understand and certainly not proof of 
guilt. 
Later, after the fake was exposed, 
Gould regards Teilhard’s attempt to 
find explanation in the letters to Oak- 
ley as incomprehensible. But there is 
no problem if one thinks that Teilhard 
really believed his friends and asso- 
ciates of many years before were in- 
nocent. Why should he welcome the 
news that Dawson was a forger and 
that both he and Smith Woodward 
were dupes? 
In instance after instance, an action 
or statement by Teilhard is taken to 
reflect guilt. For example, upon seeing 
the exhibit of the forgery at the British 
Museum, Teilhard is described as 
walking through “glumly.” But an 
honest person seeing an exhibit that 
showed he had been hoaxed by a per- 
son he considered a friend might in- 
deed feel glum. 
Throughout the paper a misleading 
vocabulary is used — on page 14 Nixon 
is mentioned, and then on page 16 
Teilhard is accused of “stonewalling.” 
On page 14 Teilhard is described as 
hiding his real nature “behind a garb 
of piety.” He did not “spontaneously” 
congratulate Oakley as “all other sci- 
entists” had. Reading this the unwary 
are likely to forget that the other sci- 
entists who took part in the excava- 
tions at Piltdown were dead. 
There will, of course, always be un- 
certainty about the events and mo- 
tivations of long ago. I happen to think 
that Teilhard was a sincere and honest 
human being, and that this accounts 
for the facts better than the idea that 
he was a forger. The joke theory just 
does not cover the facts at all. 
In summary, one way of looking 
at the Piltdown forgery is that it 
started as a joke played by Teilhard 
de Chardin and that for the rest of 
his life he regretted it, but events had 
gone too far, and he did not have 
the courage to confess. 
A different way of interpreting the 
same facts is that Piltdown was an 
elaborate and deliberate forgery, and 
that Teilhard was fooled, having 
trusted both Smith Woodward and 
Dawson. He expressed himself clearly 
on Piltdown, but avoided the bitter 
controversy as far as possible. He died 
a few months after the fake was dis- 
covered, still hoping that some other 
explanation might be found. 
S.L. Washburn 
Professor of Anthropology and 
University Professor Emeritus 
University of California, Berkeley 
To the Editor: 
In reviewing the Piltdown forgery, 
Gould considers that J.S. Weiner has 
virtually proven that Charles Dawson 
was guilty of forgery, but he is looking 
for a coconspirator. He mentions the 
anatomist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith 
and the geologist W.J. Sollas, but he 
dismisses them as “farfetched and de- 
void of reasonable evidence.” He then 
turns to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 
and after an extensive review of cir- 
cumstantial evidence, he concludes 
that “Teilhard was an active cocon- 
spirator with Dawson at Piltdown.” 
As to motive, Gould finds that “we 
must recast Piltdown ... as a joke that 
went too far, not as a malicious at- 
tempt to defraud.” 
Other authors have speculated on 
possible coconspirators at Piltdown. 
Just before Gould, three French sci- 
entists (M. Blanc, G. Chapouthier, 
and A. Danchin) published a review 
of scientific frauds, including Pilt- 
down. They mention Teilhard in pass- 
ing but give more attention to Smith 
and Sollas, to both of whom they as- 
cribe professional jealousy of Sir Ar- 
thur Smith Woodward, keeper of ge- 
ology at the British Museum and prin- 
cipal advocate of Piltdown. They are 
inclined to consider Sollas as the most 
probable candidate, largely on the tes- 
timony of J.A. Douglas, Sollas’s long- 
time colleague and his successor in 
the Chair of Geology at Oxford. In 
his retirement on the Isle of Wight, 
Douglas discussed Piltdown with 
R.L.E. Ford, his neighbor and an ama- 
teur paleontologist. Douglas preferred 
not to make his views public out of 
deference to the family of his pre- 
decessor, but Ford persuaded him to 
put them on record before his death. 
As he was then blind, he made a tape 
that was played at a symposium at 
Reading after his death in 1978. L.B. 
Halstead published parts of the tran- 
script with a commentary in Nature. 
He noted that it was generally felt 
that the coconspirator must have been 
someone with considerable expertise 
and with animosity toward Smith 
Woodward. Sollas satisfied these re- 
quirements (as Teilhard did not). He 
was a leader of British anthropology, 
far above Smith Woodward (a spe- 
cialist on fossil fishes) and the keeper 
of anthropology, W.P. Pycraft (an or- 
nithologist). That Sollas detested 
Smith Woodward was well known to 
Douglas from personal experience, for 
he had attempted to mediate between 
them and had failed miserably. As 
professor of geology and paleontology 
at Oxford, Sollas had easy access to 
all of the bones used in the forgery. 
Further, he had bought a supply of 
potassium bichromate, a substance 
that was not in use in his laboratory 
at the time, but which was used to 
stain the Piltdown bones. Finally, Sol- 
las and his photographer Bayzand had 
deliberately tricked Smith Woodward 
with another hoax, the Sherborne 
horse’s head, then exposed him when 
he accepted it as genuine. Why not 
victimize Smith Woodward with a 
greater hoax, one for which Sollas was 
strongly motivated and for which he 
was eminently well prepared to pro- 
vide both materials and expertise. On 
the basis of these facts and of long 
association with him, Douglas believed 
that Sollas had conceived the hoax 
and enlisted Dawson as a coconspir- 
ator. 
Blanc et al. refer to an earlier paper 
by Pierre Thuillier that appeared in 
La Recherche. This is a review of two 
books that had just been published: 
The Piltdown Fraud , by Ronald Mil- 
lar, and Pleine lumi'ere sur Vimpos- 
ture de Piltdown, by Guy van Es- 
broeck. As I have not seen these books, 
the comments below are based on 
Thuillier’s review. Millar found cir- 
cumstantial evidence that convinced 
him that Smith was the culprit and 
that his motive was jealousy and a 
desire to ridicule Smith Woodward 
and Pycraft. Smith, an Australian 
anatomist, was professor of anatomy 
at Manchester and later at London. 
He too had the needed expertise and 
access to bones for the forgery. He 
mocked Dawson by telling him that 
the Piltdown fossils had been con- 
firmed by similar finds at Pilton, Aus- 
tralia. This was pure fabrication: nei- 
ther the town of Pilton nor the fossils 
exist. Clearly, Smith exploited Pilt- 
down to bait his English colleagues. 
This infers that he knew that Piltdown 
was no more valid than Pilton. And 
how better to get that knowledge than 
from participation in the conspiracy? 
One must wonder whether Gould 
could have dismissed Sollas and Smith 
so lightly had he not been, in his own 
words, “too blinded by my own at- 
traction to the hypothesis of Teilhard’s 
complicity.” 
Van Esbroeck introduced yet an- 
other potential conspirator, William 
R. Butterfield, curator of the Hastings 
Museum, of which Dawson was a com- 
mittee member. According to van Es- 
broeck, Butterfield was anxious to 
16 
