You want header=None the False gets type promoted to int into 0 see the docs emphasis mine:
header : int or list of ints, default ‘infer’ Row number(s) to use as
the column names, and the start of the data. Default behavior is as if
set to 0 if no names passed, otherwise None. Explicitly pass header=0
to be able to replace existing names. The header can be a list of
integers that specify row locations for a multi-index on the columns
e.g. [0,1,3]. Intervening rows that are not specified will be skipped
(e.g. 2 in this example is skipped). Note that this parameter ignores
commented lines and empty lines if skip_blank_lines=True, so header=0
denotes the first line of data rather than the first line of the file.
You can see the difference in behaviour, first with header=0:
In [95]:
import io
import pandas as pd
t="""a,b,c
0,1,2
3,4,5"""
pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(t), header=0)
Out[95]:
a b c
0 0 1 2
1 3 4 5
Now with None:
In [96]:
pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(t), header=None)
Out[96]:
0 1 2
0 a b c
1 0 1 2
2 3 4 5
Note that in latest version 0.19.1, this will now raise a TypeError:
In [98]:
pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(t), header=False)
TypeError: Passing a bool to header is invalid. Use header=None for no
header or header=int or list-like of ints to specify the row(s) making
up the column names