20 Famous Artifacts Experts Got Completely Wrong At First

When divers found a lump of corroded bronze on an ancient Greek shipwreck near the island of Antikythera in 1901, they had no idea what it was. Then a year later, Greek archaeologist Valerios Stais spotted gear wheels inside the corrosion. Since complex gearing wasn’t believed to exist until the Middle Ages, they thought maybe a clock had been left on the shipwreck by mistake. X-rays showed it was actually 30 or more precise bronze gears made between 150 and 100 BC. It was an analog computer, and its purpose was to track planets and eclipses.

When amateur antiquarian Charles Dawson presented a skull and jawbone discovered in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, in 1912, London’s Natural History Museum scientist Sir Arthur Smith Woodward co-announced it as a genuine early human ancestor. Fervently seeking a “missing link” found at home, scientists embraced it for 41 years until 1953 fluorine dating revealed it was a combination of a medieval man’s cranium, a modern orangutan jaw, and filed chimp molars.

In October 1869, workers digging on William Newell’s farm in Cardiff, N.Y., unearthed a ten-foot-long carved stone “body.” Local clergymen pronounced it a fossilized Biblical giant, based on their reading of a Genesis verse about giants of old, and Newell charged people 50 cents for a glimpse. But Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh was quick to spot fresh chisel marks in the soft stone, deeming the Cardiff Giant “a most decided humbug.” Atheist cigar manufacturer George Hull had carved it from Iowa gypsum just to mock biblical literalists.

A large thighbone fragment turned up in a quarry at Cornwell in Oxfordshire, and the first curator of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, naturalist Robert Plot, illustrated it. Plot published his illustrations in 1676, believing that the bone belonged to a Biblical giant. Later, Richard Brookes, a physician, included the illustration in his work, giving it the title “Scrotum humanum” because it resembled human genitalia. It was not until 1824, when Oxford geologist William Buckland named a separate set of fossil jawbones as belonging to a new species called Megalosaurus, that the first dinosaur was named, with Plot’s bone later understood as a thighbone from that same type of animal.

The British Museum purchased this rock crystal skull in 1897 from Tiffany & Co., after French antiquities dealer Eugène Boban had marketed it as a genuine Aztec or Maya ceremonial artifact. Curators at the time thought it had been carved entirely by hand over many generations with stone tools. A British Museum scientist named Margaret Sax looked at it under an electron microscope in the 1990s and discovered that the skull had rotary wheel-cut marks, plus an industrial abrasive not present in ancient Mesoamerican artifacts. It was, in fact, consistent with carvings made in the German town of Idar-Oberstein in the 1800s.

In 1936, archaeologists near Baghdad unearthed a small ceramic jar containing a copper cylinder and an iron rod, both coated with asphalt and roughly 2,000 years old. In 1938, museum painter Wilhelm König suggested that the cylinder and rod constituted a primitive battery, possibly used for electroplating or shock therapy. Yet nearby jars found in the same area lacked any wire or evidence of electroplating. It appears that the jars served only as storage vessels to seal up sacred scrolls wound around the iron rods.

The Louvre spent 200,000 gold francs on the golden crown in 1896, after its own specialists authenticated the Tiara of Saitaphernes as a 3rd-century BCE Scythian royal treasure. In 1903, Israel Rouchomovsky, a goldsmith from Odessa, stepped forward. He had produced the tiara on commission a few years previously for some dealers, without any idea that it would be sold as an ancient relic. When summoned to Paris, where he was put under official supervision, he reproduced from memory an exact facsimile of one of its gold panels. The Louvre withdrew the crown.

Theophilus Turner, a military surgeon, shipped fossil bones of a long-necked marine reptile from Kansas to Philadelphia paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. In a rush to get in print before his rival Othniel C. Marsh, Cope mistook the creature’s long neck for its tail, and put the skull on the wrong end. At a Philadelphia meeting a few years later, his own mentor, Joseph Leidy, demonstrated that the vertebrae were running in reverse. In humiliation, Cope attempted to buy up and destroy all copies of his paper.

A few miners in California’s Calaveras County claimed to have discovered a human skull far underground, under solidified layers of volcanic lava. They presented it to Josiah Whitney, California’s state geologist and a professor at Harvard University, who was seeking evidence that humans coexisted with mastodons millions of years earlier. Despite warnings from locals that miners had planted the skull as a hoax, Whitney authenticated it and continued to defend its antiquity until his death. Subsequent analysis showed the bone was only around 1,000 years old.

Hallucigenia, a minuscule sea animal from the Cambrian era, was discovered fossilized in British Columbia’s Burgess Shale. Simon Conway Morris, a Cambridge paleontologist, studied and named it in 1977. Working from the flattened impressions found in shale, he drew the animal walking upright on seven pairs of rigid spines and with soft tentacles along its back. But when, years later, paleontologists compared uncompressed fossils of the same animal unearthed in China, they discovered that the creature had been built upside-down: what appeared to be stilts were actually spines that jutted out of its back as defense, and its “tentacles” were, in fact, clawed walking legs.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased the three terracotta figures between 1915 and 1921. Before the work went on display, the museum’s curator Gisela Richter published a scholarly paper declaring the warriors authentic and masterful products of the Etruscan civilization. In 1960, the museum chemist Joseph Veach Noble analyzed the black glaze on one of the statues by spectrograph. He found traces of manganese dioxide, a pigment Etruscan potters did not use. Within a year, an Italian sculptor named Alfredo Fioravanti made a sworn confession that he and the Riccardi brothers, fellow forgers, created the statues decades before, turning over a missing sculpted finger as evidence.

When archaeologists excavated the 1939 ship burial at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, England, they uncovered a carved stone bar with face masks and red-painted knobs topped by a bronze stag. They catalogued it as a whetstone used to sharpen blades. But after examining the stone more closely under magnification, British Museum scholar Rupert Bruce-Mitford determined there were no scratches or signs of sharpening anywhere on it, and he recategorized it as a ceremonial royal scepter that likely belonged to East Anglian king Rædwald.

In Goat’s Hole Cave, on the Gower Peninsula of Wales, an Oxford professor of geology named William Buckland unearthed the body of a human in red ochre, accompanied by ivory rods and shells. A literal, young-Earth reading of the Bible had no place for a human body this ancient, so when he found a Roman camp nearby, Buckland read the red ochre as rouge and assumed he was holding the body of a woman from Roman times. In fact, the body was of a young man who had been placed there, ritually buried, tens of thousands of years earlier.

Olof Ohman, a Swedish immigrant farmer, claimed to have discovered a heavy stone slab caught in the roots of a tree on his farm near Kensington, Minn. The slab was inscribed with runes telling of Scandinavian explorers attacked centuries ago. Local Scandinavian-American groups hailed it as evidence that Scandinavians had been in the Midwest prior to Christopher Columbus. However, runologists who have studied the grammar and lettering found 19th-century Swedish vocabulary and runic characters that only occur in regional Swedish alphabets of the 1800s.

In England, Gideon Mantell, a physician, and his wife Mary Ann discovered fossilized bones and teeth of a huge herbivorous reptile in Sussex, including one large conical bone spike. They called the reptile Iguanodon, but without a complete skeleton to help, Mantell looked to iguanas, which do have small horns on their snouts, and put the spike on the animal’s nose in his drawings. It wasn’t until decades later that coal miners in Belgium unearthed dozens of complete skeletons showing that the spike was actually a thumb.

The Nimrud Lens was unearthed in 1850 by British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard during excavation of the Assyrian palace of Nimrud, in modern-day Iraq. He and Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster conjectured that Assyrian craftsmen had fashioned the object as a magnifying lens or even as part of a telescope. This ignited decades of speculation regarding ancient optics. Later optical tests, however, revealed that the lens would suffer from severe distortion and internal fractures. The consensus today is that it was a decorative crystal inlay, probably set into a royal seat or table.

Large cylindrical fossil trunks, up to 26 feet high, were found in old rock formations throughout North America. Canadian geologist John William Dawson described these fossils in 1859. Because the internal rings of the trunk resembled the rings in a tree, he named it Prototaxites (the first yew) and assumed it was an early conifer, although conifers did not evolve for another 100 million years. Over a century later, geochemists who used carbon isotope analysis discovered that the organism had not produced its own food through photosynthesis, as plants do. Instead, it absorbed nutrients, like a huge mushroom.

When farmer Solomon Ellsworth Jr. blew up a well with gunpowder on his Connecticut farm and uncovered fossilized bones, it was decades before anyone had even invented the word “dinosaur.” He and his neighbors thought they had hit a buried giant. After an anatomist pointed out that the tail vertebrae meant it couldn’t be human, his neighbors preserved the surviving bones, badly damaged by the blast, and Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh determined they belonged to a small plant-eating dinosaur and called it Anchisaurus.

A fossil, discovered near Riedenburg, Germany, in 1855, was purchased by the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, Netherlands. There it was identified as Pterodactylus, an extinct type of flying reptile, by German paleontologist Hermann von Meyer. The limb bones had been broken, and no one looked for faint traces of feathers, so it languished misidentified for more than a century. Later, Yale University paleontologist John Ostrom, who was researching pterosaurs, turned on a light at an angle and saw unmistakable feather marks and the appropriate proportions between the limbs. It was an Archaeopteryx, the earliest specimen of that famous bird-dinosaur ever found.

The Shroud of Turin, a 14-foot-long linen cloth with the faded image of a man crucified on it, has been on public display since the 1300s in Lirey, France. A legend claims that this was Jesus of Nazareth’s burial cloth, though at the time the cloth appeared, an official church memorandum reports an artist admitting that he painted it himself. Samples of the cloth’s linen were sent to three independent laboratories for radiocarbon dating in 1988. All three gave results consistent with a date in the 1200s or 1300s, meaning the Shroud is a medieval creation, not a Roman artifact. Even the process by which the image was created is in question.

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