aining have been natural, since the local water "can stain (with iron) at a remarkable speed"? But Teilhard's notion can explain neither the artificial filing of the teeth to simulate human wear nor the crucial discovery of a second combination of ape and human at the Piltdown 2 site. In fact, Teilhard admits: "The idea sounds fantastic. But, in my opinion, no more fantastic than to make Dawson the perpetrator of a hoax."-
Teilhard then goes on to discuss Piltdown 2 and, in trying to exonerate Dawson, makes his fatal error. He writes:
He [Dawson] just brought me to the site of Locality 2 and explained me [sic] that he had found the isolated molar and the small pieces of skull in the heaps of rubble and pebbles raked at the surface of the field.
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:
Concerning the point of "history" you ask me, my "souvenirs" are a little vague. Yet, by elimination (and since Dawson died during the First World War, if 1 am correct) my visit with Dawson to the second site (where the two small fragments of skull and the isolated molar were found in the rubble) must have been in late July 1913 [it was probably in early August].
Obviously troubled, he then penned the following postscript.
When I visited the site no. 2 (in 1913?) the two small fragments of skull and tooth had already been found, I believe. But your very question makes me doubtful! Yes, 1 think definitely they had been already found: and that is the reason why Dawson pointed to me the little heaps of raked pebbles as the place of the "discovery."
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 delighte