estigation into this extraordinary silence, and trying to be as charitable as 1 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. 1 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:
In order to admit such a combination of forms [a human skull and an ape's jaw in the same creature], it is necessary that we be forced to such a conclusion. Now this is not the case here. . . . The reasonable attitude is to grant primacy to the intrinsic morphological probability over the extrinsic probability of geological conditions.... We must suppose that the Piltdown skull and jaw belong to two different subjects.
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