1. In his letter of November 28, 1953, Teilhard states that he first met Dawson in 1911. In fact, they met in May 1909, for Teilhard describes the encounter in a vivid letter to his parents. Moreover, this meeting was an important event in Teilhard’s career, for Dawson befriended the young priest and personally forged his path to professional notice and respect by sending some important specimens he had collected to Smith Woodward. When Smith Woodward described this material before the Geological Society of London in 1911, Dawson, in the discussion following Smith Woodward’s talk, paid tribute to the “patient and skilled assistance” given to him by Teilhard since 1909. I don’t regard this, in itself, as a particularly damning point. A first meeting in 1911 would still be early enough for complicity (Dawson “found” his first piece of the Piltdown skull in 1911, although he states that a workman had given him a fragment “several years before”), and I would never hold a mistake of two years against a man who tried to remember the event forty years later. Still, the later (and incorrect) date, right upon the heels of Dawson’s first “find,” certainly averts suspicion from Teilhard.
2. Oakley wrote again in February 1954, probing further into Dawson’s first contact with the Piltdown material, wondering in particular what had happened in 1908. Teilhard simply replied (March 1, 1954): “In 1908 I did not know Dawson.” True enough, but they met just a few months later, and Teilhard might have mentioned it. A small point, to be sure.
3. In the same letter, Teilhard tries further to avert suspicion by writing of his years at Hastings: “You know, at that time, I was a young student in theology—not allowed to leave much his cell of Ore Place (Hastings).” But this description of a young, pious, and restricted man stands in stark contrast with the picture that Teilhard painted of himself at the time in a remarkable series of letters to his parents (Lettres de Hastings et de Paris 1908–1912, Paris: Aubier, 1965). These letters speak little of theology, but they are filled with charming and detailed accounts of Teilhard’s frequent wanderings all over southern England. Eleven letters refer to excursions with Dawson,6 and no other naturalist is mentioned so frequently. If he spent much time at Ore Place, he didn’t choose to write about it. On August 13, 1910, for example, he exclaims: “I have travelled up and down the coast, to the left and right of Hastings; thanks to the cheap trains [les cheaptrains as he writes in French] so common at this time of year, it is easy to go far with minimal expense.”
Perhaps I am now too blinded by my own attraction to the hypothesis of Teilhard’s complicity. Perhaps all these points are minor and unrelated, testifying only to the faulty memory of an aging man. But they do form an undeniable pattern. Still, I would not now come forward with my case were it not for a second argument, more circumstantial to be sure, but somehow more compelling in its persistent pattern of forty years—the record of Teilhard’s letters and publications.
PILTDOWN IN TEILHARD’S WRITING
I remember a jokebook I had as a kid. The index listed “mule, sex life,” but the indicated page was blank (ridiculous, in any case, for mules do not abstain just because the odd arrangement of their hybrid chromosomes debars them from bearing offspring). Teilhard’s published record on Piltdown is almost equally blank. In 1920, he wrote one short article in French for a popular journal on Le cas de l’homme de Piltdown. After this, virtually all is silence. Piltdown never again received as much as a full sentence in all his published work (except once in a footnote). Teilhard mentioned Piltdown only when he could scarcely avoid it—in comprehensive review articles that discuss all outstanding human fossils. I can find fewer than half a dozen references in the twenty-three volumes of his complete works. In each case, Piltdown appears either as an item listed without comment in a footnote or as a point (also without comment) on a drawing of the human evolutionary tree or as a partial phrase within a sentence about Neanderthal man.7
Consider just how exceedingly curious this is. In his first letter to Oakley, Teilhard described his work at Piltdown as “one of my brightest and earliest paleontological memories.” Why, then, such silence? Was Teilhard simply too diffident or saintly to toot his own trumpet? Scarcely, since no theme receives more voluminous attention, in scores of later articles, than his role in unearthing the legitimate Peking man in China.
As I began my investigation into this extraordinary silence, and trying to be as charitable as I could, I constructed two possible exonerating reasons for Teilhard’s failure to discuss the major event of his paleontological youth. Kenneth Oakley then told me of the 1920 article, the only analysis of Piltdown that Teilhard ever published. I found a copy in the ten-volume edition of Teilhard’s oeuvre scientifique, and realized that its content invalidated the only exculpatory arguments I could construct.
The first argument: Marcellin Boule, Teilhard’s revered teacher, was a leading critic of Piltdown. He regarded it as a mixture of two creatures (not as a fraud), although he softened his opposition after he learned of the subsequent discovery at Piltdown 2. Perhaps Boule upbraided his young student for gullibility, and Teilhard, embarrassed to the quick, never spoke of the infernal creature, or of his role in discovering it, again.
The 1920 article invalidates such a conjecture, for in this work, Teilhard comes down squarely on the right side. He mentions that his English companions, convinced by finding the jaw so close to the skull fragments, never doubted the integrity of their fossil. Teilhard then notes, with keen insight, that experts who had not seen the specimens in situ would be swayed primarily by the formal anatomy of the bones themselves, and that these bones loudly proclaimed: human skull, ape’s jaw. Which emphasis, then, shall prevail, geology or anatomy? Although he had witnessed the geology, Teilhard opted for anatomy:
In order to admit such a combination of forms [a human skull and an ape’s jaw in the same creature], it is necessary that we be forced to such a conclusion. Now this is not the case here…. The reasonable attitude is to grant primacy to the intrinsic morphological probability over the extrinsic probability of geological conditions…. We must suppose that the Piltdown skull and jaw belong to two different subjects.
Teilhard called it once, and he called it right. He had no reason to be embarrassed.
The second argument: Perhaps Teilhard had reveled in his role at Piltdown, cherished the memory, but simply found that the man he had helped to unearth could offer no support for, or even contact with, the concerns of his later career. On a broad level, this argument is implausible, if only because Teilhard wrote several general reviews about human fossils; however controversial or dubious, Piltdown should have been discussed. Even the leading doubters never failed to air their suspicions. Boule wrote chapters about Piltdown. Teilhard listed it without comment a few times and only when he had no choice.
In a more specific area, Teilhard’s silence about Piltdown becomes inexplicable to the point of perversity (unless guilt and knowledge of fraud engendered it)—for Piltdown provided the best available support that fossils could provide for the most important argument of Teilhard’s cosmic and mystical views about evolution, the dominant theme of his career and the source of his later fame. Teilhard never availed himself of his own best weapon, partly provided by his own hand.
The conclusion that skull and jaw belonged to different creatures did not destroy the scientific value of Piltdown, provided that both animals legitimately lay in the strata that supposedly entombed them. For these strata were older than any housing Neanderthal man, Europe’s major claim to anthropological fame. Neanderthal, although now generally considered as a race of our species, was a low-vaulted, beetle-browed fellow of decidedly “primitive” cast. Piltdown, despite the thickness of its skull bones, looked more modern in its globular vault. The assignment of the jaw to a fossil ape further enhanced the skull’s advanced status. Humans of modern aspect must have lived in England even before Neanderthal man evolved on the continent. Neanderthal, therefore, cannot be an ancestral form; it must represent a side branch of the human tree. Human evoluti
on is not a ladder but a series of lineages evolving along separate paths.
In the 1920 article, Teilhard presented the Piltdown skull, divorced from its jaw, in just that light—as proof that hominids evolved as a bundle of lineages moving in similar directions. He wrote:
Above all, it is henceforth proved that even at this time [of Piltdown] a race of men existed, already included in our present human line, and very different from those that would become Neanderthal…. Thanks to the discovery of Mr. Dawson, the human race appears to us even more distinctly, in these ancient times, as formed of strongly differentiated bundles, already quite far from their point of divergence. For anyone who has an idea of paleontological realities, this light, tenuous as it appears, illuminates great depths.
To what profundity, then, did Teilhard refer Piltdown as evidence? Teilhard believed that evolution moved in an intrinsic direction representing the increasing domination of spirit over matter. Under the thrall of matter, lineages would diverge to become more unlike, but all would move upward in the same general direction. With man, evolution reached its crux. Spirit had begun its domination over matter, adding a new layer of thought—the noosphere—above the older biosphere. Divergence would be stemmed; indeed, convergence had already begun in the process of human socialization. Convergence will continue as spirit prevails. When the last vestiges of matter have been discarded, spirit will involute upon itself at a single point called Omega and identified with God—the mystical evolutionary apocalypse that secured Teilhard’s fame.8
But convergence is a thing of the future. Scientists seeking evidence for such a scheme must look to the past for twin signs of divergence accompanied by similar upward direction—in other words, for multiple, parallel lineages within larger groups.
I have read all of Teilhard’s papers from the early 1920s. No theme receives more emphasis than the search for multiple, parallel lineages. In an article on fossil tarsiers, written in 1921, he argues that three separate primate lineages extend back to the dawn of the age of mammals, each evolving in the same direction of larger brains and smaller faces. In a review published in 1922 of Marcellin Boule’s Les hommes fossiles, Teilhard writes: “Evolution is no more to be represented in a few simple strokes for us than for other living things; but it resolves itself into innumerable lines which diverge at such length that they appear parallel.” In a general essay on evolution, printed in 1921, he speaks continually of oriented evolution in multiple, parallel lines within mammals.
But where was Piltdown in this extended paean of praise for multiple, parallel lineages? Piltdown provided proof, the only available proof, of multiple, parallel lineages within human evolution itself—for its skull belonged to an advanced human older than primitive Neanderthal. Piltdown was the most sublime argument that Teilhard possessed, and he never breathed it again after the 1920 article.
These two arguments have been abstract. A third feature of the 1920 article is stunning in its directness. For I believe that Teilhard fleetingly tried to tell his colleagues, too subtly perhaps, that Piltdown was a phony. In discussing whether the Piltdown remains represent one or two animals, Teilhard laments that the direct and infallible test cannot be applied. One skull fragment contained a perfect glenoid fossa, the point of articulation for the upper jaw upon the lower. Yet the corresponding point of the lower jaw, the condyle, was missing on a specimen otherwise beautifully preserved at its posterior end. Teilhard writes: “Since the glenoid fossa exists in perfect state on the temporal bone, we could simply have tried to articulate the pieces, if the mandible had preserved its condyle: we could have learned, without possible doubt, if the two fit together.” I read this statement in a drowsy state one morning at two o’clock, but the next line—set off by Teilhard as a paragraph in itself terminated by an exclamation point—destroyed any immediate thought of sleep: “As if on purpose [comme par exprès], the condyle is missing!”
“Comme par exprès.” I couldn’t get those words out of my mind for two days. Yes, it could be a literary line, a permissible metaphor for emphasis. But I think that Teilhard was trying to tell us something he didn’t dare reveal directly.
OTHER ARGUMENTS
1. Teilhard’s embarrassment at Oakley’s disclosure. Kenneth Oakley told me that, although he had not implicated Teilhard in his thoughts, one aspect of Teilhard’s reaction had always puzzled him. All other scientists, including those who had cause for the most profound embarrassment (like the aged Sir Arthur Keith, who had used Piltdown for forty years as the bedrock of his thought), expressed keen interest amidst their chagrin. They all congratulated Oakley spontaneously and thanked him for resolving an issue that had always been puzzling, even though the solution hurt so deeply. Teilhard said nothing. His congratulations arrived only when they could not be avoided—in the preface to a letter responding to Oakley’s direct inquiries. When Teilhard visited London, Oakley tried to discuss Piltdown, but Teilhard always changed the subject. He took Teilhard to a special exhibit at the British Museum illustrating how the hoax had been uncovered. Teilhard glumly walked through as fast as he could, eyes averted, saying nothing. (A. S. Romer told me several years ago that he also tried to conduct Teilhard through the same exhibit, and with the same strange reaction.) Finally, Teilhard’s secretary took Oakley aside and explained that Piltdown was a sensitive subject with Father Teilhard.
But why? If he had been gulled by Dawson at the site, he had certainly recouped his pride. Smith Woodward had devoted his life to Dawson’s concoction. Teilhard had written about it but once, called it as correctly as he could, and then shut up. Why be so embarrassed? Unless, of course, the embarrassment arose from guilt about another aspect of his silence—his inability to come clean while he watched men he loved and respected make fools of themselves, partly on his account. Marcellin Boule, his beloved master, for example, correctly called Smith Woodward’s Eoanthropus “an artificial and composite being” in the first edition of Les hommes fossils (1921). The skull, he said, could belong to “un bourgeois de Londres” the jaw belonged to an ape. But he pondered the significance of Piltdown 2 and changed his mind in the second edition of 1923: “In the light of these new facts, I cannot be as sure as I was before. I recognize that the balance has now tipped a bit in the direction of Smith Woodward’s hypothesis—and I am happy for this scientist whose knowledge and character I esteem equally.” How did Teilhard feel as he watched his beloved master, Boule, falling into the abyss—when he contained tools for extraction that he could not use.
2. The elephant and the hippo. Bits and pieces of other fossil mammals were salted into the Piltdown gravels in order to set a geologic matrix for the human finds. All but two of these items could have been collected in England. But the hippo teeth, belonging to a distinctive dwarfed species, probably came from the Mediterranean island of Malta. The elephant tooth almost surely came from a distinctive spot at Ichkeul, Tunisia, for it is highly radioactive as a result of seepage from surrounding sediments rich in uranium oxide. This elephant species has been found in several other areas, but nowhere else in such highly radioactive sediments. Moreover, the Ichkeul site was only discovered by professionals in 1947; the doctored specimen at Piltdown could not have come from a cataloged museum collection.
Teilhard taught physics and chemistry at a Jesuit school in Cairo from 1905 to 1908, just before coming to Piltdown. His volume of Letters from Egypt again records little about theology and teaching, but much about travel, natural history, and collecting. He did not call at Tunisia or Malta on his passage down, but I can find no record of his passage back, and the two areas are right on his route from Cairo to France. In any case, Teilhard’s letters from Cairo abound in tales of swapping and exchange with other natural historians of several North African nations. He was plugged into an amateur network of information and barter and might have received the teeth from a colleague.
This argument formed the base of evidence among my senior colleagues who suspected Teilhard—A. S. Romer, Bryan Patters
on, and Louis Leakey (Leakey also mentioned Teilhard’s knowledge of chemistry and the clever staining of the Piltdown bones). According to hearsay, le Gros Clark himself, a member of the trio that exposed the hoax, also suspected Teilhard on this basis. I regard this argument as suggestive, but not compelling. Dawson too was plugged into a network of amateur exchange.
3. Teilhard’s good luck at Piltdown. Although records are frustratingly vague, I believe that all the Piltdown pieces were found by the original trio—Dawson, Smith Woodward, and Teilhard. (In the official version, a workman may have given Dawson the first piece in 1908.) Dawson, of course, unearthed most of the material himself. Smith Woodward, so far as I can tell, found only one cranial fragment. Teilhard, who spent less time at Piltdown than his two colleagues, was blessed. He found a fragment of the elephant tooth, a worked flint, and the famous canine.
People who have never collected in the field probably do not realize how difficult and chancy the operation is when fossils are sparse. There is no magic to it, just hard work. A tooth in a gravel pit is about as conspicuous as the proverbial needle in a haystack. The hoaxer worked hard on his Piltdown material. He filed the canine and painted it to simulate age. Apes’ teeth are not easy to come by. If I had but one precious item, I would not stick it into a large gravel heap and then hope that some innocent companion would find it. It would probably be lost forever, not triumphantly recovered. I doubt that I would ever find it again myself, after someone else had mucked about extensively in the pile.
Teilhard described his discovery in the first letter to Oakley: “When I found the canine, it was so inconspicuous amidst the gravels which had been spread on the ground for sifting that it seems to me quite unlikely that the tooth could have been planted. I can even remember Sir Arthur congratulating me on the sharpness of my eyesight.” Smith Woodward’s recollection (from his last book of 1948) is more graphic: