Oakley attended Dr Challoner's Grammar School in Amersham, Buckinghamshire before studying geology at University College London, where he earned his BSc and PhD in the subject.
[5] Another source that Oakley contributed to is the Catalogue of Fossil Hominids Part III: Americas, Asia, Australasia which he, Bernard Grant Campbell, and Theya Ivitsky Molleson all edited.
J. S. Weiner and W. E. le Gros Clark published The Solution of the Piltdown Problem in the Bulletin of The British Museum of Natural History: Geology Department.
Instead, it appeared that the skull was a fabrication produced out of a modern ape mandible that had been skilfully fused to the cranial fragments of another species.
[7] This discovery by Oakley and his colleagues resulted in a vital reconstruction of the existing fossil record, leading to the removal of Eoanthropus dawsoni, enabling properly conducted research into other evidence of human evolution in other parts of the world to be encouraged.