The Lost Forest

by John Francis Kinsella

  Chapter 60

  ZHOUKOUDIAN - CHINA

  During the flight up to Beijing from Hongkong Ennis pondered the consequences of the discovery that was now public. What would be the reaction? What would that mean for future excavation campaigns? How would the Indonesians react to the Malaysian accusations and how would it affect him?

  To his astonishment he got part of the answer in the media’s reaction immediately he left the passport control and baggage arrivals area at Beijing International Airport. The automatic doors slide opened and a crowd surged forward with flashes of cameras and hand held spot lights from TV camera men.

  ‘Mr Ennis! Mr Ennis! When are you going to make a declaration? Is the missing link Asian? Do you have the bones with you?”

  The police forced their way though the throng with an official and a small man whom he recognised as Professor Wei from the Beijing Institute of Anthropology.

  ‘Welcome to Beijing Mr Ennis, I’m sorry about the reception but you are now a star,’ said Professor Wei with a wry smile.

  They were jostled and bombarded with questions as the police made a path to the exit and a waiting car.

  ‘First we go to your hotel, the Grand Hotel, you are a guest of our government!’

  It took ten minutes or more for Ennis to gather his senses as they entered the outskirts of the Chinese capital.

  ‘How did the press learn so quickly about our work?’

  ‘Ah, that’s a question only you can answer Mr Ennis.’

  ‘But we have not communicated anything to the media!’

  ‘No, but somebody in your team must have done so.’

  ‘Has Mr Pierre Ros arrived?’

  ‘Yes, he arrived yesterday morning from Paris.’

  ‘Does he know about this situation?’

  ‘I suppose you mean the media. He learnt about it this morning, on the TV news.’

  ‘How did they know I was arriving here?’

  ‘Well the conference is followed by the press, specialists from all over the world will be present, so when the news broke they guessed you may be coming here to make some announcement. You know they check out the airline passenger lists with their contacts in the airlines. Is Ennis a common name?’

  At the hotel he had barely found Pierre Ros in the lobby when they were swamped by a crowd including the hotel director, his staff and a gaggle of press reporters.

  It was a quarter of an hour before he made it to his room with Pierre followed by the hotel director.

  ‘Mr Ennis, this is your suite’, he announced with obvious pleasure opening the room door to a spacious suite on the twenty-fifth floor. After the formalities of handing over the keys and an inspection of the rooms he left them to themselves.

  Ennis flopped into an armchair, picking up the remote control and zapping at the large TV in a cabinet that the director had opened for him.

  ‘Where’s Professor Wei disappeared to?’ asked Pierre.

  ‘He’ll be back at seven to take us to diner.’

  ‘So the shit’s really has hit the fan,’ Ennis half said to himself.

  ‘Is there any news from Aris?’

  ‘No, what about you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  China was perhaps the most important site for prehistoric man in Asia and its palaeoanthropologist amongst the world’s leaders. China was the second site of the second discovery of Homo erectus where were found at a site called, Zhoukoudian. In 1921, Gunnar Anderson discovered an important source of ‘dragon bones’ in northern China, an abandoned limestone quarry near the village of Zhoukoudian, where excavations began in 1921 and the first hominid remains, a molar tooth, was unearthed in 1923. Then came the first Homo erectus skull cap found by Pei Wenzhong in 1929 followed by the remains of at least fourteen other individuals during the period that led up to the start of World War II.

  As the Japanese forces approached in 1941, it was decided to ship them to the USA in a desperate effort to save them, but the day they reached the Chinese port of embarkation was December 7, 1941, was the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. The ship on which they were to be transported was sunk, and the American marine detachment, in whose luggage they were being carried, was captured by Japanese soldiers. The fossils disappeared and have never been seen since. The German anatomist Franz Weidenreich had fortunately made highly detailed casts and very detailed scientific descriptions.

  After WWII work continued on the site and more teeth with bones and skull fragments were found. Thirteen different levels were indentified containing not only bones but also stone artefacts and evidence of fire.

  These were dated using all the most modern scientific techniques including Electron Spin Resonance, Thermoluminescence, Paleomagnetism and Fission Track. The results indicated that the layers containing hominid fossils dated to between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago.

  The diner in a private dinning room in one of the hotels many restaurants gathered at least thirty persons on four round tables. It was in traditional Chinese style with many toasts followed by speeches welcoming ‘Professor’ Ennis, and to international scientific cooperation. Ennis was especially struck by the speech from a specialist from the Chinese Academy of Science who questioned the out of Africa theory suggesting that modern man had evolved in several regions of the world and more specifically in China. Pierre Ros nudged him under the table in case he had not grasped the significance of the speech, which ended with a toast for ‘Professor’ Ennis and his team.

  The next day’s programme started with them sneaking out by the hotels underground parking for a visit to Zhoukoudian in the company of Professor Wei. Zhoukoudian was a small village situated about fifty kilometres to southwest of Beijing, situated by a chain of low mountains and rolling hills that opened out to the plains of Huabei Province. The celebrated Peking Man Site lay on the west side of Village.

  The limestone caves had long been known by the local inhabitants as a source of Dragon Bones often found in the nearby hills. It was there at a place called Chicken-bone hill that work first started by fossil collectors in the early 1920’s. But it was at Dragon Bone Hill human-like teeth were discovered.

  One of them was an upper molar. It was found during the excavation. Another one was an unerrupted lower premolar. It was the first discovery of any such ancient human fossil in China and the Asian mainland.

  Dr. Davidson Black, a Canadian anthropologist and Dean of the Anatomy Department of Peiping Union Medical College, named the new discovery as Sinanthropus pekinensis, generally known as ‘Peking Man’.

  The most important discovery of all was made in a cave where the first and almost complete skullcap of Peking Man in the red sandy clay at level 10. The skullcap was remarkably similar to Eugene Dubois’s discovery in Java and Peking Man was accepted as the irrefutable proof of the existence of an intermediate stage in human evolution between man and the apes.

  They started the tour followed by an official cameraman who bobbed in and about the group trying to catch Ennis who had become an instant celebrity.

  ‘So John what’s it like to be famous?’ said Pierre laughing.

  ‘I don’t know, but I hope it helps my business!’

  That morning the hotel had delivered a pile of faxs to Ennis’s room with requests for interviews from local and international news agencies. He was joined by Pieere for breakfast in his suite, a little concerned about being swamped by a crowd of journalists. It had been difficult to sort the important messages from the rest. There were messages from Aris and the dig asking Ennis to call urgently and a fax informing them that Professor Lundy would be in Beijing the next day for the opening of the conference.

  They stopped and Professor Wei made a sign for the dialogue to commence.

  “So Professor Ennis,” said the site director, “since the excavation work here started again after the War of Resistance, many new discoveries were made. By 1966 the number of fossils found included six crania or skullcaps, 19 large fragments of skulls, many
small fragments of skulls, 15 mandibles, 157 isolated teeth, three pieces of humerus, one clavicular, one lunate, and a tibia.”

  They looked across the low hills that had been worked by three questers of a century of excavations.

  ‘As you can see many thousands of cubic metres have been moved, this is one of the greatest excavations ever undertaking in the history of paleoanthropology. Some of these deposits total fifty metres of accumulated debris and up to one million years old.’

  ‘From an archeological point of view were there many artefacts discovered here?’

  ‘Oh yes Professor, our excavation have turned up not only fossils but great quatities of stone tools and raw materials for making tools from quartz, flint, and sandstones, much of which was transported here. There are also many thousands of bones from animals that Peking man had hunted including deer.’

  The caves were occupied for hundreds of thousands of years and though initially of great volume were gradually filled with debris slowly reducing the space until they were finally abandoned as uninhabitable.

  Another important discovery was the use of fire. Several layers of ash layers have been found on the limestone floor of the caves that had been the home of Peking Man. They layers are up to six metres deep and filled with large quantities of stone tools and charred animal bones. Did Peking Man discover how to make fire? That was uncertain as at the outset have found natural fire brought it back to the cave where it was kept alive over a very long period of time.

  To Ennis it was clear that he was like his counterparts in Spain, a cave dweller, tool maker, fire user, a hunter gatherer,. He had a similar social structure living in groups, working together in their daily tasks, hunting and carrying their kill back to share it with their families in their caves.

  Life was hard not unlike that of animals, life expectancy was extremely brief with the majority dying before reaching the age of fourteen and only one in twenty reaching fifty, as the fossil record shows.

  In the upper levels of the site bones were found of early and late Homo sapiens, the most recent of which dated to about twenty seven thousand years before present.

  Back at the hotel Professor Wei informed them that a TV interview had been arranged concerning the International Anthropological Congress. They agreed but informed Wei that they could not to go into details about their discovery as it was the prerogative of Professor Lundy to make an official statement. Their protestations had little effect as they were bustled from the lift to a nearby meeting room that was packed full of journalists and TV cameras.

  They took a seat before an array of microphones at a table set up on a podium before the crowd. Professor Wei sat in the middle and they were joined by who Wei introduced as a director from the Ministry of Science and Culture.

  The man from the ministry raised his hands for silence and then spoke into the microphones.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of our government I am pleased to welcome Professor Ennis, whose extraordinary discovery in Borneo will be officially presented at the Conference of Palaeoanthropology here in Beijing on Monday.’

  There was a movement of excitement and applause from the crowd as they pressed for to see Ennis accompanied by the flashing of cameras.

  ‘Also let met introduce Professor Pierre Ros from the Musée de l’Homme in Paris who is directing the excavations in Borneo.’

  Ennis looked at Ros who lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

  ‘Now, Professor Wei, will answer your questions.’

  Wei looked a little bewildered in spite of being used to talking in public.

  ‘Professor Wei, Professor Ennis, have you really found a Yeti?’

  There was a faint laugh from the assembly.

  Wei looked towards Ennis for a response.

  ‘No,’ said Ennis clearing his voice. There was a sigh of disappointment. ‘We have found something much more important.’

  The excitement rose again.

  ‘Unfortunately I cannot make an official statement before the arrival of Professor Lundy from Paris tomorrow and his colleague from Bandung University, Professor Ismail Sarrudin.’

  ‘Professor, professor,” shouted a woman reporter with a French accent. ‘We have heard that you have a new Homo erectus!’

  ‘As I said…’

  ‘Is it true that primitive man lived in Borneo until recent times?’ an American questioned.

  ‘Is Asia the birth place of modern man?’ another shouted.

  Ennis stood up lifting his hands. “Gentlemen, I’m sorry but I cannot make a statement before tomorrow, let us meet again at the Conference Centre here in the hotel tomorrow afternoon.

  Pandemonium broke out as disappointed journalists crowded around them as they struggled to make their way out to the lifts followed by Wei and the man from the ministry.