Piltdown in Letters 
The role of the famous priest in the infamous 
conspiracy is here disputed in epistolary fashion 
by Stephen Jay Gould 
In “This View of Life" for August 
1980, a case was made for the active 
participation of the French priest and 
paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de 
Chardin in the fraud of Piltdown man. 
In the months following the publi- 
cation of that column, Natural His- 
tory received many letters expressing 
a wide variety of views on this subject. 
Presented here are three letters in de- 
fense of Teilhard, along with a re- 
sponse from Stephen Jay Gould. Nat- 
ural History welcomes additional let- 
ters on this scientific controversy. 
To the Editor: 
From the moment of discovery, the 
Piltdown “fossils” were the center of 
controversy. Piltdown apparently pro- 
vided a human fossil on English soil, 
a maker for the eoliths, and proof 
that the brain came first in human 
evolution and that an anatomically 
modern braincase was present at the 
beginning of the Ice Age. Every con- 
clusion was important and controver- 
sial, and for many years it was not 
possible to discuss human evolution 
without considering Piltdown. Hun- 
dreds of papers were written about 
the discoveries, but the problem re- 
mained. Anatomically it seemed im- 
possible to associate the skull and jaw, 
but the chance association of an ape’s 
jaw and a human skull in England 
seemed at least as improbable. The 
solution came when J.S. Weiner, Ken- 
neth Oakley, and W.E. le Gros Clark 
showed that everything was fake — 
the bones had been stained, ape’s teeth 
filed down, and fossils added to the 
assemblage to determine the antiq- 
uity. The whole matter is carefully 
reviewed in Weiner’s The Piltdown 
Forgery (1955). 
Obviously, from the point of view 
of science, the importance of discov- 
ering the forgery was to remove the 
chimera, as Franz Weidenreich called 
it, from the list of human fossils. In 
my opinion, the great interest in Pilt- 
down lies in why major scientists ac- 
cepted it, not in who forged it. Un- 
certain conditions of discovery, lack 
of geological information, and virtual 
anatomical impossibility did not deter 
many scientists from giving Piltdown 
a key position in their theories. As 
Ales Hrdlicka remarked on Piltdown 
in The Skeletal Remains of Early 
Man ( 1 930), “It is another case where 
a desire to reach conclusions from in- 
sufficient and problematical material 
has led to a cloud of speculation and 
opinion.” Yet many scientists did take 
a very strong position for or against 
Piltdown. To many it was the most 
important fossil in proving the antiq- 
uity of anatomically modern human 
beings, and any doubts about Piltdown 
were treated as an attack on a whole 
way of looking at human evolution. 
Piltdown was a center of very strong 
national, personal, and technical bi- 
ases, and I think it is very difficult 
for people today (when there are so 
many well-preserved and -dated fos- 
sils) to realize how much emotion was 
invested in theories based on very little 
information. 
Proof of the forgery finished sci- 
entific interest in Piltdown, but the 
very human question remained: Who 
had done it? This is very carefully 
considered in Weiner’s book, and the 
story is much too long to repeat here. 
The core of the matter is that three 
people were personally involved in the 
excavations — Charles Dawson, Ar- 
thur Smith Woodward, and Teilhard 
de Chardin. Dawson took the origi- 
nally “discovered” bones to Smith 
Woodward, a distinguished scientist 
at the British Museum. Later, Smith 
Woodward took part in the excava- 
tions, but it is not thought that he 
was involved in the forgery. His ac- 
count of Piltdown is given in The Ear- 
liest Englishman (1948). 
Dawson not only made most of the 
finds, but was present when the oth- 
ers — Smith Woodward and Teilhard — 
made discoveries. Prior to Piltdown, 
Dawson had been accused of plagia- 
rism, fakes, and “undoubted decep- 
tions.” The evidence against Dawson 
is summarized in Wilton M. Krog- 
man’s “The Planned Planting of Pilt- 
down: Who? Why?” ( Human Evolu- 
tion: Biosocial Perspectives , edited by 
S.L. Washburn and E.R. McCown, 
1978), and I think that it is generally 
believed that he was involved in the 
forgery. After Dawson’s death, Mrs. 
Dawson sent some parts of human 
skulls from her husband’s collection 
to the British Museum, and it turned 
out that these had been stained with 
the same chemicals used in the forg- 
ery. I will return to the matter of 
