Crystal Skulls are Frauds. Surprised? Nah.

I had never heard of the whole crystal skull mythology until the latest Indiana Jones movie came out. And leading up to the movie premier were ridiculous documentaries on the Sci-fi channel about how the crystal skulls were “impossible to have been created by human hands” and they had “immense power to heal” and other such claptrap.

Today the AFP sticks a dagger in this myth by reporting that the skulls in the Smithonian, British and French Museums, on which this myth was based, are all frauds. So take that, freaky crystal worshippers.

From AFP here:

Less than three months after the Quai Branly Museum in Paris discovered that a crystal skull once proclaimed as a mystical Aztec masterpiece was a fake, it is now the turn of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution to find they were victims of skull-duggery.

Scientists from those two prestigious institutions on Wednesday said their crystal skulls were cut, honed and polished by tools of the industrial age, not by Mesoamerican craftsmen of yore.

“The skulls under consideration are not pre-Columbian. They must surely be regarded as of relatively modern manufacture,” they say. “Each skull was probably worked not more than a decade before it was first offered for sale.”

The skulls became star exhibits in all three museums long before the Indiana Jones movie, “The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” hit the movie screens this year.

The superstitious deemed them part of a collection of 12 skulls, endowed with healing or mystical powers, that dated back to the ancient culture of Central America.

Reuniting all 12 skulls, together with a putative 13th, would conjure up a massive power that would prevent the Earth from tipping over on December 21 2012, the “doomsday” in the Mayan calendar, according to one fable.

The investigators also found a black-and-red deposit in a tiny cavity of the Smithsonian skull. X-ray diffraction showed it to be silicon carbide — a tough compound that only exists naturally in meteorites but is widespread in modern industrial abrasives.