Of Paleopolitics and Missing Links - The Fossil Chronicles - page 13

Scholars have been divided on the question of whether Dawson acted
alone or had one or more accomplices in the forgery. 43 Over the years,
at least 21 individuals have been identified as suspected accomplices,
including the French priest Teilhard de Chardin and the celebrated cre-
ator of detective Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. Most of these
individuals are no longer serious suspects. 44 A more recent revelation
has pointed in the direction of Martin Hinton, a volunteer in the British
Museum of Natural History at the time of the incident. 45 Hinton, who
specialized in studying fossil rodents and was known to have a keen
interest in hoaxes, joined the staff of the museum's zoology department
in 1921 and rose to the rank of keeper of zoology by 1936. In 1978, 17 years
after Hinton's death, a trunk bearing his initials was found in the loft
above his old office. Ten mammalian bones that had been stained and
(in some cases) whittled in the same fashion as the Piltdown bones lay
at the bottom of the trunk. Hinton's estate also yielded remains of eight
human teeth that had been stained with a second method used to alter
some of the Piltdown remains. 46
It has been suggested that Hinton's deception was motivated by a
desire to validate his beliefs about the nature of the earliest stone tools
(called eoliths at that time) as well as to settle a grudge he may have
held against Arthur Smith Woodward, who had been invited to provide
the official study of the Piltdown specimen. 47 Hinton knew Dawson
well enough to have visited his house and had frequented Piltdown
on weekends during the period it was being excavated. Thus, it seems
very likely that Dawson and Hinton coperpetrated the Piltdown forg-
ery. 48 This interpretation is consistent with a letter that Hinton wrote
on May 11, 1955, to Joseph Weiner, the lead author of the paper that
eventually exposed the hoax: “I think the original discovery of the skull
by the workmen was very likely genuine—but the rest was a practical
joke which succeeded only too well. ” 49 The original discovery to which
Hinton referred, however, contains a clue in the form of the so-called
coconut story, 50 which suggests that the Piltdown affair may have been
a bad practical joke right from the beginning: