Bone Fraud: The Piltdown Man

On July 4th, 1975, journalist and Sydney heiress Juanita Nielsen disappeared. Most assumed she was the victim of foul play. After all, for years she’d been fighting a land developer determined to turn her charming, low-income neighborhood into a bunch of high-rises. She was last ... Show More

The chupacabra is considered the third most widely known cryptid in the world, behind Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster – kind of mind-blowing, considering the fact that this mythical creature’s origins are relatively recent. Reports of el chupacabras began in Puerto Rico in 1995 ... Show More

Chuck Barris created game show classics like The Dating Game and The Gong Show. However, his memoir claims his prolific career was all a cover for his classified missions as a CIA assassin. The agency says his claim is 100% false, but as Barris notes, "Have you ever heard the CIA ... Show More

This episode is a mystery in the most classic literary sense of the word. It’s a whodunit detective story that spans more than a century - the saga of the Piltdown Man Hoax. From a gravel pit in Sussex, we follow the faked fossils through history, to what’s now the Natural Histor ... Show More

In Sussex, in 1912, men quarrying in a gravel pit near Piltdown village turned up a human skull. According to Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur archeologist with a remarkable track record for finding ancient treasures, it belonged to a palaeolithic man, possibly millions of ye ... Show More

Even expert primatologists can’t agree on whether Bigfoot exists. Is it all a hoax, or is the creature more intelligent — or cosmic — than we give it credit for? This episode originally aired on Conspiracy Theories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adcho ... Show More

A newly-examined munch mark on a tibia has become a real pleistocene whodunit. By Natalia Raegan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices 

Did you know England's first newspaper was fake? Or that King Arthur is more or less completely made up? The deeper we look into human history, the more we see that civilization is utterly riddled with bizarre hoaxes -- some of which are laughable, and some of which are downright ... Show More

Who owns stolen art? Today on the show, the bloody journey of a Benin Bronze from West Africa to the halls of one of England's most elite universities — a tale of imperialism, betrayal, and the making of the modern world.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection an ... Show More