by Lydia Pyne
His book, The Search for Peking Man, teems with mystery and conspiracy—clandestine meetings, cloak-and-dagger innuendo, and international intrigues. The first couple of chapters of the book describe the loss of the fossils and relate in vivid detail how a Dr. Herman Davis supposedly used the boxes as poker tables. According to Janus’s “research,” Davis even used the crates of fossils to steady his machine gun during the Japanese invasion of the base. Janus has people coming out of the woodwork to offer their take on the possible fate of Peking Man: some claim to know where it is; others claim to actually have the remains. For example, Mr. Andrew Sze, a Chinese expat living in the United States, claimed that the fossils were in Taiwan and his best friend knew the exact location. The climax of Janus’s search involved a particularly furtive meeting with a woman who claimed to have the fossils in her late husband’s U.S. Marine footlocker—he had brought the fossils back from his deployment in World War II, she said. Janus was to meet the woman at the top of the Empire State Building at noon one spring day; she told him that he would know her because she would be wearing sunglasses. On the rooftop, she gave him a blurry photo of what looked like fossils, then utterly vanished. (Harry Shapiro, of the American Museum of Natural History, was dubious at best about the materials when Janus asked him to look at the photo to authenticate the fossils. The photograph in question is spectacularly blurry and conveniently out of focus.) Janus also claimed his search for the fossils continued—rather improbably—with help from the FBI and CIA, claiming to want to help him locate the fossils “in the national interest.”19
Janus’s hunt for Peking Man came to a screeching halt on February 25, 1981, when he was indicted by a federal grand jury on thirty-seven fraud counts. Prosecutors charged that the international search for the bones amounted to a $640,000 fraud in which Janus had funneled the majority of the funds—$520,000 in bank loans and $120,000 from investors to finance the search and produce a film—toward his personal use. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Janus insisted that all the money he borrowed was for the search and the planned film. After his indictment, Janus hinted that U.S. relations with China would be ruined if the federal government took action against him. “The whole thing is more than the search for the Peking Man,” Mr. Janus told the press. “It involves certain relationships with China that can’t be discussed, a project we have going with the Federal Government.”20
The grand jury concluded that Mr. Janus had made no serious effort to search for the Peking Man or to make the film. But it could not find out what he did with most of the money he’d borrowed. “He’d say, ‘I see Harrison Ford as me,’” recalls William Brashler, coauthor of The Search for Peking Man, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “He immediately hit me up to invest in the movie. It was hard not to like him, but he had one arm around your shoulder and the other in your wallet.”21 Ultimately, Janus pled guilty to two counts of fraud.
Where characters like Janus found blatant means of inserting themselves into the Peking Man story, others, like Claire Taschdjian, a technician at the Peking Union Medical College and one of the last people to have seen the fossils, participated in the Peking legacy in a more subtle way. Taschdjian wrote The Peking Man Is Missing—a fictionalized account of the fossils’ disappearance. (The book can most charitably be described as sensationalistic—full of torpid prose, kept together by a hilariously simplistic plot.) But Taschdjian was a secretary at the laboratory in Beijing when the fossils were lost, and by a quirk of historical happenstance, her comments on the fossils—and anything she writes—have a tell-all sensationalism to them since she was one of the last people to have seen the actual fossils. In January 1975, the original Hawaii Five-0 ran an episode, “Bones of Contention,” in which Steve McGarrett’s team tracks down the “world’s oldest missing persons case”; they find the remains of Peking Man in a military storage unit in Hawaii. It’s the thrill of the hunt, the treasure, and the mystery that drives the fiction. And it’s that very sensationalism that cuts to the core of how we are geared to think about the Peking Man story. The fossils’ fame hinges now on the mystery and intrigue that surround him; it’s only logical, then, that the stories we create and repeat about the fossil end up just as romanticized as the fossils themselves.
Even as recently as July 2006, Beijing’s Fangshan district government announced that it was renewing its search for the fossils. A committee of four from the museum located on the Zhoukoudian site began to gather leads for the fossils’ whereabouts throughout China. A search hotline was even published in the local newspapers; by the fall of that year, the committee announced that sixty-three total leads had come in. One committee member, quoted in multiple newspapers, said that four leads looked “especially promising.” Lead number one: A “121-year-old man” who had served as a high official in Sun Yat-sen’s republican government said he knew exactly where the fossils were. Lead number two: An “old professor” from northwest Gansu Province, during a visit to Japan, had found revealing testimony from an American soldier in the Tokyo military tribunals’ archives. Lead number three: A Mr. Liu, from Beijing, said he knew an “old revolutionary” who had a skull in his possession. Lead number four: Another Beijing man said that his father, a former doctor at Peking Union Hospital, had brought one of the skulls home from work one day and buried the fossils in his neighbor’s yard.22
None of these leads panned out.
—
If the fossils are missing, how can Peking Man have any kind of scientific legacy? In the first part of the twentieth century, casts of fossil specimens were the key to paleosciences. Since fossils were too valuable and rare to ship to international researchers, casts of fossils were sent through networks of natural history institutions. (Recall that Raymond Dart had specifically insured the Taung Child for marine travel when he sailed to London from South Africa.) In the early days of human origins research, paleoanthropologists would offer to trade casts of “their” fossil to other researchers in different areas of the world who had different specimens—the casts thus became a kind of social currency. Scientific colleagues—both collaborators and detractors—wanted to see copies of the fossil in order to examine its anatomy for themselves. People outside of academic circles had heard of the famous fossils and expected to see them in public museums. In order to circulate them for study and display, accurate copies of the fossils had to be made.23
Casts of Peking Man skull at the Cenozoic Research Laboratory, curing and drying on laboratory bench. From Paramount News film, early 1930s. (Film courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Library and Dr. Milford Wolpoff)
“All [Sinanthropus pekinensis] casts are made and coloured with extreme care and attention to the finest detail. They can be studied with complete confidence,” advertised the catalog for R. F. Damon & Co., purveyor of fossils and creator of fossil casts.24 With the company’s new catalog page for the fossils excavated during Zhoukoudian’s field seasons of the early 1930s, access to Peking Man was suddenly available to international researchers. Every scientist from Sir Arthur Keith in London to Raymond Dart in South Africa could examine the remarkable Zhoukoudian finds.
To that end, on August 2, 1930, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote to Marcellin Boule about the exciting discoveries at Zhoukoudian and Teilhard de Chardin’s own studies in working out the comparisons between different fossil taxa. A powerful presence in the early-twentieth-century paleo world (having worked with both the La Chapelle Neanderthal as well as the Piltdown fossil), Teilhard de Chardin shifted the focus of his work to China when excavations began at Zhoukoudian. “On returning to Peking, I had the pleasant surprise of finding at Black’s laboratory a second skull of Sinanthropus, identical to the first by form and also (fortunately) by its state of conservation. In this second sample, one discerns the beginning of the nasal bones, and some further details,” Teilhard wrote. “Black has made some casts (very good ones) of all the isolated pieces. Two weeks from now, he should be able to give an estimate
of the cranial capacity, taken from one absolutely perfect piece as preparation.”25
Although they made the exchange of scientific information easier, the casts represented a huge commitment of time, resources, and investment. “Casts preserve the external form of the fossil, and they thus represent a permanent duplicate record of the shape of fossil bones. They are routinely used in place of original fossils for research, since they enable scientists to study and compare the remains of animals that have been discovered thousands of miles apart, and may be stored on different continents,” museum curators Drs. Janet Monge and Alan Mann explain. “Virtually every paleontological museum and academic department spends considerable time in the procurement of quality casts for both research and instructional purposes.”26
By 1932, when R. F. Damon & Co. was expanding its collection of Sinanthropus casts, Robert Ferris Damon inherited the company from his father, Robert Damon. Damon Senior had established himself in the fossil business in 1850, undertaking the artistic and technological aspects of creating good fossil casts for paleontologists and prehistorians. All of these casts were made of heavy plaster and were used by museums in collections as well as in displays. In the early days of the casting company, between 1850 and 1900, most of the casts and models were marine shells and fish. With the influx of hominin fossils, the company expanded its paleontological collections to include anthropological casts and models. As interest burgeoned in obtaining casts of human ancestors and anthropological specimens, the company focused on skulls, jaws, and teeth of humans and their ancestors. With the discovery of fossil hominins in Southeast Asia in 1891 (Java Man), Europe in 1912 (Piltdown), and Africa in 1924 (Taung Child), many researchers and museums wanted access to copies of fossils to be able to examine the specimens for themselves.
In the mid-1930s, R. F. Damon & Co. was authorized by Davidson Black and Weng Wenhao to expand the list of casts available of Sinanthropus pekinensis as more and more specimens of Peking Man came from the excavations. These new casts included eight mandibular fragments from a variety of differently aged individuals, juvenile through adult, to a skull from Locus E and based on the materials from Davidson Black’s 1931 publication in Palaeontologia Sinica. Prices for such materials were usually several pounds.
Without any originals whatsoever, researchers are left with only the casts as the material evidence and tangible remains of the early Zhoukoudian excavations. Where other casts merely carry the information of the original fossils, the Peking Man casts have come to take the place of the originals. “Fortunately, during the time when they were studied in China, quality plaster casts of almost all of the Zhoukoudian bones were made and distributed to major museums around the world,” Monge and Mann note. “These casts preserve a remarkable amount of detail, and in many cases, measurements taken from them show no significant difference from measurements recorded on the original fossils. This represents a remarkable achievement considering the level of molding and casting technology in the 1930s, and the (by today’s standards) primitive molding media. Although no cast is an ideal substitute for the original fossil, in this case, the casts represent the only record of these specimens, and provide a reasonable alternative for the missing originals.”27
Brochure advertising Peking Man casts from the prominent R. F. Damon & Co. (Raymond Dart Collection. Courtesy of the University of the Witwatersrand Archive)
In 1951–1952, when China was actively looking to have the original Peking Man fossils returned, the casts were confused with the original specimens. In a letter dated October 6, 1951, Dr. Walter Kühne, a paleontologist at Humboldt University in Berlin wrote to Yang Zhongjian, the director of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. In his letter, Kühne claimed to have been told by a colleague, Dr. D. M. S. Walson, that Walson had seen skullcap 2 of Zhoukoudian at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and, further, that Walson had seen Weidenreich himself handling the specimen. This claim about the fossils immediately sparked an editorial in the People’s Daily (dated January 1, 1952) that urged the American Museum of Natural History—and, indeed, the United States—to return the fossils to the People’s Republic of China. However, in a letter dated April 29, 1952, Dr. Joseph Needham, president of the Britain-China Friendship Association, proved that Walson was mistaken about the identity of the fossil and included a letter from Dr. Kenneth Oakley (of Piltdown debunking fame) that demonstrated that what Walson had seen was, in fact, merely casts. Walson himself retracted his claim once his error had been pointed out.28
What does it mean, then, for us to be left with the replica of a fossil? Does it even matter? “Even without the originals, the duplicates of the Peking Man fossils made before their disappearance have provided substantial information for morphological studies of Homo erectus,” historian of science Dr. Hsiao-pei Yen claims. “Therefore, it is questionable if the discovery of any of the missing Peking Man original fossils would dramatically change our current understanding of human evolution.”29
On one level, this sentiment is certainly true. If the fossils are simply their dimensions and their physical forms, then certainly Yen is correct that the casts are just as good as the originals. Yet the original fossil clearly carries with it cachet and cultural value beyond its height and breadth; in this sense, such an argument amounts to saying that a copy of the Hope Diamond or the Mona Lisa would be the “same” as the original.
Painted casts of Peking Man skull at the Cenozoic Research Laboratory on a laboratory bench. From Paramount News film, early 1930s. (Film courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Library and Dr. Milford Wolpoff)
—
“In 1539 the Knight Templars of Malta paid tribute to Charles V of Spain, by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with the rarest jewels—but pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day,” reads the introductory text that appears after the opening credits in the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon. It is the story of a treasure hunt for a priceless object and the motivations that fuel that hunt. The “black bird” that Kasper Gutman and Sam Spade search for is that jewel-encrusted falcon, which, by the 1940s, was said to have been covered in a deep black patina to hide the bird’s true value. In the film’s dramatic reveal—where the bird is proven to be a fake—the audience is told that the bird is more myth than fact. In the end, actually finding the bird wasn’t as important as cultivating the belief in what it stood for. The bird, Sam Spade dryly notes, is the “stuff that dreams are made out of.”
Today, the only pieces of the Peking Man in Chinese collections are five teeth and some parts of a skull found in the renewed excavation of the 1950s and 1960s. The Uppsala Museum of Evolution has three teeth from the original excavations in the 1920s; these are considered the “collection’s highlights.” When the tooth was discovered in the boxes of Professor Carl Wiman’s stuff, that tooth, newly reexcavated from the archives, became a significant part of the Peking Man’s story. Like that tooth, Peking Man’s story is one of abrupt beginnings and endings, encounters and losses; it’s a story of details and dramatic events—kind of like The Maltese Falcon, but with fossils.
“As is well known, almost all material from this excavation period (except the original Uppsala teeth) was lost in 1941, and has never been recovered,” Swedish research Dr. Per Ahlberg said in an interview. “After the war, Chinese scientists continued to excavate Zhoukoudian and found some new fossils in the deeper layers. But this new tooth is most probably the last fossil from the ‘classical’ Peking Man excavations that will ever be found.” Ahlberg continued, “We can see many details that tell us about the life of the owner of the tooth, which is relatively small, indicating that it belonged to a woman. The tooth is also rather worn, so the person must have been rather old when she died. Also, parts of the tooth enamel have been broken off, probably indicating that the person had bitten down on something really hard, like a bone or a nu
t. We should probably now be talking about a ‘Peking Woman’ and not a ‘Peking Man.’” Professor Liu Wu, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, chimed in with his observations that the canine tooth was fractured but otherwise well preserved: “This is an extremely important find. It is the only canine tooth in existence. It can yield important information about how Homo erectus lived in China.”30
Peking Man’s legacy—his legend, his fame—hinges on his disappearance. It’s as if the paleo world had found a historical parallel for the story of Amelia Earhart; Peking Man captivates its audiences because the ending of its story is a mystery. As history, unresolved stories can be unsettling and deeply unsatisfying. Even Piltdown—with his conspiracies—is a fossil with a better-resolved narrative. Piltdown is a hoax; the perpetrator might still be at historical large, but the fossil’s story has been rather neatly tied up with Kenneth Oakley’s chemical analysis, and Piltdown’s fossils are carefully stored in the fossil vault at the London Natural History Museum. Peking Man, on the other hand, is missing—it’s a paleo-noir cold case in the history of science.
Peking Man teeth with original museum label (Lagreliska Collection). (Science Source)
Perhaps the black bird offers a useful lens for making sense of the life history of the Peking Man fossils. Every aspect of the Peking Man story contains multiple levels. One is its science, of course, but also finding part of the Peking Man collection—even if it is just a tiny part found in archival boxes—provides a compelling narrative aspect, another level, to the Peking Man story. What was lost has now been found.
