.
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, Teilhard presented the Piltdown skull, divorced from its jaw, in just that light-as proof that hominids evolved as a bundle of lineages moving in similar directions. He wrote:
Above all, it is henceforth proved that even at this time [of Piltdown] a race of men existed, already included in our present human line, and very different from those that would become Neanderthal. . . . Thanks to the discovery of Mr. Dawson, the human race appears to us even more distinctly, in these ancient times, as formed of strongly differentiated bundles, already quite far from their point of divergence. For anyone who has an idea of paleontological realities, this light, tenuous as it appears, illuminates great depths.
To what profundity, then, did Teilhard refer Piltdown as evidence? Teilhard believed that evolution moved in an intrinsic direction representing the increasing domination of spirit over matter. Under the thrall of matter, lineages would diverge to become more unlike, but all would move upward in the same general direction. With man, evolution reached its crux. Spirit had begun its domination over matter, adding a new layer of thought-the noosphere above the older biosphere. Divergence would be stemmed; indeed, convergence had already begun in the process of human socialization. Convergence will continue as spirit prevails. When the last vestiges of matter have been discarded, spirit will involute upon itself at a single point called Omega and identified with God-the mystical evolutionary apocalypse that secured Teilhard's fame. 8
But convergence is a thing of the future. Scientists seeking evidence for such a scheme must look to the past for  twin signs of divergence accompanied by similar upward direction-in other words, for multiple, parallel lineages within larger groups.
I have read all of Teilhard's papers from the early 1920s. No theme receives more emphasis than the search for multiple, parallel lineages. In an article on fossil tarsiers, written in 1921, he argues that three separate primate lineages extend