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 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, Daw