The Piltdown Confession: A Novel
by By Schwartz, Irwin
Category: Fiction , General

In 1911 an amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson uncovered fossil fragments at Piltdown, Sussex, in a dig that appeared to present irrefutable proof that Man had descended from the apes. In 1953 the discovery was shown to have been a hoax.In an amazing blend of fine historical documentation and artful fiction, this book should set to rest all questions about the Piltdown hoax. The text of "On the matter of Eoanthropus dawsoni," the reminiscences of Charles Dawson, is scrupulously annotated here and filled with maps, photos, and diagrams that demonstrate how this meek Edwardian anthropologist succeeded in making monkeys out of Darwin's most ardent advocates.From these annotated pages emerges a darker tale, as we learn what the staid, journalistic studies of the nearly century-old hoax have never told us: about a group of Evangelical extremists who would not stop at murder to suppress support for Darwin's heretical views...about the young priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who enraged members of the Church with his belief that God had created beings that could evolve... about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose real-life sleuthings and interest in spiritualism had led him to investigate the Piltdown affair on his own. The forces of progress and faith clash dramatically in a pastoral English Eden where discovery of the Origin of Man could lead to certain death.Was Dawson the true perpetrator of the Piltdown hoax? Only his modern-day annotator knows for sure, and his identity is perhaps the greatest hoax of all....