Three Centuries Went Missing. Then The Authors Found The Typo.
A 2023 preprint reported a 297-year discontinuity in a master tree-ring chronology. Four months later its own authors withdrew it: one mis-keyed sample identifier, propagating. It remains the most-requested document in our archive and it sits in the rejected drawer.
Background written by the news staff. Contains no argument or recommendation.
ITHACA, N.Y. — One document is requested more often than anything else in our archive. It has been for three years.
It sits in the rejected drawer of The Vault. It is PX-1745, and its own authors withdrew it.
The drawer is public so this can be argued about. Here is what the document is, and why it is in there.
The claim
Heribert Illig proposed in 1991 that the years 614 to 911 CE did not happen — that the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII inserted 297 years of fabricated history to place themselves at the millennium.
If true, there is no Charlemagne, no Viking raid on Lindisfarne, and no eighth century.
The preprint
In March 2023 two dendrochronologists posted a paper reporting an apparent 297-year discontinuity in a master tree-ring chronology spanning 600 to 950 CE.
Dendrochronology is normally very hard to argue with. Tree rings vary in width year to year according to conditions, the pattern of variation is regionally shared, and overlapping samples chain a sequence backward continuously. A false chronology would require a very large number of independent samples to be wrong in a coordinated way.
The preprint appeared to show exactly such a discontinuity. It was, briefly, the strongest quantitative claim the phantom-time hypothesis had ever had.
The withdrawal
In July 2023 the authors withdrew it.
…the apparent 297-year discontinuity reported in §4 is, on re-examination, an
artefact of a single mis-keyed sample identifier propagating through the master
chronology. We withdraw the paper and thank the correspondent who found it.
The correspondent was Yusuf Aldridge-Kone, an amateur with no institutional position, who re-derived the master chronology from the published raw series on a laptop over a fortnight because he thought the result was too clean.
"Real data is never that tidy," he said. "That is the whole method. When it comes out tidy, you have made a mistake, and I have made enough of them to know what mine look like."
Dr. Ondřej Baranowski-Faye, the first author, asked this newspaper to print one sentence plainly and at the top of any account: he no longer stands behind the paper, and he has not since July 2023.
Why it is in the rejected drawer
Because the people who produced it say it is wrong, and they say so in writing, and they explain the mechanism.
This newspaper's rule is that we do not cite a document as evidence of anything when its authors have withdrawn it for a stated, specific, technical reason that we can follow. We can follow this one. A mis-keyed identifier propagating through a chain is exactly the kind of failure that produces an artefact of precisely this shape, and it is the kind of failure a re-derivation catches.
We keep the document listed, publicly, in the drawer, because a rejected-documents list that is not public is just a bin.
What else would have to be wrong
Dr. Konstanze Villiers-Obi set out, at our request, the independent lines that would each have to fail for the 297 years to be fabricated:
- The dendrochronological sequence, from multiple continents and species.
- Radiocarbon calibration, which is anchored against that sequence but also against varves and ice cores.
- The Chinese dynastic record, which is continuous, dated, and was not available to Otto III to coordinate with.
- Islamic chronology, likewise.
- Solar eclipse records from three traditions, which are astronomically retrodictable to the day and which land where they should.
"Any one of those could be wrong," she said. "The hypothesis needs all of them to be wrong, in the same direction, by the same amount, and it needs the people who made them not to have met."
She added the sentence this newspaper has now printed three times in different stories and expects to print again: "The interesting thing is not the hypothesis. The interesting thing is that the hypothesis is checkable, and somebody checked it, and it was an amateur with a laptop."
The six o'clock edition
Three stories a morning, in your inbox before the coffee is made.
Sources & Method
This piece exists because our postbag demanded it. We asked both authors of the withdrawn preprint to explain, on the record, why they withdrew it; both did, without conditions. We then asked the amateur who found the error how he found it, and a historian of the period what else would have to be wrong for the hypothesis to survive.
Who we spoke to
- Dr. Ondřej Baranowski-Faye, Dendrochronologist; first author of the withdrawn preprint. Interviewed by video call; supplied the withdrawal correspondence 3 July 2026 Asked us to say plainly that he no longer stands behind the paper. He does not.
- Dr. Marisol Quintanilla-Iver, Dendrochronologist; second author. Interviewed by e-mail July 2026
- Yusuf Aldridge-Kone, The correspondent who found the error. Interviewed by telephone 8 July 2026 An amateur. Found it by re-deriving the master chronology from the published raw series.
- Dr. Konstanze Villiers-Obi, Historian of the early medieval Mediterranean. Interviewed in person 11 July 2026 Sets out the independent lines of evidence that would each have to fail for the hypothesis to hold.
Documents
- PX-1745 — Calendrical audit of dendrochronological sequences, 600–950 CE rejected
What we could not confirm
- Nothing. This is an explainer, not a report, and the single factual claim it turns on — that the authors withdrew and why — is in writing from both authors.
How was this story?
We publish the result, whatever it is. Reader verdicts appear on the front page and in our newsroom metrics.
Readers' Letters 1
Printed at once under the name you give and read by the desk afterwards; anything unfit is removed, with a note saying so, and nothing else is ever deleted — only corrected. Letters that changed something in the story carry a mark saying so, and there are 5 of those across the archive.
I am not a scientist and I want people to know how boring the method was. I downloaded the raw series, wrote 40 lines of code, and got a different answer than the paper. Then I did it again to check I had not made a mistake. That is the whole skill.