" (Living Fossils, 1999, p.85)."Mark Hall senses,†wrote Loren to me, “that the mysterious owner was a pro-creationist."

From the article by Dmitri Bayanov I linked to earlier. I hoped people had read it.

Okay, it's late, there's a thunderstorm and I'm losing my signal so that will have to be all for now.

Peace, out.

Lu

[wolftrax]

The images displayed throughout this page and preceeding were available to the public, these ones in particular were published in the book "Prehistoric Men" in 1960 and were very popular. This type of image was in the public's mind when imagining an apeman, just as it seems to be today. We've seen this sort of image in movies as well from the time period, like "2001 a Space Odyssey" and "One Million Years BC". There have been similar Apemen in films going back to the silent era. By far Hansen and Howard Ball were not working in a vaccuum.

Edited April 28, 2011 by wolftrax

[kitakaze]

Hansen was a huckster. Selling views of a What Is It? at State Fairs and carnivals for $.25 - $.35 does not make him a hoaxer. Sanderson had a pet cheetah, too, didn't he? Don't leave that out. As Heuvelmans wrote, “Vers la fin de sa vie pourtaint il se refusait à rejeter la possibilité que les hominoides reliques eussent été largués sur notre planète par des vaisseaux spatiaux."

What does any of this have to do with his training in zoology?

As an extremely credulous Bigfoot enthusiast who tolerates hoaxers such as Paul Freeman, it is unsurprising that you would say this. Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer had a fake Bigfoot frozen in ice which they did for money. Frank Hansen had a fake apeman frozen in ice for money. Whitton and Dyer made their cash-grab in one transaction with gullible Bigfoot enthusiasts. Hansen had his purpose built for touring and making money repeatedly on the claim what was in the ice was real. Hansen labeled his swindle, "What is it?", "Siberskoye Creature", "Found in the Woods of Minnesota", and "Is it Prehistoric?" among other things. He said it was plucked from an ice flow in the Sea of Okhotsk, was discovered in a refrigeration plant in Hong Kong, was found in its frozen state in the possession of fisherman at a market in Tokyo Bay, and that he shot it hunting in Minnesota. There is no difference between Whitton and Dyer and Hansen. Both the Georgia Boys and Hansen had ever changing stories as to how they came to be in possession of their beastsicles. Both eventually admitted that they had been hoaxing people.

Sanderson and Heuvelmans were fortean obsessed quacks first united in their belief in dinosaurs existing today, and not the ones we call birds...

Of those two men, Sanderson was certainly the quackier with his fortean pursuits. Heuvelmans in your quote above said of Sanderson, "Towards the end of his life, however, he refused to reject the possibility that the hominoid relics had been released on our planet by spaceships." These men were too far gone in quackery and were duped royally by a carnival huckster. It is not unknown what it was that they examined. It's right here...

Here is how Hansen showed his hoax...

Not that it will have any effect on your credulity, but Hansen flat out admitted his attraction was a hoax and never a real creature encased in ice...

"I tried to take it (the exhibit) into Canada for a show, was stopped at the border. It was the Bureau of Customs, and they stopped me because they thought I was transporting cadaver across the border. It was seized at the border. I explained to them it was just an exhibit, neither man nor beast, but they didn't believe me until a US Senator bailed me out." Frank Hansen to Alan Berry by phone interview on April 7, 2002.

[Guest LAL]

As an extremely credulous Bigfoot enthusiast who tolerates hoaxers such as Paul Freeman, it is unsurprising that you would say this.

Should that be taken as a personal attack?

<snip>

Not that it will have any effect on your credulity, but Hansen flat out admitted his attraction was a hoax and never a real creature encased in ice...

"I tried to take it (the exhibit) into Canada for a show, was stopped at the border. It was the Bureau of Customs, and they stopped me because they thought I was transporting cadaver across the border. It was seized at the border. I explained to them it was just an exhibit, neither man nor beast, but they didn't believe me until a US Senator bailed me out." Frank Hansen to Alan Berry by phone interview on April 7, 2002.

Yes, that was in the article I linked to. Your reading seems to differ from mine. Hansen was relating what he told Customs, that it was an exhibit, not that it was a hoax. If all it was was an exhibit what led the authorities to think it was a cadaver in the first place? If it was just a latex and hair model why wouldn't Hansen let them Xray it?

I don't see how anyone reading Sanderson's report objectively can see him as the fanatical kook you make him out to be and I don't think his academic honors were earned by him being goofy, but mileage varies.

This is a bit off topic but did you see the article on Dr. Meldrum posted this morning? I like this:

“There’s a certain chic to being critical these days,†he said, “and skepticism is worn as a bright red arm band by some individuals.â€

Do you think I should add it to my sig line?

[Guest LAL]

Good, so the game is over and you can actually talk about what problems you have with Napier's, Chambers, and Langdon's stories.

No game here. Sometimes rewording changes meaning. I called you on it.

I don't have time for a proper response just now, but I do have some problems with Napier's take.

Chambers reportedly said ( "sort of"):

"John: A carnival. There are a lot of guys out there doing that. You know the block of ice with this body that was frozen in a block of ice? This guy’s story was really good, and he brought it to me wanting artificial eyes, and I gave him artificial eyes and I gave him the people that would do the hair, and then he had it implanted in ice. He finally got arrested by the Canadians, bringing that body across the body. They wouldn’t let him go into the ice to see if it was fake or flesh. That’s what happened with this thing; it was passed off as a real body- people would say, ‘Look at the toenails, look at the... it must be real!’ We had a speaker right near him, and we were listening to everything, but the funny thing was, the guys says, ‘I need a sign to really finish this, and I don’t know what to with it.’ I said I had an idea to make it real, so I said, ‘Listen to what I say: the creature in this coffin once lived and felt the sunset glow; like that poem, “Who lived and saw the sunset glow; now he lies in Flander’s Field;’ I took some of those phrases and put in, so it said, ‘This creature was alive, in this coffin,’ but I didn’t tell them, I put a fly under his arm, a big horsefly, and it lived and felt the sunset glow,’ and I said, ‘I’ll prove it for you, do you believe me now?’ He said, ‘You can do that?’ so I had the fly caught, because when he was challenged, he had to show the fly! That character was on the carnival circuit for years, but that was the kind of jobs I got."

On eye was shot through and the other blown out of its socket so what were the artificial eyes for?

That Hansen had a model made is not in dispute. "We had a speaker near him"???????? When, where?

I'll try to get to Langdon tonight; I'd like to check out a couple of things in the podcast first.

[slabdog]

sheesh...can you imagine if this would happen today? There's no way that he could have gotten away with simply having the thing "disappear" prior to a thorough inspection.

And don't point to the Georgia Hoax because that would only make my point.

This guy took drove this thing all across the country for crimeny sakes!

I betting if this guy were working the carnival circuit today in his refrigerated semi - bare minimum - DDA and Squatchdetective would have already teamed up, donned their ninja garb and snuck into the trailer with a cordless drill and a loooong drill bit.

Edited April 28, 2011 by slabdog