With a Wave of God's Hand.(Shinichi Fujimura admits hoax)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

Shinichi Fujimura once boasted that he could "see 500,000-year-old landscapes." An amateur Japanese paleontologist with an uncanny knack for finding buried relics, he was rumored to have supernatural powers, and colleagues gave him the nickname "God's Hand." For 20 years Fujimura's discoveries illuminated Japanese prehistory; he unearthed evidence of ancient settlements at some 42 sites across the country, and, based largely on his work, paleontologists theorized the existence of a primitive human ancestor that had migrated across a land bridge from continental Asia as early as 1.2 million years ago. "It seemed that the most advanced people in the world at the time were in Japan," says Charles T. Keally, an American archeologist at Sophia University in Tokyo. "They were rewriting the story of human evolution."

Now Japanese scientists will have to rewrite that epic narrative. Over the past year Fujimura's dramatic rendition of primitive man's arrival in Japan has been exposed as fiction. Last October journalists from the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper covertly filmed him planting stone implements at a dig 350km northeast of Tokyo. When confronted, he initially confessed to faking just two finds. Yet recently, as experts reviewed his major discoveries, Fujimura has admitted to fabricating everything. Last week scholars conferred in Saitama prefecture to analyze his numerous local excavations. Their conclusion: no stone implements found in the area are of Early Paleolithic vintage. "This is the invention of modern man," says Dr. Toshiki Takeoka, an archeologist at Kyoritsu Women's University in Tokyo. "The credibility of Japanese archeology has been ruined by this incident."

Fujimura's hoax ranks among the great deceptions in modern paleontology. Like Piltdown man, the supposed "missing link" fabricated by amateur archeologist Charles Dawson in 1912 to prove that hominids evolved outside Africa, his finds challenged conventional wisdom on the dispersal of primitive humans. Supported by some of Japan's most prominent anthropologists, Fujimura claimed to have found evidence of shelters, delicate stone tools and a cache of colored stones arranged neatly in a pit and dating back some 700,000 years. The finds suggested a branch of primitive man in Japan that was far more advanced than any previously discovered. The ritual system implied by the artifacts, for ...