Teilhard became convinced that Pilt- 
down was two creatures when he came 
to know Davidson Black and Franz 
Weidenreich in China, and that this 
discovery was such a “personal blow” 
for Teilhard that he loathed the sub- 
ject of Piltdown ever after. But von 
Koenigswald’s chronology is wrong. 
Teilhard’s 1920 article — published 
long before he went to China — cor- 
rectly chose the two-creature hypoth- 
esis for the skull and jaw. Of all Pilt- 
down’s early discoverers and cham- 
pions, Teilhard had the least cause 
for embarrassment. He had never pub- 
lished an enthusiastic comment on the 
discovery. His only article on Piltdown 
called it as right as he could without 
crying fraud (two creatures, mixed to- 
gether in the same deposit), and he 
had shut up thereafter. 
Washburn apparently prefers the 
“official” story of Dawson acting 
alone, my own preference until I found 
the Oakley letters. Von Koenigswald’s 
attitude is curious. After castigating 
me in no uncertain terms for my un- 
scholarly willingness to point the fin- 
ger of blame, he states with more defi- 
niteness than I ever imposed upon 
Teilhard that “the person responsible 
for the fraud was Professor W. J. Sol- 
las.” He then falsely states that I over- 
looked this proposal and asserts that, 
had I known of it, my “concoctions 
would never have been printed.” But 
if Professor von Koenigswald would 
care to read the first column of my 
article, he will see that I mentioned 
the Sollas accusation and dismissed 
it. True, I did not discuss the point 
in depth, but my article was long 
enough and I had already presented 
a lengthy rebuttal of the Sollas case 
in my first Piltdown piece ( Natural 
History , March 1979). 
The Sollas case seems so farfetched 
to me (and to all others I have con- 
tacted who know the details of Pilt- 
down intimately) that 1 still cannot 
understand why it attracted so much 
publicity. It was this incredulity that 
inspired my first piece. (That article, 
by the way, did not focus on whodunit , 
but on the subject correctly identified 
by Washburn as far more important 
for the history of science in general 
— why did major scientists ever accept 
Piltdown.) The Sollas case rests en- 
tirely on a tape recording made by 
J. A. Douglas, the 93-year-old emeri- 
tus professor of geology at Oxford 
(Sollas’s successor), just before he 
died. The professor’s case, based on 
some fifty-year-old suspicions, is id- 
iosyncratic and conjectural. He simply 
states that Sollas hated Smith Wood- 
ward, that Sollas had potential access 
to bones for the forgery (as did anyone 
in a major museum and many amateur 
collectors as well), and that he re- 
members the arrival of a package of 
potassium bichromate addressed to 
Sollas. (This chemical stained the Pilt- 
down bones, but it also had a variety 
of legitimate uses.) No evidence links 
Sollas with Dawson or ever places him 
at Piltdown. 
Dodson offers the entire smorgas- 
bord of other possibilities. He also 
mentions Sollas and the even more 
unlikely prospect of Grafton Elliot 
Smith. Ronald Millar’s implication of 
Smith died a quick and well-deserved 
death after he published it in 1972. 
Millar grasped at some straws, estab- 
lished no link to Dawson and no evi- 
dence for any tie with the Piltdown 
site. In fact. Smith was the most se- 
verely duped and used of all Pilt- 
down’s champions. He staked his ca- 
reer on the belief that increase in brain 
size was a trigger for all subsequent 
human evolution. A human skull at- 
tached to an ape’s jaw might have 
been designed to feed this prejudice, 
and Smith fell for Piltdown with an 
ardor unmatched by any other sup- 
porter. And lest anyone imagine that 
he constructed Piltdown to advance 
his idee fixe, Smith was far too subtle 
a scientist to imagine that he could 
get away with such a hoax perma- 
nently (since any future discovery 
would destroy him and his thesis for- 
ever) and too excellent an anatomist 
to do such a poor job of forging. 
Dodson, to my amazement, even 
dredges up Butterfield, although my 
surprise is lessened by Dodson’s ad- 
mission that he hasn’t read the ac- 
cusation itself. The Butterfield story 
even makes the Sollas case rich by 
comparison. It is based on nothing 
more, ironically, than a letter from 
Teilhard to his parents stating that 
Butterfield was angry with Dawson 
for not donating some fossil specimens 
to his local museum. 
Anyone with even the slightest pe- 
ripheral relationship to Piltdown has 
been accused by someone or other. 
People half a world away, people who 
never knew Dawson, people who never 
visited Piltdown have been implicated. 
Teilhard has largely escaped public 
scrutiny (although he provoked a great 
deal of private suspicion). But Teil- 
hard was at the site continually. He 
met Dawson three years before Smith 
Woodward even heard of the finds. 
Teilhard and Dawson became friends 
and prospected together extensively. 
Why not look close to home, when 
such a good case is at hand. 
In short, none of the three com- 
mentators has raised a single substan- 
tive point against my thesis. To my 
knowledge, only one substantive claim 
has been advanced by anyone, either 
in public or in private. One of Teil- 
hard’s biographers, Mary Lukas, has 
charged that Oakley and I and all 
who ever read the Oakley letters have 
uniformly misinterpreted them. She 
claims that Teilhard was referring, not 
to the second Piltdown site — the one 
Dawson uncovered in 1915 — but to 
a second pit at the first site. But this 
cannot be because each of three times 
that Teilhard mentions this second 
find, he refers to it explicitly as the 
place “where the two small fragments 
of skull and the isolated molar were 
supposedly found in the rubble.” Only 
one place yielded two skull fragments 
and a molar: the second site, “dis- 
covered” by Dawson in 1915. 
One final comment, almost as a 
point of personal privilege: Both 
Washburn and von Koenigswald (and 
others in private) have accused me 
of a particularly distasteful form of 
nastiness in attempting to tarnish the 
reputation of a man no longer able 
to defend himself. Washburn talks of 
the “reputation of a person long dead 
who cannot set the record straight.” 
Von Koenigswald, in his covering let- 
ter, speaks of my “cheap insult of 
a dead hero who cannot defend him- 
self.” Now, had I suspected Teilhard 
when he still lived and purposely kept 
silent awaiting his death, the charges 
would be well founded. But I was thir- 
teen years old when Teilhard died, 
and I had never heard of him. The 
subject of history might as well fold 
up its tent if it must follow the old 
motto for eulogies — de mortuis nihil 
nisi bonum (“say only good of the 
dead”). Most people who ever lived 
are dead. 
The operative sentence of my origi- 
nal article follows, and I see no reason 
to alter it: “My case is, to be sure, 
circumstantial (as is the case against 
Dawson or anyone else), but I believe 
that the burden of proof must now 
rest with those who would hold Father 
Teilhard blameless.” 
Stephen Jay Gould teaches biology, 
geology, and the history of science 
at Harvard University. 
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