Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (18 page)

Teilhard then goes on to discuss Piltdown 2 and, in trying to exonerate Dawson, makes his fatal error. He writes:

But this cannot be. Teilhard did visit the second site with Dawson in 1913, but they did not find anything. Dawson “discovered” the skull bones at Piltdown 2 in January 1915, and the tooth not until July 1915. And now, the key point: Teilhard was mustered into the French army in December 1914 and was shipped immediately to the front, where he remained until the war ended. He could not have seen the remains of Piltdown 2 with Dawson, unless they had manufactured them together before he left (Dawson died in 1916).

Oakley caught the inconsistency immediately when he received Teilhard’s letter in 1953, but he read it differently and for good reason. At that time, Oakley and his colleagues were just beginning their explorations into whodunit. They rightly suspected Dawson and had written to Teilhard to gather evidence. Oakley read Teilhard’s statement when he was simply trying to establish the basic fact of Dawson’s guilt. In that context, he assumed that Dawson had shown the specimens to Teilhard in 1913, but had withheld them from Smith Woodward until 1915—more evidence for Dawson’s complicity.

Oakley wrote back immediately, and Teilhard, realizing that he had tripped, began to temporize. In his second letter of January 29, 1954, he tried to recoup:

Obviously troubled, he then penned the following postscript.

In a final letter to Mable Kenward, daughter of the owner of Barkham Manor, site of the first Piltdown find, Teilhard drew back even further: “Dawson showed me the field where the second skull (fragments) were found. But, as I wrote to Oakley, I cannot remember whether it was after or before the find” (March 2, 1954).

I can devise only four interpretations for Teilhard’s slip.

1. I thought initially, when I had only read the first letter, that one might interpret Teilhard’s statement thus: Dawson took me to the site in 1913 and later stated in wartime correspondence that he had found the fragments in the rubble. But Teilhard’s second letter states explicitly that Dawson, in the flesh, had pointed to the spot at Piltdown 2 where he had found the specimens.

2. Oakley’s original hypothesis: Dawson showed the specimens to an innocent Teilhard in 1913, but withheld them from Smith Woodward until 1915. But Dawson would not blow his cover in such a crude way. For Dawson took Smith Woodward to the second site on several prospecting trips in 1914, always finding nothing. Now Teilhard and Smith Woodward were also fairly close. Dawson had introduced them in 1909 by sending to London some important mammal specimens (having nothing to do with Piltdown) that Teilhard had collected. Smith Woodward was delighted with Teilhard’s work and praised him lavishly in a publication. He accepted Teilhard as the only other member of their initial collecting trips at Piltdown. Moreover, Teilhard was a house guest of the Smith Woodwards when he visited London in September 1913, following his discovery of the canine. If Dawson had shown Teilhard the Piltdown 2 finds in 1913, then led Smith Woodward extensively astray during several field trips in 1914, and if an innocent Teilhard had told Smith Woodward about the specimens (and I can’t imagine why he would have held back), then Dawson would have been exposed.

3. Teilhard never did hear about the Piltdown 2 specimens from Dawson, but simply forgot forty years later that he had never actually viewed the fossils he had read about later. This is the only alternative (to Teilhard’s complicity) that I view as at all plausible. Were the letters not filled with other damaging points, and the case against Teilhard not supported on other grounds, I would take this possibility more seriously.

4. Teilhard and Dawson planned the Piltdown 2 discovery before Teilhard left England. Forty years later, Teilhard misconstructed the exact chronology, forgot that he could not have seen the specimens when they were officially “found,” and slipped in writing to Oakley.

Teilhard’s letters to Oakley contain other curious statements, each insignificant (or subject to other interpretations) by itself, but forming in their ensemble a subtle attempt to direct suspicion away from himself.

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:

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 evolution 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: