The case of Piltdown man constitutes the greatest scandal known in the history of human paleontology. The first blunder or fraud involving Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, which discredited him as a ‘scientist’ in the scientific community, took place In February 1912.
The fact is that a group of British researchers, including Sir Wilfred Le Gros Clark, Kenneth P. Oakley, Joseph Weiner, Gordon Claringbull, Max Hey, and Jan de Vries, demonstrated that everything was fraudulent in the Piltdown find over a period of ten years. For instance, the evolutionists put together a gorilla jaw with a human skull, both dyed with iron sulfate to give the appearance of great age. Furthermore, lithic implements were also dyed while bones of prehistoric animals brought from other regions were added to the same specimen.
For a while, it was thought that the skull was ancient, and the monkey jaw was recent. However, age measurements made with radioactive carbon (cf. J. de Vries and K. P. Oakley — “Nature“, vol. 184, p. 224, 1959) showed that the “prehistoric” skull of Piltdown was only 600 years old — the mortal remains of a medieval man. It is not known for sure who authored the fraudulent monkey-jawed, man-skulled monster found by Smith Woodward, Dawson, and the Rev. Father Teilhard de Chardin, S. J. Regardless, it was indeed a fraud — fossils dyed with iron sulfate to make them look old, the fossils of a so-called “pre-historic man” who died about 600 years ago.
It seems that those afflicted by the evolutionist fever, including the Jesuit priest de Chardin, would stop at nothing to convince the people that we evolved from ape-like creatures.
Let us now look at the bluff of the Peking Man: At this point, the Rockefeller Foundation oversaw financing the Choukoutien excavations. According to the narratives in the manuals, in 1928, fragments of a skull, two jaws, and five teeth were discovered. The jaws are ape-like and anthropoid in shape.
In 1929 Fr. Teilhard de Chardin was invited, as a geological advisor, to judge the stratigraphy of the region under study. The excavation work was carried out by Wenzhong Pei, who would continue in this task during the communist occupation of China.
In 1929, Pei discovered a second skull, which was incomplete. In 1930, several detached fragments of this skull were found. It was not until 1933 that the results were published by Davidson Black, who had been commissioned to study the findings. (cf. Teilhard de Chardin, Revue des Questions Scientifiques, Volume XXV, 1934).
It is stated that in 1936 there were already twenty-four skulls, five more or less complete ones, twelve jaws and one hundred teeth. From 1936 to 1937, seven human femurs and one humerus were discovered, which were supposed to belong to what was termed the “Synanthrope.” In 1934, with the death of Davidson Black, Franz Weidenreich began to direct the works.
Well, who or what was the Synanthrope?
First of all, let us see what Fr. Teilhard de Chardin says on the chronology of the strata of Choukoutien. He candidly states (in «Revue des Questions Scientifiques», 207-1930) that the faunal ensemble found there was ‘bien datée’, dated with precision. Hence the assertion that man appeared about 600,000 years ago, as this would be the age of the Synanthrope.
An interesting paleontological fact, which discredited Teilhard’s “scientific” procedure, is provided by a Chinese anthropologist (Kwang-Chih-Chang — “New Evidence on Fossil Man in China” — “Science”, vol. 136, 1962). This researcher presented data that shows that a certain type of fauna, appears in China together with normal human fossils. That is, the freak Synanthrope (ape man) fossils lived at the same time as normal homo sapiens!
Now the big part, the major bluff: Everyone knows that a common procedure in the archaeological and paleontological sciences is to photograph in detail the finds “on site” as well as after they have been cleared of all the accretions. However, in about 14 years of excavations at Choukoutien, no photographs of the Synanthropic fossil have appeared in scientific publications!
What had appeared to the public then? What had been promoted through evolutionist publications were the photograph of the entire model made of artificial mass, by Davidson Black in 1933, and of the other, no less artificial model, assembled by Weidenreich in 1936. These are the only photos of the mythical Peking Man that appeared in textbooks and publicity works.
But what about the fossils? If you don’t have pictures, you still have the fossils anyway, don’t you? Well, here comes another scandalous fact, which is the outcome of the story. On December 5, 1941, during the war, the synanthrope fossils, which had never been photographed, were boxed up and mailed from Beijing to Tientsin. And they disappeared without a trace! To this day, no one knows what happened to them. (cf. H. Brodrick, «El Hombre Pré-Histórico» — Fondo de Cultura Econômica — 1955).
Such was the sad result of Fr. Teilhard’s great finding of a second cave man — a cheap bluff.
Another important fact, according to the various reports made during the excavations, is that all the thirty-eight synanthrope skulls had an incision in the occiput, which suggested that all the individuals had died a violent death (cf. H. Brodrick — op. cit.). That is, they were apes that had been hunted by humans.
Teilhard de Chardin calls this fact a “curious thing” and an “enigmatic circumstance” (in Etudes, 5-7-1937) — which led the French scientist Marcellin Boule to formulate the commonsense thesis that such caps were nothing more than hunting trophies taken by prehistoric homo sapiens to the Choukoutien region. Associated with these skulls, there were only seven femurs and a humerus, which, yes, were photographed, but they are human, not of any ape-man.
Fr. Henri Breuil, invited in 1932 to visit the site of the discoveries, published an account in which he described as simple hubcaps the pieces that Fr. Teilhard de Chardin gratuitously calls “skulls.” (“Revue des Questions Scientifiques“, 20-7-1930).
The conclusion is simple: Fr. Pierre Marie Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. was involved in a blatant fraud – the ‘Piltdown man,’ and a major bluff – the “Synanthropus pekinensis.” A not very favorable curriculum vitae for the Jesuit ‘anthropologist’, whom the trendy contributors to the Jesuit magazine America and the like want to make a “Doctor of the Church.”
Next article: Teilhard de Chardin contradicts himself more and more…
Por la fe, nunca concidere la teoría de la evolución, poco a. Poco aparece la verdad