by Lydia Pyne
The achievements that made the Taung Child famous were the decades of study, the fall of Piltdown, and, as we tell the story, the dedicated, dogged determinism of Dr. Raymond Dart—efforts that eventually vindicated the fossil as a hominin ancestor. In the discipline’s historical canon, the fossil itself represents an underdog fighting for a place of recognition as an evolutionary ancestor to modern humans.
Composite image showing casts of hominid fossil skulls and bone fragments, drawings, and memorabilia brought by paleoanthropologist Franz Weidenreich (center) from China to New York in 1941. These fossil remains were recovered at Zhoukoudian between 1929 and 1937 and were classified by Weidenreich as Homo erectus, commonly referred to as Peking Man. (John Reader/Science Source)
CHAPTER FOUR
PEKING MAN: A CURIOUS CASE OF PALEO-NOIR
In 2011, Dr. Per Ahlberg, Dr. Martin Kundrát, and curator Dr. Jan Ove Ebbestad began unpacking and cataloging the contents of forty boxes from fossil collections archived in the Museum of Evolution in Uppsala, Sweden. These boxes had not been opened since their materials had been packed off to Sweden from excavations at the well-known archaeological site of Zhoukoudian in China during the 1920s and 1930s. Among crates of the site’s fossil fauna, the Swedish researchers found a hominin canine tooth. The tooth was chipped, the surface was very worn, and the dark brown root had broken off just below the gum line—but it was a tooth that looked surprisingly humanlike.
The Swedish scientists sent the tooth to their colleagues Liu Wu and Tong Haowen, paleontologists at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, for analysis. Wu and Haowen determined that the tooth was a canine that would have belonged to Peking Man—a series of fossils excavated from Zhoukoudian in the first half of the twentieth century. Today Peking Man is taxonomically assigned to Homo erectus—an extinct Pleistocene species in humans’ evolutionary tree roughly 750,000 years old. But Wu and Haowen’s description also meant that the tooth carried a certain historical distinction. Peking Man—as the assemblage of skulls, jaws, teeth, and other bones was collectively known—was one of the most celebrated fossils discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century. By identifying the tooth as part of Peking Man, the fossil tooth became a lost relic found.1
Recovered canine from Peking Man assemblage, Museum of Evolution, Uppsala University Archives, 2011. (Museum of Evolution, Uppsala University, Sweden. Used with permission)
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It’s hard to build a coherent narrative based strictly on disjointed details, and Peking Man’s story is full of them: its fossils are a story built out of many stories, without a clear beginning, with many middles, and with no clear ending. Where other specimens like the Old Man or the Taung Child have a very specific moment of discovery and lives as scientific and cultural personae, Peking Man has only its many stories that are told and retold, forming a mythos of importance along nationalistic, scientific, and historical lines.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, paleoanthropology had very few fossils in its collections, and no fossils from mainland Asia. (The only Asian fossil in the historical record at that point was Eugène Dubois’s discovery of Java Man, Pithecanthropus erectus, found on the Indonesian island of Java in 1891—Homo erectus to us today.) By the 1920s, the study of fossils and human evolution in China came from a variety of parties—China’s budding interests in geology and anthropology, as well as investments from outside researchers interested in the artifacts and fossils that comprised China’s archaeological and paleoanthropological records.
On the surface, Peking Man’s story seems rather straightforward. In the summer of 1921, a young Austrian paleontologist, Otto Zdansky, found the first fossil hominin molar later classified as Peking Man while he surveyed the Zhoukoudian caves just forty kilometers outside of Beijing (then romanized as Peking). He picked up the molar and put it in his pocket. The fossil was eventually analyzed, along with other archaeological materials, and all skeletal materials were published in 1927’s Palaeontologica Sinica as part of the new species Sinanthropus pekinensis, or Peking Man. On October 16, 1927, another Sinanthropus tooth was uncovered in the excavations, and Canadian paleoanthropologist Dr. Davidson Black felt confident that these fossils represented a completely new species of human ancestor. Over the course of a decade and a half, other Sinanthropus fossils like skulls, mandibles, teeth, and bone fragments were recovered from Zhoukoudian, enough fossils to represent a population of forty Sinanthropus individuals. Replica casts and museum displays were created, and national narratives written. Then, in December 1941, the fossils were lost during an attempt to ship them out of China before the invasion of the Japanese army. After the fossils went missing, they maintained their cachet through their casts and photographs. But the mystery of their disappearance and the question of where those original fossils went intrigued the scientific community and captured popular imagination, to say nothing of the interest of the government of China. All attempts to locate the fossils have ended in failure.
The Peking Man’s story is, of course, much more complicated and much more interesting. When Dr. Johan Gunnar Andersson, director of Sweden’s Geological Survey, came to China in 1914, he had been hired as a mining adviser to the Chinese government. Andersson was a self-described “mining specialist, a fossil collector and an archaeologist” who had led a Swedish survey in Antarctica from 1901 to 1903.2 His arrival and interest in fossils, however, helped initiate a series of surveys and new modern research methodologies in northern China together with his Chinese and Swedish colleagues. The growing interest in Chinese history, prehistory, and paleohistory put China on a clear trajectory to becoming a major scientific force in archaeology and geology by the mid-twentieth century. “To many anthropologists in the 1920s, Asia seemed the most likely place for ‘the cradle of mankind,’” offers historian Dr. Peter Kjaergaard. “Fame, prestige and money were intimately connected in the hunt for humankind’s earliest ancestors and, thus, a lot was at stake for those involved. Several countries were competing for access to China as ‘the paleontological Garden of Eden.’”3
Andersson’s interest in China’s fossils had been piqued by German paleontologist Max Schlosser’s “dragon bone” findings from Schlosser’s own travels in China over a decade earlier; by the time Andersson arrived in China, Schlosser’s fossils had been taxonomically identified to ninety species of mammals. Many of the early fossil collectors came to find their specimens through Chinese locals who hunted the “dragon bones”—as fossils were called—as components for traditional medicines. Archaeologists went to dragon bone hunters for leads, suggestions, and the fossils the apothecaries had collected. In Schlosser’s fossil collection was a humanlike third upper molar that piqued Andersson’s interest in the area as a viable site for investigating human origins in Asia. For Andersson, this lone rogue tooth meant that there was clear evidence of early man in China; he just had to find it. From 1914 to 1918, Andersson paid a number of local technicians (or assistants, as he called them) for fossil hunting in the Shanxi, Henan, and Gansu provinces with the hope that some of these locales would successfully yield “dragon bones” or some other interesting objects of antiquity. Any materials that Andersson’s lackeys recovered were promptly sent to Professor Carl Wiman of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology at Uppsala for study. In late autumn of 1920, Andersson’s assistant Liu Chang-shan returned to Beijing with several hundred stone axes, knives, and other stone artifacts, all of which were from a single spot in the village of Yangshao in Henan.
Particularly significant about Andersson’s work was his reliance on geological methods for excavating and his commitment to scientific methodology. “With geology, and the principles of stratigraphy as a means of exploring the dimension of time, there simply could be no scientific archaeology or any of its excavations that characteristically focus on the delineation of the context of objects,” notes historian Dr. Magnus Fikesjö. “Andersson arrived … [at] his famous position at th
e beginnings of Chinese archaeology by way of his geology, precisely by observing stratigraphic patterns and scanning the landscape for traces of paleontological and human remains that might constitute new discoveries.”4 Artifacts were mapped to specific strata, and sites could be interpreted as a sequence of events with each of the excavated objects offering clues about what those events could have been. The reliance on geology’s scientific framework firmly established the initial excavations—and the later excavations at Zhoukoudian—as credible modern science in China.
By 1918, Andersson’s interest in fossils resonated with his colleagues, and J. McGregor Gibb—who was teaching chemistry in Beijing—showed Andersson some red-clay-covered fossil fragments from a place called Jigushan (“Dragon Bone Hill”) near Zhoukoudian. (Zhoukoudian—also known as Chou Kou Tien or Choukoutien—was about forty kilometers from Beijing.) Andersson set out by mule on March 22, 1918, to explore the Zhoukoudian area, a day’s travel from his home in Beijing. There, Andersson found a series of extensive limestone caves, with thick, fault-crossed sedimentary bands. Legend—coupled with oral history—has it that the Zhoukoudian area was first recognized as a fossiliferous locale as early as the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), when archaeological evidence of limekilns appear in the area. Over millennia, the groundwater erosion of the limestone created caves and fissures, classic geomorphic catchment areas for the fabled dragon bones.
Andersson’s initial exploration of the area reinforced his notion that it would be ideal for more systematic work, and in 1921 he assigned a young Austrian paleontologist, Otto Zdansky, to survey parts of the area. Zdansky, a recent graduate from the University of Vienna, had joined the team to collect fossils for Uppsala University. “I have a feeling that there lie here the remains of one of our ancestors and it is only a question of your finding him,” Andersson gushed to Zdansky upon the latter’s arrival at Zhoukoudian. “Take your time and stick to it till the cave is emptied, if need be.”5 Since Zdansky did not receive a salary for his work (although his expenses were covered), he had negotiated the rights to describe any fossil discoveries he made in the course of his work at Zhoukoudian. While Zdansky somewhat reluctantly began excavations at Zhoukoudian, Andersson turned his own attention to generating interest in the sites from other scientific institutions, organizing grants and donations and raising awareness about the site’s significance. In one effort, Andersson brought Walter Granger, the chief paleontologist for an expedition underwritten by the American Museum of Natural History, to search for “early man.” The plan was to garner Granger’s notice about China’s value to prehistory and the contributions China could offer the still developing scientific field, thus putting China’s fossils squarely at the forefront of paleoanthropology’s burgeoning interest in Asia.
During the 1921 field season, Zdansky unearthed that single tooth—a tooth with a worn-down crown and three roots. “Although Zdansky did not acknowledge the stone tools at Zhoukoudian as such,” Kjaergaard argues, “[h]e soon realized that there was indeed ancient human remains buried at Choukoutien. However, he kept it to himself and put away the tooth he found. According to his own explanation, he did not want to let the sensation of a potential human ancestor cloud more important work. But, of course, he was perfectly aware of what this could mean for his career and what a compensation it would be for working without a proper salary.”6
Zdansky did, however, deign to produce the tooth for visitors during the visit of the crown prince of Sweden to the site in 1926. But it wasn’t until 1927 that the molar, in addition to another tooth fragment recovered from the excavation materials in the crates, was published by those working at the site. The tooth was identified as a molar from the right side of the mouth, from a species that Zdansky tentatively assigned to the genus Homo. (He put a question mark next to the species name.) Although Zdansky published his Zhoukoudian experiences in 1923—including a fossil catalog list of all the species recovered and identified—the questionable Homo tooth was conspicuously absent. After a subsequent field season in 1923, Zdansky returned to Uppsala and simply analyzed the tooth with the specimens recovered from his excavations. Although he bowed out of subsequent research at Zhoukoudian, the publication of a hominin tooth marked the beginning of a dedicated search for human ancestors at the site.
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The presence of an “early man” or that elusive hominin ancestor—even if that presence was marked by just two teeth—was enough to motivate international agencies, like the Rockefeller Foundation, to fund excavations at Zhoukoudian. By 1927, the Rockefeller Foundation funds had arrived and systematic excavations began in earnest, under the leadership of Chinese scientists Dr. Ding Wenjiang (as the project’s honorary director) and Dr. Weng Wenhao (later director of China’s Geological Survey), as well as Canadian paleoanthropologist Dr. Davidson Black. Four scientific specialists—Dr. Anders Birger Bohlin (accompanied by his wife), Drs. Li Jie, Liu Delin, and Xie Renfu—were in charge of excavations and laboratory work. Other workers were hired, including a field manager and cook. Members of the field team stayed at the Liu Zhen Inn, a camel caravan inn that had just nine tiny damp adobe rooms. Located a mere two hundred meters from the site, it was rented by Li Jie for fourteen yuan a month and functioned as an ideal field headquarters between 1927 and 1931. Initial fieldwork began on March 27, 1927. Researchers conducted a systematic survey of the entire Zhoukoudian complex, extending to the county seat of Fangshan, where earlier maps had been limited to only the Peking Man site proper. Full-scale excavations then began on April 16, 1927.
In addition to excavation funds, the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored the building and management of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory. Founded in 1928 by Davidson Black, Ding Wenjiang, and Weng Wenhao, the laboratory was a part of the Peking Union Medical College with the help of an $80,000 grant that Black had received from Rockefeller. The laboratory was specifically tasked to oversee the Peking Man material as the sheer amount of materials excavated and blasted out of the Zhoukoudian site boggles the mind: fossil specimens from the 1927 field season filled a staggering five hundred crates. Most of this fossil material was later shipped to the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Sweden. (The transportation of the fossils from Beijing to Sweden wasn’t without its own dangers; in November 1919, the Swedish ship Peking sank in a storm with eighty-two crates of plant and animal fossils on their way to Sweden for analysis. The loss of these fossils was a huge blow to the early days of Andersson’s research.)7
By October 16, 1927, three days before the field season was supposed to end and as the team was beginning to wrap up their excavations, an in situ hominin tooth was discovered close to where Zdansky had found that tooth years earlier. In a letter dated October 29, 1927, Davidson Black wrote to Andersson, who was in Stockholm at the time:
We have got a beautiful human tooth at last!
It is truly glorious news, is it not!
Bohlin is a splendid and enthusiastic worker who refused to permit local discomforts or military exercises to interfere with his investigation… . I couldn’t get away myself for I was having daily committee work that demanded my presence here. Hsieh (Zie Renfu) couldn’t reach Chou Kou Tien on account of local fighting. That night which was October 19th when I got back to my office at 6:30 from my meeting there I found Bohlin in his field clothes and covered with dust but his face just shining with happiness. He had finished the season’s work in spite of the war and on October 16th he had found the tooth; being right on the spot when it was picked out of the matrix! My word, I was excited and elated! Bohlin came here before he had even let his wife know he was in Peking—he certainly is a man after my own heart and I hope you will tell Dr. Wiman how much I appreciate his help in securing Bohlin for the work in China.
We have now in Peking some 50 boxes of material which we got in last July when the last military crisis was on but there are 300 more large boxes yet to come from Chou Kou Tien. Mr. Li of the Survey is busy trying to get rail cars to bring back this materi
al. It will fill more than two cars!8
His enthusiasm was well placed. Before 1929, the excavations at Zhoukoudian had resulted in only a few more isolated hominin teeth—not a lot more than what had been recovered between 1921 and 1927. The 1929 field season saw the beginning of excavations in the middle part of the Zhoukoudian deposits—these deposits were west of the northern fissure that crossed the site. The 1929 field season proved to be a real turning point in the Zhoukoudian excavations, in large part due to what was uncovered in December of that year. “Dragon Bone Hill”—also referred to as “Locality 53” in Andersson’s early notes—was renamed “Cave 1” and appeared as such in all subsequent documentation. The project paid a yearly rent of 90 yuan to a coal company (the hill was a quarry site the company owned), which was raised to 180 yuan after 1927. To prevent what excavators considered “extortion,” the Cenozoic Research Laboratory paid the “exorbitant” price of 4,900 yuan for permanent use of the site.
Where Bohlin and Li Jie had shared administrative and scientific affairs, paleontologist-anthropologist Professor Pei Wenzhong had to deal with the overwhelming logistics of running such a large site by himself; in interviews decades later, Pei recalled that he was seized by melancholy after Black left in April 1929 and Pei took over the site’s care.
By November 1929, the site proved to be extremely rich in fauna—145 antelope jaws were excavated in one day, for instance. The cache of antelope joined the faunal record with complete pig and buffalo skulls, as well as antlers—yet few hominin teeth. In the late afternoon of December 2, 1929, however, the story of human origins in China found itself with a new fossil character. Workers discovered a skullcap in the fifth stratigraphic layer at Zhoukoudian; the presence of the cranium was clear, irrefutable evidence that the story of human evolution had early ties to China. The discovery of these fossils meant that China’s rather recent use of geologic methodology and science was able to juxtapose itself with a strong commitment to “Chinese” historical antiquity, giving the entire excavation a nationalist agenda. With this one discovery, Chinese history pushed its antiquity and “legitimacy” back to the Pleistocene and became a serious force within the developing science of human origins.
