subject: The Acambaro Figurine Hoax [print this page] If you have a son or daughter, you may have already had the pleasure of experiencing their 'dinosaur phase', that time when they tell you that they want to be a 'T-Rex' finder or Paleontologist. The ancient creatures were larger than life, and their teeth and spines can still produce a shiver down one's spine, so who can blame them? Dinosaurs died off millions of years ago, leaving only their traces in skeletal remains. However, there are those who believe that humans co-existed with them during their time period on earth. Held up as proof that this relationship existed, are the Acambaro figurines from Guanajuato, Mexico; which seem to indicate humans lived amongst dinosaurs. For a brief period in the 20th century, the figurines were believed to be authentic artifacts, but were then quickly shown to be fakes.
A German immigrant (Waldemar Julsrud) in Acambaro, Mexico, uncovered ceramic figurines in a grouping while working there in 1944. They looked quite old, and seemed to come from one of the pre-Columbian civilizations such as the Maya or Aztec. Intrigued, he hired a farmer to dig up the remaining pieces, promising to pay him for each artifact that was brought back. The peasant and his assistants unearthed over 32,000 figures, which were carved to resemble everything from Egyptian and Sumerian people to dinosaurs.
While the figures attracted very little attention from historical scholars, Julsrud became convinced that the pieces were representations of dinosaurs which predated scientific awareness of the beasts, and tabloids were quick to hop on the story. Initial dating attempts using thermoluminescence showed that they had been made around 2500 BC, but this technique was in its infancy, and very prone to error. The artifacts were finally discovered to be fakes, once they were examined by an archeologist.. Most of the clay pieces were intact and showed no signs of age; the few which were broken had been smashed cleanly and all the pieces were present. Buried in what appeared to be recently dug soil, there was no dirt in the crevices of the sculptures.
Scientific evidence concluded that the eager farmer and his friends had produced as many of the figurines as they could, having been promised a pay scale based on volume. Furthermore, a local family had a long history of making these little sculptures for sale in the local markets. Despite the overwhelming amount of proof that the Acambaro artifacts were fraudulent, many people still believed that they showed humans had coexisted with dinosaurs.
Most recently, proponents of young Earth creationism have used them as a central arguing point. The bible is to be taken literally, according to this belief system and the age of the Earth said to be about 4,000 years following this faith (rather than 1.4 billion). Humans saw and interacted with dinosaurs, according to the believers that hold up the Acambaro figurines as being legitimate. However, accurate dating techniques pinpointed the firing date of the clay to around 1939, and the wider scientific world now considers them to be a footnote in the history of real paleontology and archeology.
