hmmm. Seems a French Priest is suspect ...
Was it the French Priest?
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a young French priest and paleontology enthusiast, was present at the Piltdown excavation site during several major discoveries. His clerical duties had brought him to England, where he befriended Dawson. Later in his professional career, de Chardin was to become involved in the discovery of Peking Man, an important collection of early human fossils (Homo erectus) found in China. He was to also become well-known for his philosophical ideas on religion and evolution.
For many years, de Chardin was not seriously considered a suspect. But in 1980, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, published an essay accusing him as a co-conspirator with Charles Dawson. While reviewing Piltdown documents, Gould was struck by a statement made by the priest in correspondence with Kenneth Oakley after the fraud was exposed. In the letter, de Chardin mentioned that Dawson had showed him the second Piltdown site in 1913. But that site had actually been reported to Woodward two years later, in 1915. It was unlikely that de Chardin had the dates mixed up because in 1915, he was serving as a stretcher bearer in France during World War I.
This slip, said Gould, suggested that de Chardin and Dawson could have planned the hoax. Gould further speculated that Piltdown was a joke that got out of hand, becoming so quickly accepted without question by most British paleontologists that a confession would have ruined de Chardin's career. Other investigators have disagreed, explaining de Chardin's alleged slip as an innocent mistake. They suggested that Dawson had actually taken him to see the Barcombe Mills site where a set of human fossils had been found in 1913, not the Piltdown II site at Sheffield Park. Although no other evidence has been found linking the priest to this fraud, he still remains a major suspect to this day.