The Piltdown Conspiracy 1
Hen's Teeth and Horses' Toes 1983
Stephen Jay Gould
 Introduction and Background
In his great aria "La calumnia," Don Basillo, the music master of Rossini's Barber of Seville, graphically describes how evil whispers grow, with appropriate watering, into truly grand and injurious calumnies. For the less conniving among us, the same lesson may be read with opposite intent: in adversity, try to contain. The desire to pin evil deeds upon a single soul acting alone reflects this strategy; conspiracy theories have a terrible tendency to ramify like Basillo's whispers until the runaway solution to "whodunit" becomes "everybodydunit." But conspiracies do occur. Even the pros and pols now doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald  acted alone; and everybody did do it on the Orient Express. 2
The Piltdown case, surely the most famous and spectacular fraud of twentieth-century science, has experienced this tension ever since its exposé in 1953 . The semiofficial, contained version holds that Charles Dawson, the lawyer and amateur archeologist who "found" the first specimens, devised and executed the entire plot himself. Since J. S. Weiner's elegant case virtually precludes Dawson's innocence (The Piltdown Forgery, Oxford University Press, 1955), conspiracies become the only reasonable refuge for challengers. And proposals for coconspirators abound, ranging from the great anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith to W. J. Sollas, professor of geology at Oxford. I regard these claims as farfetched and devoid of reasonable evidence. But I do believe that a conspiracy existed at Piltdown and that, for once, the most interesting hypothesis is actually true. I believe that a man who later became one of the world's most famous theologians, a cult figure for many years after his death in 1955, knew what Dawson was doing and probably helped in no small way-the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
TEILHARD AND PILTDOWN
Teilhard, born in Auvergne (central France) in 1881, belonged to an old, conservative, and prosperous family. Entering the Society of Jesus in 1902, he studied on the English island of Jersey from 1902 to 1905 and then spent three years as a teacher of physics and chemistry at a Jesuit school in Cairo. In 1908, he returned to finish his theological training at the Jesuit seminary of Ore Place in Hastings, providentially located right next to Piltdown on England's southeast coast. Here he stayed for four years, and here he  was ordained a priest in 1912. 3 As a theological student, Teilhard was talented enough, but lackadaisical. His passion at Hastings was, as it always had been, natural history.
He scoured the countryside for butterflies, birds, and fossils. And, in 1909, he met Charles Dawson at the focus of their common interests-in a stone quarry, hunting for fossils. The two men became good friends and colleagues in pursuit of their interest. Teilhard described Dawson to his parents as "my correspondent in geology."
Dawson claimed that he had recovered the first fragment of Piltdown's skull in 1908, after workmen at a gravel pit told him of a "coconut" (the entire skull) they had unearthed and smashed at the site. Dawson kept poking about, collecting a few more skull pieces and some fragments of other fossil mammals. He did not bring his specimens to Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of paleontology at the British Museum, until the middle of 1912. Thus, for three years before any professional ever heard of the Piltdown material, Dawson and Teilhard were companions in natural history in the environs of Piltdown.
Smith Woodward was not a secretive man, but he knew the value of what Dawson had brought and the envy it might inspire. He clamped a tight lid upon Dawson's information prior to its publication. He wanted none of Dawson's lay friends at the site, and only one naturalist accompanied Dawson and Smith Woodward in their first joint excavations at Piltdown-Teilhard de Chardin, whom Dawson had described as "quite safe." More specimens came to light during 1912, including the famous jaw with i