Word: piltdown
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stephen Jay Gould appears to accept the popular charge that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was involved in the conspiracy behind the Piltdown man forgery. Gould's accusation, however, has not been accepted by experts. J.S. Weiner, who first uncovered the hoax and then the hoaxer, dismissed Gould's account as worthless. British Scholar Kenneth Oakley, who originally supported Gould's contention that Teilhard faked the Piltdown fossil as part of a youthful prank, later changed his mind. After being shown evidence that contradicted Gould, Oakley declared that the basis of Gould's charge against Teilhard...
...bizarre, it is because, as he notes, "small items with big implications are my bread and butter." A confessed iconoclast, he likes nothing better than to take aim at major targets. Gould links that saintly man of the cloth and science, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to the infamous Piltdown hoax (the faked fossil, says Gould, was apparently a youthful prank by Teilhard), and displays irreverence for even his great hero Charles Darwin. Says Gould: "If I have one special ability, it is as a tangential thinker. I can make unusual connections...
...Alexander Haig for his Piltdown treatment of the English language. To those of us who share the general's khaki complexion, Haigledygook is the creative flowering of basic Army jargon...
...sort of a fraud," the press agent says over the phone. Here's a spark of interest--after all, Henry David shows up about 36 inches into the Five Foot Shelf of Books. And now someone's gotten the goods on him, found some grinning skeleton of Piltdown Man in the closet of his rude cabin. Okay, so send the book...
...near Piltdown, England, an amateur fossil hunter named Charles Dawson "found" the first of two skulls with a human-like cranium and an apelike jaw. The find was hailed as the missing link between man and ape; for years Piltdown man occupied a prominent place in paleontology. Finally in 1953 he was unmasked: the remains were nothing more than a fabrication of modern human and ape bones doctored to give them the look of antiquity...