ve, 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 its two molar teeth, artificially filed to simulate human patterns of wear. In December, Smith Woodward published and the controversy began.
The skull fragments, although remarkably thick, could not be distinguished from those of modern humans. The  jaw, on the other hand, except for the wear of its teeth, loudly said "chimpanzee" to many experts (in fact, it once belonged to an orangutan). No one smelled fraud, but many professionals felt that parts of two creatures had been mixed together at the Piltdown site. Smith Woodward stoutly defended the integrity of his creature, arguing, with flawed logic, that the crucial role of brain power in our mastery of the earth today implies a precocious role for large brains in evolutionary history as well. A fully vaulted skull still attached to an apish jaw vindicated such a brain-centered view of human evolution.
Teilhard left England late in 1912 4 to begin his graduate studies with Marcellin Boule, the greatest physical anthropologist of France. But in August 1913, he was back in England for a retreat at Ore Place. He also spent several days prospecting with Dawson and on August 30 made a major discovery himself-a canine tooth of the lower jaw, apish in appearance but worn in a human fashion. Smith Woodward continued his series of publications on the new material, but critics persisted in their belief that Piltdown man represented two animals improperly united.
The impasse broke in Smith Woodward's favor in 1915. Dawson had been prospecting at another site, two miles from Piltdown, for several years. He probably took Teilhard there in 1913; we know that he searched the area several times with Smith Woodward in 1914. Then, in January 1915, he wrote to Smith Woodward. The second site, later called Piltdown 2, had yielded its reward-"I believe we are in luck again. I have got a fragment of the left side [it was actually the right] of a frontal bone with a portion of the orbit and root of nose.-In July of the same year, he announced the discovery of a lower molar, again, api