by Lydia Pyne
Archaeologists and workers excavating at the Peking Man discovery site, China, 1920s. (Science Source)
The sheer excitement of the discovery was unmistakable. In a series of interviews in 1980, Pei Wenzhong recalled the details from December 2, 1929:
In the afternoon after four o’clock, it was near sunset and the winter wind brought freezing temperatures to the site. Everybody felt the cold, but all were working hard at finding more fossils… . The large number of fossils attracted everyone of us and we all went down to take a look, so I know what it was like down there in the crack.
We generally used gas light, for it was brighter. But the pit was so small that anyone working there had to hold a candle in one hand and work with the other.9
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Prehistorian and archaeologist Dr. Jia Lanpo offered his recollections of the discovery of the first Peking Man skull:
Maybe because of the cold weather, or the hour of the day, the stillness of the air was punctuated only by occasional rhythmic hammer sounds that indicated the presence of men down in the pit. “What’s that?” Pei suddenly cried out. “A human skull!” In the tranquility, everybody heard him.
Pei had gone down after the sighting of the fossils, and now, where he was told there was a round-shaped object there, he had stayed there and worked with the technicians. As more of the object became exposed, he had cried out. Everybody around him was excited and gratified at the long-awaited find.
Some suggested that they take it out at once, while others objected for fear that, working rashly in the late hours, they might damage the object. “It has been there for so many thousands of years, what harm would it do lying there for one more night?” they argued. But a long night of suspense was too much to bear.10
Pei’s terse telegraph to Black fittingly captures the emotion of the moment: “Found skullcap—perfect—look[s] like man’s.”11 The news was scarcely believed at first; skeptics either doubted Pei’s ability to correctly identify the fossil specimen or, after two years of excavations with only the occasional tooth to show for their efforts, refused to believe that the excavations could have been so lucky. In a letter to Andersson dated December 5, 1929, Davidson Black wrote: “I had a telegram from Pei from Chou Kou Tien yesterday saying he would be in Peking tomorrow bringing with him what he thinks is a complete Sinanthropus skull! I hope it turns out to be true.”12
Simply finding the fossil wasn’t enough, though. The specimen had to be carefully excavated and transported to the Cenozoic Research Laboratory. Excavating and storing the fossil was a bit tricky; when that Sinanthropus fossil was first unearthed, the specimen was rather wet and soft, due to the cave’s sediments, and could be damaged easily. The specimen thus had to be dried out before it could be transported to Beijing. Pei and fellow archaeologists Qiao and Wang Cunyi stayed day and night next to a fire to dry out the skull. Pei carefully wrapped it in layers of gauze; the gauze was covered with plaster and dried again; then it was all wrapped in two thick cotton quilts and two blankets and the entire specimen was then trussed up with rope. What had been so carefully excavated from one set of soil and cave sediments was now jacketed in a new stratigraphy of cultural layers and materials. Pei delivered the first complete skull of the Peking Man assemblage to Davidson Black at the Cenozoic Research Laboratory on December 6, 1929.
Excavations at Zhoukoudian showing how fossils were jacketed in situ for safe removal. From Paramount News film, early 1930s. (Film courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Library and Dr. Milford Wolpoff)
China’s Geological Survey held a special meeting on December 28, 1929, to announce the discovery; the next day the foreign press reported the news of the phenomenal fossil find, which quickly spread across global scientific communities. Scientists like British anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith—while still immersed in sorting out the anatomy of Piltdown Man—visited Beijing in September 1930 to examine the Peking Man fossils. Over the next few years, the Cenozoic Research Laboratory continued its excavations at the Zhoukoudian sites, and additional fragments of skulls, jaws, and teeth were recovered; all were assigned to Sinanthropus.13
On March 16, 1934, Davidson Black passed away—he was found dead that morning with the Zhoukoudian specimens lying in front of him as he attempted to catch up with work. Dr. Franz Weidenreich, a German anatomist, took over Black’s position and work in 1935. Weidenreich’s attention to detail and scientific brilliance helped push the scientific import of the Zhoukoudian fossils to the forefront of the scientific community. Unfortunately, Weidenreich was not as sociable and personable as his predecessor. He left all administrative organization and affairs to his Chinese counterpart in the laboratory, Yang Zhongjian, who had earlier directed the excavations at Zhoukoudian, from 1928 to 1933. As a result of Weidenreich’s reticence about administrative affairs, the Rockefeller Foundation stopped supporting the Cenozoic Research Laboratory directly, although the Foundation continued to finance the Zhoukoudian excavations, allocating money for continued work there through March 31, 1937. In meeting minutes, the Rockefeller Foundation acknowledged the incredible scientific significance that the site offered both China and the international community:
The paleontological finds in the caves of Choukoutien near Peking constitute one of the most dramatically interesting and significant advances ever made in our knowledge of ancient man. The scientific importance of this work can not be questioned, and the collapse of the program would be a major scientific loss. The program has, moreover, been closely associated from the outset with the Peiping Union Medical College. It represents a fine-spirited cooperation between Chinese and western scholars and in terms of scientific competence and achievement it is outstanding in China’s experience. It was natural to fear that Dr. Black’s death would mean the virtual end of this project. However, Dr. Franz Weidenreich, formerly of the University of Frankfurt and of the University of Chicago, has, since his appointment in March, 1935, demonstrated the necessary qualities of scholarship, administrative ability, tact, etc., to carry forward with distinguished success the work which was so brilliantly begun by Dr. Black.14
Despite this endorsement, the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and the difficulties that the war raised meant that excavations at Zhoukoudian stopped and fossils were carefully locked away in the laboratory. Weidenreich was concerned that if Japan and the United States went to war, the Japanese would take over the lab; in the summer of 1941, Weidenreich insisted that additional replicas of the bones be created. In late 1941, Weidenreich left Beijing, opting to take a position at the American Museum of Natural History.
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So what made Peking Man “Peking Man”? Taxonomically, Peking Man was part of a species that Johan Andersson and colleagues named Sinanthropus pekinensis—not a single individual but a series of individuals now known as Homo erectus. Davidson Black’s initial morphological studies described a species similar to modern humans, having a large brain but overall similar skull and bone sizes. Sinanthropus, however, was different in that it had heavy brows and large, chinless jaws. Geologically, the site dates to between 750,000 and 530,000 years ago. Today, thanks to extensive analyses of the site’s artifacts, we know that the species had sophisticated stone tools and offered the first systematic use of controlled fire outside of our own species, Homo sapiens. From a historical standpoint, however, the moniker “Peking Man” refers to the assemblage of fossils found at Zhoukoudian. When we talk about “Peking Man,” we are thus implicitly referring to both a taxonomic moment in time and the identity of a historical object.
“There is a celebrity around the fossils, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, when they become quite individualized and personalized,” historian Dr. Christopher Manias explains. “You do get the sense that the media or popular accounts are talking about ‘Peking Man’ as a definite individual and trying to work out what ‘he’ was like: who he was, when he lived, what moral standard he was at, what he ate, how much like ‘us’ he was, and
so on.”15
Where other fossil discoveries had clear nationalistic ties—the Piltdown Man, for example, was touted as “the earliest Englishman”—no other discovery was quite as inexorably linked to the development of science writ large in the way that Peking Man was. Many standard histories regard the development of modern geology in China as influenced by foreign imperialism, with only a few Chinese students studying abroad in the West and then returning to China in the early to mid-twentieth century, bringing back with them Western techniques and theories. This was different than science done in British colonies, and to that end China had a different kind of paleoanthropology than the science that surrounded the Taung Child in South Africa. One of the reasons that the European paleointelligentsia was so sniffy about Taung’s discovery was that the fossil and the fossil’s ancestral interpretation had come from a colony—South Africa—and they felt it ought to have been validated by the European (specifically British) establishment.
The introduction of the scientific methodology and framework offered a means of legitimizing China’s presence and participation in global scientific norms of geology. “To China’s geological pioneers, the connection between nation and science was even more basic. Whether they were collecting rocks and fossils or elucidating earth processes, they were in a sense studying China directly and fitting it into a global narrative,” argues historian Dr. Grace Yen Shen.16 Participating in these new frameworks of geology and archaeology became a way for China to take part in the global modernity of geological sciences, and China was now a serious player in paleoanthropology. It’s hard, in fact, to imagine a more global perspective than a search for “early man”—which was, after all, how the Zhoukoudian project unfolded. It was backed by a variety of international participants, and the site and its treasures meant that Sinathropus’s early identity was an international one. Workers at the site were Canadian, Swedish, Austrian, German, and French as well as Chinese. Moreover, the excavation of Zhoukoudian tapped into a variety of scientific, intellectual networks devoted to studying archaeology, human evolution, and the longue durée of human history, with international ties due to the long-running Swedish connection, as well as a French involvement.17 Even with this international focus, the fossils themselves became a strong symbol of China and its history.
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While the specific moment of the discovery of the Zhoukoudian fossils is a bit ambiguous, the date of the fossils’ disappearance is specific—but circumstances, even decades later, are far from clear. And as with most aspects of Peking Man, there is a long version and a short version to the story.
In the short version, researchers at the Peking Union Medical College, especially Franz Weidenreich, were concerned about the safety of the fossils due to building tensions between China and Japan between 1939 and 1941. When the United States declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese military took over the Peking Union Medical College. Concerned that the fossils would be looted from China—or completely destroyed—the College carefully crated the Peking Man fossils with the intention of smuggling them out of China to the United States or Europe. The fossils were packed into two crates and driven to the U.S. Marines’ base at Camp Holcomb, where they were scheduled to be shipped out on the USS President Harrison. However, the fossils happened to arrive at the base just a few days before the U.S. military base surrendered to the Japanese. Somewhere between the departure of the fossils from Beijing and loading on board the Harrison, the fossils were lost in the confusion and pandemonium.
The long version of the Peking Man disappearance reads like something straight out of a Dashiell Hammett novel—there’s mystery and intrigue, some fact but more fiction. It’s as if the hardboiled detective Sam Spade has been tasked to track down priceless scientific curios.
In preparation for transport, anatomy technicians Ji Yan-qing and Hu Chengzhi of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory wrapped each fossil in white tissue paper, cushioned them with cotton and gauze, then overwrapped the fossils with white sheet paper. The fossils were placed in small wooden boxes with several layers of corrugated cardboard on all sides. The smaller wooden boxes were then placed into two big unpainted wooden crates, one of which was approximately the size of a large office desk and the other slightly smaller. The crates were delivered to Controller T. Bowen’s office at the Peking Union Medical College. Once the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor and the Japanese took over the College, the fossils in their crates were moved around different storerooms, then quickly delivered to the U.S. embassy at Dong Jiao Min Xiang in Beijing. All of this occurred three weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The contents of the two crates reflected the vast amount of archaeological materials that had been excavated at the Zhoukoudian site. Case 1, for example, had seven boxes nestled into the desk-sized crate: Box 1 contained teeth (in seventy-nine separate smaller boxes), nine thighbone fragments, two fragmented humeri, three upper jaws, a collarbone, a carpal bone, a nasal bone, a palate, a cervical vertebra, fifteen skull fragments, a separate box of skull fragments, two boxes of toe bones, and thirteen boxes of mandibles. Case 1 also contained six additional boxes of skulls and a small container of orangutan teeth. With the exception of the orangutan teeth, all of the fossils in Case 1 were assigned to Peking Man, indicative of how Peking Man, with thirteen jawbones and nine thighbones, reflected an assemblage of multiple individuals that represented all genders and ages. The second crate contained a similar swath of Peking Man fossil remains, plus several macaque (monkey) skulls. The lab took careful notes about these crates as well, noting who packed which one and what kind of packing materials were used. Although these crates were also lost and never recovered, the notes about their contents have survived.
Backing up, however, to the buildup of political and military tensions in November and early December 1941, Dr. Weng Wenhao, the director of China’s Geological Survey, appealed to Dr. Henry Houghton, president of the College, to have the Peking Man collection taken to safety. Houghton asked Colonel William W. Ashurst—a commander of the marine detachment at the U.S. embassy in Peking—to send the Peking Man collection to safety, under protection of the marines, leaving within a couple of days. At five a.m. on December 5, the marines’ special train—with the Peking Man fossils—pulled out of Peking, headed down the Japanese-owned Manchuria railroad toward the small Chinese coastal town of Chinwangtao. From Chinwangtao, the Peking Man materials were to be loaded onto the American liner USS President Harrison, which was to head to Shanghai, then north from there.
However, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor halted all plans. To prevent the capture of the Harrison, her crew grounded her at the mouth of the Yangtze River, and the marine train with the fossils was captured by the Japanese at Chinwangtao. What happened to the two large crates of Peking Man remains has been the subject of much speculation, due in no small part to the varied and often contradictory testimonies of different witnesses. “What happened from that moment on is clouded in rumour and the confusion of war,” author Ruth Moore writes in her account of the Peking Man disappearance. “Despite the efforts of three governments to find them, they have vanished from the world as completely as during the centuries when they lay hidden in the earth of Dragon Bone Hill. According to one account, the Japanese loaded all the cases taken from the train on a lighter that was to take them to a freighter lying off Tientsin. The lighter, it is said, capsized, and the remains of Peking Man drifted away or sank to the bottom of the sea. The other story is that the Japanese who looted the train knew nothing of the value of the scraps of bone and either threw them away or sold them to Chinese traders as ‘dragon bones.’ If so, they may long since have been ground into medicine.”18
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Since the Peking Man story lacks a satisfying resolution, many believe that the fossils are still out there just waiting to be rediscovered, and such believers have mounted decades of searches.
This is where, in 1972, one Christ
opher Janus—a U.S. financier and philanthropist from Chicago—enters the Peking Man story. Janus was no stranger to public outrage, having himself owned and driven Hitler’s limousine. Moreover, in 1950, he’d inherited a cotton plantation and “fifty Egyptian dancing girls,” whom he used as a vaudeville act; the exasperated Egyptian embassy spent months explaining that slavery was outlawed in Egypt and desperately tried to distance themselves from Janus, whom they had come to see as a political leper.
Like a character straight out of a film noir (and with a name to match), Janus was determined to write his own chapter of the Peking Man story. The disappearance of the fossils had attracted his interest during his visit to China in 1972 among the first group of Americans allowed to visit the country as it reopened to the West. His dynamic personality was matched by his penchant for history and interest in culture. Although Janus had no training as an anthropologist—he admitted that he had never even heard of the Peking Man fossils before his trip and his visit to the Peking Man Museum—Janus felt that he had been selected and charged by Dr. Wu of the Peking Man Museum at Zhoukoudian to find the fossils and return them to China. To read how Janus tells his story, the return of the Peking Man fossils turned into a personal mission. Upon his return to the United States, Janus quickly set to finding the missing specimens, offering a $5,000 reward for information about their whereabouts.
