es at Harvard, often voiced their suspicions to me. Louis Leakey voiced them in print,  without naming the name, but with no ambiguity for anyone in the know (see his autobiography, By the Evidence ). 5
I finally decided to get off my butt and probe a bit after I wrote a column on Piltdown for other reasons (Natural History, March 1979). 1 read all the official documents and concluded that nothing excluded Teilhard, although nothing beyond his presence at Piltdown from the start particularly implicated him either. I intended to drop the subject or to pass it along to someone with a greater zeal for investigative reporting. But at a conference in France last September, I happened to meet two of Teilhard's closest colleagues, the leading paleontologist J. Piveteau and the great zoologist P. P. Grassé. They greeted my suspicions with a blustering "incroyable." Then Père Francois Russo, Teilhard's friend and fellow Jesuit, heard of my inquiries and promised to send me a document that would prove Teilhard's innocence-a copy of the letter that Teilhard had written to Kenneth Oakley on November 28, 1953. I received this letter in printed French translation (Teilhard wrote it in English) in October 1979 and realized immediately that it contained an inconsistency (a slip on Teilhard's part) most easily resolved by the hypothesis of Teilhard's complicity. When I visited Oakley at Oxford in April 1980, he showed me the original letter along with several others that Teilhard had written to him. We studied the documents and discussed Piltdown for the better part of a day, and I left convinced that Romer, Patterson, and Leakey had been right. Oakley, who had noted the inconsistency but interpreted it differently, agreed with me and stated as we parted: "I think it's right that Teilhard was in it.." (Let me here express my deep appreciation for Dr. Oakley's hospitality, his openness, and his simple, seemingly inexhaustible kindness and helpfulness. I always feel so exhilarated when I discover-and it is not so rare as many people imagine-that a great thinker is also an exemplary human being.)  Since then, I have sharpened the basic arguments and read through Teilhard's published work, finding a pattern that seems hard to reconcile with his innocence. My case is, to be sure, circumstantial (as is the case against Dawson or anyone else), but I believe that the burden of proof must now rest with those who would hold Father Teilhard blameless.
The Case against Teilhard
THE LETTERS TO KENNETH OAKLEY
The main virtue of truth, quite apart from its ethical value (which I hold to be considerable), is that it represents an infallible guide for keeping your story straight. The problem with prevarication is that, when the going gets complex or the recollection misty, it becomes very difficult to remember all the details of your invented scheme. Richard Nixon finally succumbed on a minor matter, and Sir Waiter Scott spoke truly when he wrote the famous couplet: "Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/When first we practice to deceive! "
Teilhard made just such a significant slip on a minor point in his letter to Oakley. Teilhard offered no spontaneous recollections about Piltdown and responded only to Oakley's direct inquiries for help in establishing the forger's identity. He begins by congratulating Oakley "most sincerely on your solution of the Piltdown problem. Anatomically speaking, 'Eoanthropus' [Smith Woodward's name for the Piltdown animal] was a kind of monster. . . . Therefore I am fundamentally pleased by your conclusions, in spite of the fact that, sentimentally speaking, it spoils one of my brightest and earliest paleontological memories."-
Teilhard then stonewalls on the question of fraud. He refuses to believe it at all, declaring that Smith Woodward and Dawson (and, by implication, himself) were not the kind  of men who could conceivably do such a thing. Is it not possible, he asks, that some collector discarded the ape bones in a gravel pit that legitimately contained a human skull, the product of a recent interment? Could not the iron st