The Weird News Daily: 2012-10-07

The Glozel Mystery - (In 1924)

Emile Fradin, a 17 year old farmer's son from le Glozel, a small hamlet in Franc, stumbled upon one of the most contentious archaeological discoveries ever. On freeing the foot of a cow from a hole while he was ploughing, he and his father uncovered an oval brick -lined pit, containing a human skull and carved bones, carved pebbles, pots and clay tablets with mysterious symbols.

Dr Antonin Morlet (1882-1965), an amateur archaeologist, began more extensive excavations and concluded that it was a unique Neolithic site. He immediately published his findings, but was called a charlatan, as his finds resembled no known Neolithic remains. The teenager Fradin was denounced as a forger, and there was a police raid on the family farm.

Emile Fradin counter-attacked citing defamation of character, and he and his father set up a museum in a farm outbuilding to display more than 2000 objects from le Champ des Morts (the Field of the Dead). Five decades later , scientists decided to test the ceramics from the site with the newly developed thermo-luminescence dating technique. The ceramics did not date from the 1920's, nor from Neolithic times, but from the Late Iron Age/Gallo-Roman periods (c.200 BCE to 400 CE). Over the next two decades it was discovered the oval pit seemed to be a 12th - 13th century glass kiln, and there had also been early postmedieval activity involving human burial.

Carbon-14 dating now showed that some carved bones were of medieval date, c.1100 - 1300. the finds which are firmly dated by thermo-luminescence contain no single object typical of the well-documented cultures of that region and period. Were it not for the scientific dating undertaken in the mid -1970's onwards, many would have dismissed the site as a hoax.