Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race

8.3 A Canine Tooth and Nose Bones

It was hoped that future discoveries would clarify the exact status of Piltdown man. The canine teeth, which are more pointed in the apes than in human beings, were missing from the Piltdown jaw. Woodward thought a canine would eventually turn up, and even made a model of how a Piltdown man canine should look (Bowden 1977, p. 5).

On August 29, 1913, Teilhard de Chardin did in fact find a canine tooth in a heap of gravel from the Piltdown excavation site, near the place where the mandible had been uncovered (Dawson and Woodward 1914, p. 85). The point of the tooth was worn and flattened like that of a human canine. Woodward (Dawson and Woodward 1914, p. 87) stated: “In the upper half of the outer face the thin layer of enamel is . . . marked by the usual faint transverse striations (or imbrications).” Such markings are characteristic of human canines. According to von Koenigswald (1956, p. 159), it was not clear whether the tooth was an upper or lower canine, but the British scientists placed it in the lower jaw discovered at Piltdown.

Some nose bones were also found. Dawson stated: “While our laborer was digging the disturbed gravel within 2 or 3 feet from the spot where the mandible was found, I saw two human nasal bones lying together with the remains of a turbinated bone beneath them in situ. The turbinal, however, was in such bad condition that it fell apart on being touched, and had to be recovered in fragments by the sieve; but it has been pieced together satisfactorily by Mrs. Smith Woodward” (Dawson and Woodward 1914, p. 85). Turbinals are thin, platelike bones with ridged surfaces; they line the nasal chambers.

Also discovered in the 1913 excavations were a tooth of Stegodon (an extinct elephant), an incisor and jaw fragment of a beaver, a fragment of a rhino tooth, and more flint tools (Dawson and Woodward 1914, pp. 84–85). A mastodon bone, apparently intentionally modified to form a pointed tool, was also found.

By this time, Piltdown had become quite a tourist attraction. Visiting researchers were politely allowed to assist in the ongoing excavations. Motor coaches came with members of natural history societies. Dawson even had a picnic lunch at the Piltdown site for the Geological Society of London (Millar 1972, p. 132). Dawson achieved celebrity. Indeed, the scientific name for the Piltdown hominid became Eoanthropus dawsoni, meaning “Dawson’s dawn man.” But Dawson’s enjoyment of his fame was short-lived; he died in 1916.

8.4 A Second Dawn Man Discovery

Doubts persisted that the jaw and skull of Eoanthropus belonged to the same creature, but these doubts weakened when Woodward (1917) reported the 1915 discovery of a second set of fossils about 2 miles from the original Piltdown site.

Woodward (1917, p. 3) stated: “One large field, about 2 miles from the Piltdown pit, had especially attracted Mr. Dawson’s attention, and he and I examined it several times without success during the spring and autumn of 1914. When, however, in the course of farming, the stones had been raked off the ground and brought together into heaps, Mr. Dawson was able to search the material more satisfactorily; and early in 1915 he was so fortunate as to find here two well-fossilized pieces of human skull and a molar tooth, which he immediately recognized as belonging to at least one more individual of Eoanthropus dawsoni. Shortly afterwards, in the same gravel, a friend met with part of the lower molar of an indeterminable species of rhinoceros, as highly mineralized as the specimens previously found at Piltdown itself.”

Woodward (1917, p. 3) added: “The most important fragment of human skull is part of . . . a right frontal bone. . . . It is in exactly the same mineralized condition as the original skull of Eoanthropus, and deeply stained with ironoxide.” The second fragment was from the occipital, the bone of the lower rear portion of the skull.

The tooth found at what came to be called the Piltdown II site was a left lower first molar, which according to Woodward (1917, p. 5) was “stained brown with iron oxide in the usual manner.”

The report on the fossils found at the Piltdown II site included these remarks by W. P. Pycraft about the molar found there: “If the new tooth be compared with the corresponding molars of a Melanesian, a Tasmanian, and a Chimpanzee, of approximately the same size, it will readily be recognized as essentially human. In the considerable depth of the crown and its gradual passage into the root, it agrees with the human tooth and differs from that of the Chimpanzee, in which the crown is very brachyodont [broad ] and overhangs the root. . . . These comparisons are made because it has been stated that the molar teeth in the Piltdown mandible are those of a Chimpanzee” (Woodward 1917, p. 6).

Gerritt T. Miller, of the Smithsonian Institution, had sent Pycraft a chimpanzee jaw with molars flattened by wear, like those in the original Piltdown jaw. The molars of human beings are generally worn flat, while the surfaces of ape and chimp molars are usually more pointed (Figure 8.2). The flat molars of the otherwise chimpanzeelike Piltdown mandible were taken as a sign that the mandible was not that of a chimpanzee or other member of the ape family. So by presenting a chimp jaw with flattened molars, Miller was implying that the Piltdown mandible might still be that of an ape rather than an early human. This would mean that the Piltdown cranium and jaw belonged to two different creatures, the former to a human and the latter to an ape.

Pycraft replied that the flat molar surfaces on the chimpanzee jaw Miller had sent him were due “not to normal wear, but to some interference in the normal ‘bite.’” Pycraft added: “In no other chimpanzee that the speaker had examined had he ever found anything in the matter of wear comparable with the molars of Mr. Miller’s specimen. These are quite abnormal in this regard, and therefore of no value as evidence that the Piltdown teeth might, even in the wear of their crowns, agree with the teeth of chimpanzees” ( Woodward 1917, p. 6).

In the published summary of the discussion among scientists that took place following Arthur Smith Woodward’s report on the Piltdown II discoveries, it is recorded: “Prof. A. Keith said that these further Piltdown ‘finds’ established beyond any doubt that Eoanthropus was a very clearly differentiated type of being—in his opinion a truly human type” (Woodward 1917, p. 6). In the discussion, Sir Ray Lankester stated: “The present ‘find’ therefore makes it impossible to regard the Piltdown man as an isolated abnormal individual” (Woodward 1917, p. 6).

Figure 8.2. The crown of a human molar (middle) is generally worn flat, while the crown of a chimpanzee molar (right) generally remains pointed. In this respect, a Piltdown II molar (left) resembles a human molar (Woodward 1917, plate 1).

8.5 One Creature or Two?

Keith and Lankester, like Dawson and Woodward, accepted the idea that the humanlike skull and apelike jaw belonged to the same creature, which represented an Early Pleistocene ancestor of Homo sapiens. After all, what were the odds of finding a human skull and an ape’s jaw in such close proximity, with no sign of the matching human jaw and ape’s skull? But two German scientists interpreted the Piltdown finds somewhat differently. Franz Weidenreich said the molar of the Piltdown II specimen was human, indicating Piltdown II was a fully human find. As for the original Piltdown jaw, von Koenigswald (1956, p. 179) informs us: “A pupil of Weidenreich’s wanted to assign the mandible to a new ape, Boreopithecus, the ‘Northern Ape.’ Weidenreich compared it in the first place to the orang-utan, because, like the latter, it lacked certain muscle-attachments on the under margin of the jaw.” If Weidenreich’s view were to have been accepted, this would have left scientists with a fully human skull and an ape jaw, from an ape living at the same time as Piltdown man. Still, H. Weinert thought the original Piltdown jaw could easily be reconstructed as human (Weiner et al. 1955, p. 231). It is interesting to note the widely varying interpretations by professional anthropologists.

So after years of study, debate continued about whether the jaw and skull belonged to the same creature. Ales Hrdlicka, among other American scientists, was convinced they were from different creatures. Eager to resolve the controversy in his own mind, the famous American anthropologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, accompanied by two other scientists, journeyed to England to view the Piltdown fossils. Osborn was no stranger to controversy. Around this same time he proposed a new hominid genus on the basis of a single molar found by a geologist in western Nebraska. The ape-man was named Hesperopithecus (Cousins 1971, pp. 40– 41). In England, Sir Grafton Elliott Smith wrote a threepage article for the Illustrated London News (June 24, 1922), in which there appeared a full-page picture of the brutish creature walking along carrying a club, with his wife preparing food in the background. Later, Dr. W. K. Gregory demonstrated to the satisfaction of the scientific community that the Nebraska tooth belonged to an extinct pig (Cousins 1971, p. 40). Thereafter everyone was silent about Hesperopithecus.

Osborn and his two companions had tended to favor Gerritt S. Miller’s proposal that Piltdown man’s jaw was actually that of a separate chimpanzeelike creature. In his book Ancient Hunters, W. J. Sollas (1924, pp. 189 –190) wrote: “As a consequence, Profs. Osborn, Matthews and McGregor, who had previously been much impressed by Mr. Miller’s observations, took the opportunity when they last visited Europe to make a special pilgrimage to the British Museum in order that they might see and handle the actual bones themselves of the Piltdown man, previously known to them only as represented by plaster casts. The result was eminently satisfactory, the doubts these observers had previously entertained were dissipated and they fully recognised that the jaw and skull had rightly been assigned to a single individual” (Sollas 1924, pp. 189–190).

In his book Man Rises to Parnassus, Osborn (1927, pp. 45–74) recalled how he had approached the British Museum feeling greatly thankful this treasure house had been spared destruction from German bombardment during the Zeppelin raids of World War I. After spending several hours with Woodward examining the Piltdown fossils, and finally concurring that the jaw and skull belonged to the same creature, Osborn recalled the opening words of a prayer sung at Yale: “Paradoxical as it may appear O Lord, it is nevertheless true.”

8.6 The Effect of New Discoveries On Piltdown Man

But as more hominid fossils were found, the Piltdown fossil, with its Homo sapiens type of cranium, introduced a great deal of uncertainty into the construction of the line of human evolution. At Choukoutien (now Zhoukoudian), near Peking (now Beijing), researchers initially uncovered a primitive-looking jaw resembling that of Piltdown man. But when the first Peking man skull was uncovered in 1929, it had the low forehead and pronounced brow ridge of Pithecanthropus erectus of Java, now classified with Peking man as Homo erectus (Millar 1972, p. 173). In the same decade, Raymond Dart uncovered the first Australopithecus specimens in Africa. Other Australopithecus finds followed, and like Java man and Peking man they also had low foreheads and prominent brow ridges. Most British anthropologists, however, decided that Australopithecus was an apelike creature that was not a human ancestor. That lessened the threat to Piltdown man, who was, nevertheless, beginning to seem out of place.

In spite of the new evidence, Sir Arthur Smith Woodward remained a champion of Piltdown man until his death. Von Koenigswald (1956, p. 182) wrote: “Sir Arthur Smith Woodward was so convinced of the significance of Piltdown man that he had a small house built at Haywards Heath, not far from the site of the find, so that he could always keep an eye on it. He was a man with a strong sense of fair play, and when he felt he had been passed over on the occasion of a promotion, he left his beloved British Museum, never to set foot in it again. From now on he dedicated his whole life to Piltdown man. When we visited him at Haywards Heath in 1937 he talked of nothing else. . . . In spite of the bad weather we had to go out in a taxi to the site of the discovery. Standing under a big umbrella, Sir Arthur showed us the spot at which he had unearthed the celebrated find.”

But after World War II, new finds by Robert Broom led the British to change their minds about Australopithecus. Sir Arthur Keith telegrammed Broom: “All my landmarks have gone, you have found what I never thought could be found: a man-like jaw associated with an ape-like skull—the exact reverse of the Piltdown evidence” (Goodman 1982, p. 94). So now what was to be done with Piltdown man, who was thought to be as old as the Australopithecus finds that had by then been made?

In addition to Australopithecus, some of the anomalous human fossils discussed previously in this book also appeared to contradict the evidence provided by Piltdown man. In his book Meeting Prehistoric Man, von Koenigswald (1956, pp. 179–180) addressed this problem stating: “Apart from Piltdown man there was a whole series of allegedly very ancient sapiens forms, none of which, however, possessed such a simian jaw. The Foxhall mandible, which already has a chin, is said to have come from deep in the Red Crag on the East Anglian coast. Then there is the complete skeleton from Galley Hill near Northfleet in Kent, the finds at Denise in southern France, and various others. In the past, there was no conclusive method of determining the age of skeletal remains. Since man is in the habit of burying his dead, human bones occur in strata of differing ages. In most cases, of course, it is not difficult to ascertain whether remains are those of a modern interment or not. But there are finds that remain doubtful, and these have misled certain anthropologists into ascribing a very great geological age to Homo sapiens as such. This is naturally very important for the interpretation of our evolutionary history; for if we [i.e., Homo sapiens] really go back to the Tertiary, then all the forms of primordial man discovered up to the present are merely parallel forms, interesting in themselves but without any bearing on the history of our own stock.” This conclusion becomes even stronger when we consider discoveries von Koenigswald neglected to mention, such as those made at the Castenedolo site (Section 6.2.2). Putting all the evidence on the table, we appear to be dealing with the coexistence of various fully human and ape-man-like forms rather than evolutionary relationships in which primitive ape-men clearly give rise to the modern human type... Von Koenigswald (1956, p. 180) added: “Hence Piltdown man, more than any other find, introduced an element of uncertainty into our ideas on the course of human evolution; and anyone who takes the trouble to read several books on fossil men will see to his horror that practically every author holds a different view as to the connexions between the known human forms. It is tempting to take refuge in the theory of ‘parallel evolution,’ according to which Homo sapiens is derived direct from Eoanthropus (“Dawn Man”) and all other early hominids are simply ‘collateral forms.’” Parallel evolution, of the kind von Koenigswald described above, is exactly the position that some British anthropologists maintained for several decades.

8.7 Marston’s Crusade

Meanwhile, an English dentist named Alvan Marston kept badgering British scientists about Piltdown man, contending that something was not quite right about the fossils. In 1935, Marston discovered a human skull at Swanscombe, accompanied by fossil bones of 26 kinds of Middle Pleistocene animals. Desiring that his discovery be hailed as “the oldest Englishman,” Marston challenged the age of the Piltdown fossils (Johanson and Edey 1981, pp. 79–80).

In 1949, Marston convinced Kenneth P. Oakley of the British Museum to test both the Swanscombe and Piltdown fossils with the newly developed fluorine content method. The Swanscombe skull had the same fluorine content as the fossil animal bones found at the same site, thus confirming its Middle Pleistocene antiquity. The test results for the Piltdown specimens were more confusing.

Oakley, it should be mentioned, apparently had his own suspicions about Piltdown man. Oakley and Hoskins, coauthors of the fluorine content test report, wrote (1950, p. 379) that “the anatomical features of Eoanthropus (assuming the material to represent one creature) are wholly contrary to what discoveries in the Far East and in Africa have led us to expect in an early Pleistocene hominid.”

Oakley tested the Piltdown fossils in order to determine whether the cranium and jaw of Piltdown man really belonged together. The fluorine content of four of the original Piltdown cranial bones ranged from 0.1 to 0.4 percent. The jaw yielded a fluorine content of 0.2 percent, suggesting it belonged with the skull. The bones from the second Piltdown locality gave similar results.

The fluorine content of some of the Piltdown animal bones was for the most part substantially higher, with one group (Early Pleistocene forms) ranging from

1.9 to 3.1 percent. But another group (Middle to Late Pleistocene forms) ranged from 0.1 to 1.5 percent (Oakley and Hoskins 1950, p. 381). Oakley concluded: “Comparison of the fluorine values of the specimens attributed to Eoanthropus and of the bones and teeth the geological ages of which are certain leaves little doubt that: (1) all the specimens of Eoanthropus including the remains of the second skull found two miles away, are contemporaneous; (2) Eoanthropus is, at the earliest Middle Pleistocene” (Oakley and Hoskins 1950, p. 381).

Giving a more exact estimate of the date, based in part upon his interpretation of the geological age of the Piltdown gravels, Oakley wrote: “Eoanthropus may be provisionally referred to the last warm interglacial period (Riss-Würm interglacial); that is, early Upper Pleistocene, although here it should be noted that some authorities count Riss-Würm as Middle Pleistocene” (Oakley and Hoskins 1950, p. 382).

Oakley’s opinion that the Piltdown man fossils belonged to the last interglacial period is consistent with the view of R. G. West (1968, p. 343), an expert on the Pleistocene geology of England, who assigned the Piltdown gravels to the Late or Middle Pleistocene. Modern authorities place the last interglacial at 75,000 to 125,000 years ago, spanning the boundary of the Late Pleistocene and Middle Pleistocene. This is quite a bit more recent than the Early Pleistocene date originally ascribed to the Piltdown fossils, but it is still anomalously old for a skull of the fully human type in England. According to current theory, Homo sapiens sapiens arose in Africa about 100,000 years ago and only much later migrated to Europe, at around 30,000 years ago (Gowlett 1984, p. 118).

Oakley apparently still accepted that the skull and jaw belonged to the same creature. He suggested that “Piltdown man, far from being a primitive type, may have been a late specialized hominid which evolved in comparative isolation” (Goodman 1983, p. 100).

This did not entirely satisfy Marston, who was convinced the Piltdown jaw and skull were from completely different creatures. From his knowledge of medicine and dentistry, Marston concluded that the skull, with its closed sutures, was that of a mature human, while the jaw, with its incompletely developed molars, was from an immature ape (Goodman 1983, p. 101). He also felt that the dark staining of the bones, taken as a sign of great antiquity, was caused by Dawson soaking them in a solution of potassium dichromate to harden them.

8.8 Evidence of Forgery

Marston’s ongoing campaign about the Piltdown fossils eventually drew the attention of J. S. Weiner, an Oxford anthropologist. Weiner himself soon became convinced that something was wrong with the Piltdown fossils. He noticed on teeth abrasion marks that to him indicated artificial filing. As early as 1916, C. W. Lyne, a dentist, had noted that the Piltdown molars, which apparently belonged to a fairly young individual, should not be as worn down as they appeared (Goodman 1983, p. 102).

J. S. Weiner reported his suspicions to W. E. Le Gros Clark, head of the anthropology department at Oxford University, but Le Gros Clark was at first skeptical. On August 5, 1953, Weiner and Oakley met with Le Gros Clark at the British Museum, where Oakley removed the actual Piltdown specimens from a safe so they could examine the controversial relics. At this point, Weiner (1955, pp. 44–45) presented to Le Gros Clark a chimpanzee tooth he had taken from a museum collection and then filed and stained. The resemblance to the Piltdown molar was so striking that Le Gros Clark authorized a full investigation of all the Piltdown fossils (Weiner et al. 1953, pp. 141–142). One wonders if this step would have been taken if the Piltdown man fossils had fit more comfortably within the emerging hominid evolutionary progression.

In any case, a second fluorine content test, using new techniques, was applied to the Piltdown human fossils. Three pieces of the Piltdown skull now yielded a fluorine content of .1 percent. By this time, all the other fossil material from Piltdown was also suspect. Consequently, the Piltdown skull was compared with Late Pleistocene fossils from other sites in the same region, which showed a minimum fluorine content of .1 percent. But the Piltdown jaw and teeth yielded a much lower fluorine content of .01–.04 percent. A modern chimpanzee tooth had .06 percent fluorine. Because fluorine content increases with the passing of time, the results indicated a younger age for the jaw and teeth than the skull. The test results were reported in a paper authored by Weiner, Le Gros Clark, and Oakley, who stated: “the results leave no doubt that, whereas the Piltdown cranium may well be Upper Pleistocene as claimed in 1950 [by Oakley], the mandible, canine tooth and isolated molar are quite modern” (Weiner et al. 1953, p. 143). The conclusion that the jaw and cranial bones were of different ages is a correct application of the fluorine content test, which, as we have seen, is best used as an indicator of the relative ages of bones found in close proximity in the same deposit. However, the attribution of a Late Pleistocene date to the skull by comparison with fossils from other sites is not quite as sound. As we have seen, the fluorine content in groundwater and its rate of absorption are subject to quite a bit of variation at different sites and over long periods of time, making relative dating estimates by this method alone subject to doubt. Thus the fluorine content test results do not completely rule out an earlier—perhaps Middle Pleistocene— date for the cranial bones discovered at Piltdown.

Regarding the two fluorine content tests by Oakley, we see that the first indicated both the skull and jaw were of the same age whereas the second indicated they were of different ages. It was stated that the second set of tests made use of new techniques—that happened to give a desired result. This sort of thing occurs quite often in paleoanthropology—researchers run and rerun tests, or refine their methods, until an acceptable result is achieved. Then they stop. In such cases, it seems the test is calibrated against a theoretical expectation.

Nitrogen content tests were also run on the Piltdown fossils. Examining the results, Weiner found that the skull bones contained 0.6–1.4 percent nitrogen while the jaw contained 3.9 percent and the dentine portion of some of the Piltdown teeth contained 4.2–5.1 percent. The test results therefore showed that the cranial fragments were of a different age than the jaw and teeth, demonstrating they were from different creatures. Modern bone contains about 4–5 percent nitrogen, and the content decreases with age. So it appeared the jaw and teeth were quite recent, while the skull was older (von Koenigswald 1956, p. 181; Weiner et al. 1953, p. 144).

By including for comparison in their report a nitrogen content of 0.7 percent for a Late Pleistocene bone from London, Weiner and his coauthors indicated the Piltdown skull fragments, with a similar nitrogen content, were probably also Late Pleistocene in age. However, as discussed in connection with the Galley Hill fossils in Chapter 6 and Appendix 1, the rate of nitrogen decay is subject to many variables. This greatly reduces the usefulness of comparing nitrogen contents of bones from different sites. In any case, the results of the nitrogen content test still allowed one to believe that the skull, at least, was native to the Piltdown gravels.

But finally even the skull came under suspicion. Weiner and his associates wrote in a lengthy report published by the British Museum: “As the fluorine and nitrogen content of the cranial bones were consistent with their being fairly ancient [1950 report], it seemed at first that the hoax had been based on a genuine discovery of portions of a skull in the gravel, and that animal remains and implements had been subsequently ‘planted’ to suggest that it was Pliocene or Early Pleistocene in age. As the investigations proceeded the skull too became suspect. Dr. G. F. Claringbull carried out an X-ray crystallographic analysis of these bones and found that their main mineral constituent, hydroxy-apatite, had been partly replaced by gypsum. Studies of the chemical conditions in the Piltdown sub-soil and ground-water showed that such an unusual alteration could not have taken place naturally in the Piltdown gravel. Dr. M. H. Hey then demonstrated that when sub-fossil bones are artificially iron-stained by soaking them in strong iron sulphate solutions this alteration does occur. Thus it is now clear that the cranial bones had been artificially stained to match the gravel, and ‘planted’ at the site with all the other finds” (Weiner et al. 1955, p. 257).

8.9 Was The Piltdown Skull Genuine?

Despite the evidence presented in the British Museum report, it can still be argued that the skull was originally from the Piltdown gravels. All of the skull pieces were darkly iron-stained throughout, while the jaw bone, also said to be a forgery, had only a surface stain (Bowden 1977, p. 13). Furthermore, a chemical analysis of the first skull fragments discovered by Dawson showed that they had a very high iron content of 8 percent, compared to only 2–3 percent for the jaw (Weiner et al. 1953, p. 145). This evidence suggests that the skull fragments acquired their iron-staining (penetrating the entire bone and contributing 8 percent iron to the bones’ total mineral content) from a long stay in the iron-rich gravels at Piltdown. The jaw, with simply a surface stain and much smaller iron content, appears to be of a different origin.

If the skull fragments were native to the Piltdown gravels and were not artificially stained as suggested by Weiner and his associates, then how is one to explain the gypsum (calcium sulfate) in the skull fragments? One possibility is that Dawson used sulfate compounds (along with or in addition to potassium dichromate) while chemically treating the bones to harden them after their excavation, thus converting part of the bones’ hydroxy-apatite into gypsum.

Another option is that the gypsum accumulated while the skull was still in the Piltdown gravels. The British Museum scientists claimed that the concentration of sulfates at Piltdown was too low for this to have happened. But Bowden (1977, p. 15) observed that sulfates were present in the area’s groundwater at 63 parts per million and that the Piltdown gravel had a sulfate content of 3.9 milligrams per 100 grams. Admitting these concentrations were not high, Bowden said they could have been considerably higher in the past. We note that Oakley appealed to higher past concentrations of fluorine in groundwater to explain an abnormally high fluorine content for the Castenedolo bones (Appendix 1).

Significantly, the Piltdown jaw contained no gypsum. The fact that gypsum is present in all of the skull fragments but not in the jaw is consistent with the hypothesis that the skull fragments were originally from the Piltdown gravel while the jaw was not.

Chromium was present in the five skull fragments found by Dawson alone, before he was joined by Woodward. This can be explained by the known fact that Dawson dipped the fragments in potassium dichromate to harden them after they were excavated. The additional skull fragments found by Dawson and Woodward together did not contain any chromium.

The jaw did have chromium, apparently resulting from an iron-staining technique involving the use of an iron compound and potassium dichromate.

To summarize, it may be that the skull was native to the Piltdown gravels and became thoroughly impregnated with iron over the course of a long period of time. During this same period of time, some of the calcium phosphate in the bone was transformed into calcium sulfate (gypsum) by the action of sulfates in the gravel and groundwater. Some of the skull fragments were later soaked by Dawson in potassium dichromate. This would account for the presence in them of chromium. The fragments found later by Dawson and Woodward together were not soaked in potassium dichromate and hence had no chromium in them. The jaw, on the other hand, was artificially iron-stained, resulting in only a superficial coloration. The staining technique involved the use of a chromium compound, which accounts for the presence of chromium in the jaw, but the staining technique did not produce any gypsum.

Alternatively, if one accepts that the iron-staining of the skull fragments (as well as the jaw) was accomplished by forgery, then one has to assume that the forger used three different staining techniques: (1) According to the British Museum scientists, the primary staining technique involved the use of an iron sulfate solution with potassium dichromate as an oxidizer, yielding gypsum (calcium sulfate) as a byproduct. This would account for the presence of gypsum and chromium in the five iron-stained skull fragments first found by Dawson. (2) The four skull fragments found by Dawson and Woodward together contained gypsum but no chromium (Weiner et al. 1955, p. 269; Woodward 1948, p. 10). These must have been stained by another method. In connection with some Piltdown beavers’ teeth, which also contained gypsum but no chromium, the British Museum report said: “These were presumably stained by another technique, which dispensed with the use of a dichromate solution as an oxidizer” (Weiner et al. 1955, p. 252). (3) The jaw, which contained chromium but no gypsum, must have been stained by a method that involved use of iron and chromium compounds, but which did not produce gypsum. It is hard to see why a forger would have used so many methods when one would have sufficed. We must also wonder why the forger carelessly stained the jaw to a far lesser extent than the skull, thus risking detection.

Additional evidence, in the form of eyewitness testimony, suggests that the skull was in fact originally from the Piltdown gravels. The eyewitness was Mabel Kenward, daughter of Robert Kenward, the owner of Barkham Manor. On February 23, 1955, the Telegraph published a letter from Miss Kenward that contained this statement: “One day when they were digging in the unmoved gravel, one of the workmen saw what he called a coconut. He broke it with his pick, kept one piece and threw the rest away” (Vere 1959, p. 4). Particularly significant was the testimony that the gravel was unmoved.

Francis Vere amplified this information in a book published the same year that Miss Kenward wrote her letter: “the first discovery of the skull was most graphically described to me by Miss Mabel Kenward herself. She remembers seeing from her window her father, Mr. Robert Kenward, standing by the pit looking at the workmen, while they were digging in the gravel. One of them said there was something just like a coconut in the pit, and her father said that they should take care how they got it out, but before he could stop them, a blow from the pick shattered the skull and pieces flew in all directions. He picked up as many pieces as he could find and came into the house, whereupon Miss Kenward exclaimed, ‘What on earth have you loaded up your pockets with all those old stones for?’ He laid them out on the table and looked at them, but later returned them to the workmen, telling them to give them to Mr. Dawson next time he came. She could not say, of course, whether all the pieces were given to Dawson by the workmen. Presumably, as recounted by Miss Kenward and Woodward, the workman kept one piece which he later handed to Dawson, and threw away the rest” (Bowden

1977, p. 12).

Even Weiner himself (1955, p. 193) wrote: “we cannot easily dismiss the story of the gravel diggers and their ‘coconut’ as pure invention, a plausible tale put about to furnish an acceptable history for the pieces. . . . Dawson told frequently of the labourers’ part (even if he did not clearly record the coconut episode) in the next few years and could hardly have had reason to fear anyone’s seeking confirmation of the men. Granting, then the probability that the workmen did find a portion of skull, it is still conceivable that what they found was not the semi-fossil Eoanthropus but some very recent and quite ordinary burial.” Weiner suggested that the culprit, whoever he may have been, could have then substituted treated skull pieces for the ones actually found. But if the workmen were dealing with “a very recent and quite ordinary burial” then where were the rest of the bones of the corpse? At least some harder bones, like the femurs, should have remained.

In the end, Weiner suggested that an entire fake skull was planted, and the workmen broke it. But Mabel Kenward testified that the surface where the workman started digging was unbroken. The spot was also on the manor grounds, quite near the house, it appears from the testimony, and the gravel was so compact and cemented that it took a pick to break into it. It would not have been easy, it seems, for some unknown person to enter onto private property in England and excavate a deep hole with a pick by the drive near a manor house, any time of day or night, without being questioned. In any case, if we accept the plant hypothesis in this instance, then practically any discovery of human fossil remains anywhere could also be said to have been a plant and forgery.

What about the altered animal fossils allegedly planted at Piltdown? Those could have been introduced without arousing suspicion, because after the skull’s discovery the investigators would often be searching through the gravel, which was already broken up.

Robert Essex, a scientist personally acquainted with Dawson in the years

1912 to 1915, provided interesting testimony about the Piltdown jaw, or jaws, as it turns out. Essex wrote in 1955: “Another jaw not mentioned by Dr. Weiner came from Piltdown much more human than the ape’s jaw, and therefore much more likely to belong to the Piltdown skull parts which are admittedly human. I saw and handled that jaw and know in whose bag it came to Dawson’s office. The jaw was also seen by Mr. H. H. Wakefield, then an articled clerk of Dawson’s, and he has given written evidence of seeing it. Dawson never saw it, and the owner himself probably never knew until 1953 that anybody but himself had seen it” (Bowden 1977, p. 37).

Essex then gave more details. At the time, he had been science master at a local grammar school, located near Dawson’s office. Essex stated: “One day when I was passing I was beckoned in by one of the clerks whom I knew well. He had called me in to show me a fossil half-jaw much more human than an ape’s and with three molars firmly fixed in it. When I asked where this object came from, the answer was ‘Piltdown.’ According to the clerk, it had been brought down by one of the ‘diggers’ who, when he called and asked for Mr. Dawson, was carrying a bag such as might be used for carrying tools. When he was told that Mr. Dawson was busy in court he said he would leave the bag and come back. When he had gone, the clerk opened the bag and saw this jaw. Seeing me passing he had called me in. I told him he had better put it back and that Mr. Dawson would be cross if he knew. I found afterwards that when the ‘digger’ returned, Mr. Dawson was still busy in court, so he picked up his bag and left” (Bowden 1977, p. 37). Essex later saw photographs of the Piltdown jaw. Noting the jaw was not the same one he had seen in Dawson’s office, he communicated this information to the British Museum.

These reports are significant for the following reason. It is unlikely that a forger would have planted a human jaw at Piltdown, along with everything else. So the story about the discovery of a human jaw tends to confirm the view that the human skull found at Piltdown was native to the gravels. Even if we grant that every other bone connected with Piltdown is a forgery, if the skull was found in situ, we are confronted with what could be one more case of Homo sapiens sapiens remains from the late Middle Pleistocene or early Late Pleistocene.

8.10 The Identity of The Forger

Most recent writing, totally accepting that all the Piltdown fossils and implements were fraudulent, has focused on identifying the culprit. Weiner and Oakley insinuated that Dawson, the amateur paleontologist, was to blame. Woodward, the professional scientist, was absolved.

But Dawson’s honor was defended by, of all people, Alvan Marston. At a meeting of the Geological Society of London, held on November 25, 1953, Weiner and Oakley made a slide presentation detailing the evidence that led them to conclude the Piltdown jaw had been forged from a modern orangutan jaw. Marston, who strongly objected to any suggestion that Dawson was guilty of forgery, showed his own slides proving that the jaw, though that of an ape, was a genuine fossil with no sign of deliberate staining or filing. Marston apparently believed that although Dawson may have been mistaken about the age of the jaw, and in connecting it with the human cranium found with it, he was not a forger. Marston accused the British Museum of making Dawson a scapegoat. Dawson could not fight back, but he, Marston, could. Marston shouted, “Let them try and tackle me!” A British author wrote: “The hubbub at this meeting was wrongly reported in the United States to have developed into a series of fist fights” (Millar 1972, pp. 218–219).

Von Koenigswald, like Weiner and Oakley, blamed Dawson: “It is certainly not nice to accuse a dead man who cannot defend himself; but everything quite clearly points to his responsibility for the forgery. Indeed, it has now turned out that neither the fossils nor the tools belong to this locality at all, and that the whole find was carefully planted” (Wendt 1972, p. 154). But as we have seen, the evidence is not so clear cut in this regard. Indeed, it is difficult to see how anyone could say that anything “quite clearly points” to anything in regard to the Piltdown controversy.

For example, if Dawson were involved in chemical forgery, why did he immediately send the five pieces of skull originally found at Piltdown to a public chemist for analysis? Furthermore, Dawson openly admitted he had treated the fragments with potassium dichromate to harden them, and it was well known that he was performing some experiments on staining techniques in his offices (Bowden 1977, p. 26). If Dawson had really been involved in some deliberate fraudulent staining and planting of the original skull pieces and all the other fossils found at Piltdown, it seems he would have been more careful.

Furthermore, it would appear that the Piltdown forgery (even excluding the skull) demanded extensive technical knowledge and capability—beyond that seemingly possessed by Dawson, an amateur anthropologist. Gavin De Beer, a director of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote in a foreword to a report by Weiner, Le Gros Clark, and Oakley: “We are now in a position to give an account of the full extent of the Piltdown hoax. The mandible has been shown by . . . anatomical and X-ray evidence to be almost certainly that of an immature orang-utan; that it is entirely Recent has been confirmed by a number of microchemical tests, as well as by the electron-microscope demonstration of organic (collagen) fibers; the black coating on the canine tooth, originally assumed to be an iron encrustation, is a paint (probably Vandyke brown); the so-called turbinal bone is shown by its texture not to be a turbinal bone at all, but thin fragments of probably non-human limb-bone; all the associated flint implements have been artificially iron-stained; the bone implement was shaped by a steel knife; the whole of the associated fauna must have been ‘planted,’ and it is concluded from radioactivity tests and fluorine analysis that some of the specimens are of foreign origin” ( Weiner et al. 1955, p. 228). It appears that a professional scientist, who had access to rare fossils and knew how to select them and modify them to give the impression of a genuine faunal assemblage of the proper age, had to be involved in the Piltdown episode.

Some have tried to make a case against Teilhard de Chardin, who had studied at a Jesuit college near Piltdown and who had become acquainted with Dawson as early as 1909. A Stegodon tooth found at Piltdown was believed by Weiner and his associates to have come from a North African site that might have been visited by Teilhard de Chardin in the period from 1906 to 1908, during which time he was a lecturer at Cairo University (Millar 1972, p. 232).

Woodward is another suspect. Over the course of several decades, he tightly controlled access to the original Piltdown fossils, which were stored under his care in the British Museum. This could be interpreted as an attempt to prevent evidence of forgery from being noticed by other scientists. It is interesting, for example, that Woodward originally reported the following facts about the Piltdown site: “Portions of the bed are rather finely stratified, and the materials are usually cemented together by iron oxide, so that a pick is often needed to dislodge portions—more especially at one particular horizon near the base. It is in this last mentioned stratum that all the fossil bones and teeth discovered in situ by us have occurred” (Dawson and Woodward 1913, p. 119). If all the Piltdown fossils are fakes, then why did Woodward not notice something was wrong? There are three possible reasons: (1) the planting was done in an incredibly clever fashion, so as to exactly reproduce the fine stratification and the hard, unbroken consistency of the bed in question; (2) Woodward, supposedly an expert, missed obvious signs of planting; (3) Woodward was involved in the planting. It is also suspicious that Woodward so tightly controlled access to the original Piltdown specimens, compelling all but a select few researchers to examine only casts.

Ronald Millar, author of The Piltdown Men, suspected Grafton Eliot Smith. Having a dislike for Woodward, Smith may have decided to entrap him with an elegant deception. Smith, like Teilhard de Chardin, had spent time in Egypt, and so had access to fossils that could have been planted at Piltdown (Johanson and Edey 1981, pp. 81– 82).

Frank Spencer, a professor of anthropology at Queens College of the City University of New York, has written a book that blames Sir Arthur Keith, conservator of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, for the Piltdown forgery (Wilford 1990). Keith believed that modern humans evolved earlier than other scientists could accept, and this, according to Spencer, impelled him to conspire with Dawson to plant evidence favoring his hypothesis.

Another suspect was William Sollas, a professor of geology at Cambridge. He was named in a tape-recorded message left by English geologist James Douglas, who died in 1979 at age 93. Sollas disliked Woodward, who had criticized a method developed by Sollas for making plaster casts of fossils. Douglas recalled he had sent mastodon teeth like those found at Piltdown to Sollas from Bolivia and that Sollas had also received some potassium dichromate, the chemical apparently used in staining many of the Piltdown specimens. According to Douglas, Sollas had also “borrowed” some ape teeth from the Oxford museum collection (Johanson and Edey 1981, p. 83). According to this view, Sollas secretly enjoyed seeing Woodward duped by the Piltdown forgeries.

But if Piltdown does represent a forgery, it is likely that something more than personal revenge was involved. Spencer said that the evidence “had been tailored to withstand scientific scrutiny and thereby promote a particular interpretation of the human fossil record” ( Wilford 1990).

Possible motivations for forgery by a professional scientist may be sensed when we consider the inadequacies of the evidence for human evolution that had accumulated by the beginning of the twentieth century. Darwin had published The Origin of Species in 1859, setting off almost immediately a search for fossil evidence connecting Homo sapiens with the ancient Miocene apes. Leaving aside the discoveries suggesting the presence of fully modern humans in the Pliocene and Miocene, Java man and the Heidelberg jaw were the only fossil discoveries that science had come up with. And as we have seen in Chapter 7, Java man in particular did not enjoy unanimous support within the scientific community.

Right from the start there were ominous suggestions that the apelike skull did not really belong with the humanlike thighbone found 45 feet away from it. As we have seen in this chapter, a number of scientists in England and America, such as Arthur Smith Woodward, Grafton Eliot Smith, and Sir Arthur Keith were developing alternative views of human evolution in which the formation of a high-browed humanlike cranium preceded the formation of a humanlike jaw. Java man, however, showed a low-browed cranium like that of an ape.

Since so many modern scientists have indulged in speculation about the identity and motives of the presumed Piltdown forger, we would also like to introduce a tentative hypothesis. Consider the following scenario. Workmen at Barkham Manor actually discovered a genuine Middle Pleistocene skull, in the manner described by Mabel Kenward. Pieces of it were given to Dawson. Dawson, who had regularly been communicating with Woodward, notified him. Woodward, who had been developing his own theory of human evolution and who was very worried about science’s lack of evidence for human evolution after 50 years of research, planned and implemented the forgery. He did not act alone, but in concert with a select number of scientists at the British Museum, who assisted in acquiring the specimens and preparing them so as to withstand the investigations of scientists not in on the secret.

Oakley, who played a big role in the Piltdown exposé, himself wrote (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 3): “The Trinil [Java man] material was tantalizingly incomplete, and for many scientists it was inadequate as confirmation of Darwin’s view of human evolution. I have sometimes wondered whether it was a misguided impatience for the discovery of a more acceptable ‘missing link’ that formed one of the tangled skein of motives behind the Piltdown Forgery (1912).”

Weiner also admitted the possibility: “Behind it all we sense, therefore, a strong and impelling motive. . . . The planning . . . must betoken a motive more driving than a mere hoax or prank. . . . There could have been a mad desire to assist the doctrine of human evolution by furnishing the ‘requisite’ ‘missing link.’. . . Piltdown might have offered irresistible attraction to some fanatical biologist to make good what Nature had created but omitted to preserve” (Weiner

1955, pp. 117–118).

Unfortunately for the hypothetical conspirators, the discoveries that turned up over the next few decades did not support the evolutionary theory represented by the Piltdown forgery. The discoveries of new specimens of Java man and Peking man, as well as the Australopithecus finds in Africa, were accepted by many scientists as proving the low-browed ape-man ancestor hypothesis, the very idea the high-browed Piltdown man was meant to discredit and replace.

Time passed, and the difficulties in constructing a viable evolutionary lineage for the fossil hominids increased. At a critical moment, the remaining insiders in the British Museum chose to act. Perhaps enlisting unwitting colleagues, they organized a systematic exposé of the forgery the Museum had perpetrated earlier in the century. In the course of this exposé, perhaps some of the specimens were further modified by chemical and physical means to lend credence to the idea of forgery.

The idea of a group of conspirators operating out of the British Museum, perpetrating a forgery and then later exposing the same is bound to strike many as farfetched. But it is founded upon as much, or as little, evidence as the indictments made by others. Doubt has been cast on so many British scientists individually, including some from the British Museum, that this conspiracy theory does not really enlarge the circle of possible wrongdoers.

Perhaps there were no conspirators at the British Museum. But according to many scientists, someone with scientific training, acting alone or with others, did carry out a very successful forgery.

Gavin De Beer, a director of the British Museum of Natural History, believed the methods employed in uncovering the Piltdown hoax would “make a successful repetition of a similar type of forgery virtually impossible in the future” (Weiner et al. 1955, p. 228). But a forger with knowledge of modern chemical and radiometric dating methods could manufacture a fake that would not be easily detectable. Indeed, we can hardly be certain that there is not another Piltdownlike forgery in one of the world’s great museums, just waiting to be uncovered.

The impact of Piltdown remains, therefore, damaging. But incidents of this sort appear to be rare, given our present knowledge. There is, however, another more insidious and pervasive kind of cheating—the routine editing and reclassifying of data according to rigid theoretical preconceptions.

Vayson de Pradenne, of the Ecole d’Anthropologie in Paris, wrote in his book Fraudes Archéologiques (1925): “one often finds men of science possessed by a pre-conceived idea, who, without committing real frauds, do not hesitate to give observed facts a twist in the direction which agrees with their theories. A man may imagine, for example, that the law of progress in pre-historic industries must show itself everywhere and always in the smallest details. Seeing the simultaneous presence in a deposit of carefully finished artefacts and others of a coarser type, he decides that there must be two levels: the lower one yielding the coarser specimens. He will class his finds according to their type, not according to the stratum in which he found them. If at the base he finds a finely worked implement he will declare there has been accidental penetration and that the specimen must be re-integrated with the site of its origin by placing it with the items from the higher levels. He will end with real trickery in the stratigraphic presentation of his specimens; trickery in aid of a pre-conceived idea, but more or less unconsciously done by a man of good faith whom no one would call fraudulent. The case is often seen, and if I mention no names it is not because I do not know any” (Vere 1959, pp. 1–2).

This sort of thing goes on not just in the British Museum, but in all museums, universities, and other centers of paleoanthropological research the world over. Although each separate incident of knowledge filtration seems minor, the cumulative effect is overwhelming, serving to radically distort and obscure our picture of human origins and antiquity.

An abundance of facts suggests that beings quite like ourselves have been around as far back as we care to look—in the Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene, and beyond. Remains of apes and apelike men are also found throughout the same expanse of time. So perhaps all kinds of hominids have coexisted throughout history. If one considers all the available evidence, that is the clearest picture that emerges. It is only by eliminating a great quantity of evidence— keeping only the fossils and artifacts that conform to preconceived notions—that one can construct an evolutionary sequence. Such unwarranted elimination of evidence, evidence as solidly researched as anything now accepted, represents a kind of deception carried out by scientists desiring to maintain a certain theoretical point of view. This deception is apparently not the result of an deliberately organized plot, as with the Piltdown man forgery (if that is what Piltdown man was). It is instead the inevitable outcome of social processes of knowledge filtration operating within the scientific community.

But although there may be a lot of unconscious fraud in paleoanthropology, the case of Piltdown demonstrates that the field also has instances of deception of the most deliberate and calculating sort.

Peking Man and Other Finds in China

After the discoveries of Java man and Piltdown man, ideas about human evolution remained unsettled. Dubois’s Pithecanthropus erectus fossils did not win complete acceptance among the scientific community, and Piltdown simply complicated the matter. Scientists waited eagerly for the next important discoveries—which they hoped would clarify the evolutionary development of the Hominidae. Many thought the desired hominid fossils would be found in China.

Eventually, such fossils did turn up, at Choukoutien, near Peking. The creature to which the bones originally belonged was designated Peking man or Sinanthropus. The Peking man fossils were lost to science during World War II, but more fossil discoveries were made in the postwar era. In this chapter, we will discuss the controversial nature of the Peking man fossils and the questionable practice of dating later Chinese hominid fossils by their morphology, in the absence of more secure means of determining their actual age.

In the course of this discussion, the reader will be confronted with various spellings of names of Chinese geographical locations and scientists. Over the years, scholars have adopted different conventions for rendering Chinese names into English. For example, Peking is now spelled Beijing. And Choukoutien is now spelled Zhoukoudian. In the first part of the chapter, we use Peking and Choukoutien, and in the later part of the chapter we use Beijing and Zhoukoudian. As far as names of scientists are concerned, what Westerners regard as the last name comes first in the Chinese name. For example, Wu Rukang will be listed in our bibliography as Wu, R. Complicating the matter are variant spellings, such as Woo Jukang. In our text and citations, we will use the modern spellings of most authors. In the bibliography, we will also give the modern spelling with the older variant in brackets: Wu, R. [Woo, J.].

9.1 Discoveries at Choukoutien

The ancient Chinese called fossils dragon bones. Believing dragon bones to possess curative powers, Chinese druggists have for centuries powdered them for use in remedies and potions. For early Western paleontologists, Chinese drug shops therefore provided an unexpected hunting ground.

In 1900, Dr. K. A. Haberer collected mammalian fossils from Chinese druggists and sent them to the University of Munich, where they were studied and catalogued by Max Schlosser in The Fossil Mammals of China (1903). Among the specimens, Schlosser found a tooth from the Peking area that appeared to be a “left upper third molar, either of a man or hitherto unknown anthropoid ape” (Goodman 1983, p. 63). Schlosser suggested China would be a good place to search for primitive man.

Among those who agreed with Schlosser was Gunnar Andersson, a Swedish geologist employed by the Geological Survey of China. Andersson, a keen hunter of dragon bones, traced out their sources from druggists and other informants. He then carried out excavations for fossils. Andersson was particularly interested in discoveries that might increase the evidence for the theory of human evolution. In his paleoanthropological research, Andersson enjoyed the support of the Swedish government, members of the Swedish royal family, and wealthy patrons such as Ivar Kreuger, who monopolized match-manufacturing in several countries.

In 1918, Andersson visited a place called Chikushan, or Chicken Bone Hill, near the village of Choukoutien, 25 miles southwest of Peking. There, on the working face of an old limestone quarry, he saw a fissure of red clay filled with fossil bones.

In 1921, Andersson again visited the Chikushan site. He was accompanied by Otto Zdansky, an Austrian paleontologist who had been sent to assist him, and Walter M. Granger, of the American Museum of Natural History. Their first excavations were not very productive, resulting only in the discovery of some fairly recent fossils.

Then some of the local villagers told Zdansky about a nearby place with bigger dragon bones, near the small Choukoutien railway station. Here Zdansky found another limestone quarry, the walls of which, like the first, had fissures filled with red clay and broken bones. Andersson visited the site and discovered some broken pieces of quartz, which he thought might be very primitive tools. The mineral quartz did not occur naturally at the site, so Andersson reasoned that the quartz pieces must have been brought there by a hominid. Zdansky, who did not get along very well with Andersson, disagreed with this interpretation.

Andersson, however, remained convinced. Looking at the limestone wall, he said, “I have a feeling that there lies here the remains of one of our ancestors and it’s only a question of finding him” (Hood 1964, p. 65). He asked Zdansky to keep searching a filled-in cave, saying, “Take your time and stick to it until the cave is emptied if need be” (Goodman 1983, p. 65).

9.1.1 The First Teeth

In 1921 and 1923, Zdansky, somewhat reluctantly, conducted brief excavations. He uncovered signs of an early human precursor—first one tooth and then a second, tentatively dated to the Early Pleistocene. Of the first tooth Zdansky said: “I recognized it at once, but said nothing” (Goodman 1983, p. 65).

Even after finding the second tooth, Zdansky kept both secret. The teeth, a lower premolar and an upper molar, were crated up with other fossils and shipped to Sweden for further study (Hood 1964, p. 66). Back in Sweden, Zdansky published a paper in 1923 on his work in China, with no mention of the teeth.

There the matter rested until 1926. In that year, the Crown Prince of Sweden, who was chairman of the Swedish China Research Committee and a patron of paleontological research, planned to visit Peking. Professor Wiman of the University of Uppsala, asked Zdansky, his former student, if he had come across anything interesting that could be presented to the Prince. Zdansky sent Wiman a report, with photographs, on the teeth he had found at Choukoutien. The report, later published in the Bulletin of the Geological Survey of China, was duly presented by J. Gunnar Andersson to a meeting in Peking, attended by the Crown Prince. Andersson declared in regard to the teeth: “The man I predicted had been found” (von Koenigswald 1956, p. 41).

9.1.2 Davidson Black

Another person who thought Zdansky’s teeth represented clear evidence of fossil man was Davidson Black, a young Canadian physician residing in Peking.

Davidson Black graduated from the University of Toronto medical school in 1906. To satisfy his strong interest in anatomy, he took a post at Western Reserve University in Ohio, where he worked with T. Wingate Todd, a noted English anatomist.

Todd was an associate of Grafton Eliot Smith, familiar to us from our discussion of Piltdown man (Chapter 8). A forceful advocate of human evolutionary theory, Todd organized at Western Reserve University an extensive skeletal museum, including casts of bones from all known forms of fossil man. Under Todd, Davidson Black therefore had an opportunity to become acquainted with the latest developments in the field of paleoanthropology.

In 1914, Black went to Manchester, England, to work under Grafton Elliot Smith, who was then occupied with Piltdown man. Black also developed a friendly relationship with Sir Arthur Keith, accompanying him to the Piltdown site.

In a letter of recommendation, Smith wrote of Black: “during his stay in my department he has seized every opportunity of familiarizing himself with the problem of human phylogeny [evolution]” (Hood 1964, p. 27).

After returning to Western Reserve, Black read Climate and Evolution by William Diller Matthew. In 1911, Matthew had said in an address to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States: “All authorities are today agreed in placing the center of dispersal of the human race in Asia. Its more exact location may be differently interpreted, but the consensus of modern opinion would place it probably in or about the great plateau of central Asia” (Osborn 1928, p. 192).

Today the center of dispersal is viewed as Africa rather than central Asia, and all fossil evidence must therefore be interpreted in light of an African origin. For example, most paleoanthropologists now believe that Homo sapiens sapiens evolved in southern Africa about 100,000 years ago, and then spread throughout the world, diversifying into the present races. But other scientists concerned with human origins, such as Carleton S. Coon (1969), have said the fossil evidence shows that the several modern human races evolved separately from Homo erec tus in Africa, Europe, and Asia. However, as we have several times noted, it is only by excluding or reinterpreting vast quantities of reported evidence that any evolutionary hypothesis whatsoever can be maintained.

From the time he first became acquainted with Matthew’s ideas in 1915, Black intended to go to northern China to search for the center of human origins (Hood 1964, p. 35). But the First World War delayed his plans.

9.1.3 The Rockefeller Foundation Sends Black to China

In 1917, Black joined the Canadian military medical corps. Meanwhile, a friend of Black, Dr. E. V. Cowdry, was named head of the anatomy department at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Peking Union Medical College. Cowdry asked Dr. Simon Flexner, director of the Rockefeller Foundation, to appoint Black as his assistant. After meeting Flexner in New York, Black was accepted and wrote to a colleague: “In addition to my work at the school I shall have the privilege of accompanying such scientific expeditions as may be organized to explore and collect material in central China, Tibet, etc.” (Hood 1964, pp. 41– 42).

After Rockefeller Foundation officials petitioned the Surgeon General of Canada, Black won his release from the Canadian military and proceeded to Peking, arriving in 1919.

At the Peking Union Medical College, Black did everything possible to minimize his medical duties so he could concentrate on his real interest—paleoanthropology. In November 1921, he went on a brief expedition to a site in northern China, and other expeditions followed. Black’s superiors were not pleased.

In 1921, Dr. R. M. Pearce, the Rockefeller Foundation’s advisor on medical education, visited Peking on an inspection tour. Afterward, Pearce wrote to Black: “If you think of anatomy for nine months out of the year, it is no one’s business what you do with the other three months in the summer in connection with anthropology, but for the next two years at least give your entire attention to anatomy” (Hood 1964, p. 55).

But gradually the Rockefeller Foundation would be won over to Black’s point of view. The series of events that caused this change to take place is worth looking into.

Late in 1922, Black submitted a plan for a Siam (now Thailand) expedition to Dr. Henry S. Houghton, director of the medical school. Black expertly related his passion for paleoanthropology to the mission of the medical school. Houghton wrote to Roger Greene, the school’s business director: “While I cannot be certain that the project which Black has in mind is severely practical in its nature, I must confess that I have been deeply impressed by . . . the valuable relationship he has been able to establish between our department of anatomy and the various institutions and expeditions which are doing important work in China in the fields which touch closely upon anthropology research. With these points in mind I recommend the granting of his request” (Hood 1964, p. 56). Here can be seen the importance of the intellectual prestige factor—ordinary medicine seems quite pedestrian in comparison with the quasi-religious quest for the secret of human origins, a quest that had, since Darwin’s time, fired the imaginations of scientists all over the world. Houghton was clearly influenced. The expedition took place during Black’s summer vacation in 1923, but unfortunately produced no results.

In 1924, Black took a year’s paid leave to travel around the world, visiting early man sites, museums, and scholars in the field of human evolution. Black returned to Peking determined to give more time to his pet research projects.

9.1.4 Black and the Birth of Sinanthropus

In 1926, Black attended the scientific meeting at which J. Gunnar Andersson presented to the Crown Prince of Sweden the report on the molars found by Zdansky at Choukoutien in 1923. Excited on learning of the teeth, Black accepted a proposal by Andersson for further excavations at Choukoutien, to be carried out jointly by the Geological Survey of China and Black’s department at the Peking Union Medical School. Dr. Amadeus Grabau of the Geological Survey of China called the hominid for which they would search “Peking man.”

On October 27, 1926, Black wrote to Sir Arthur Keith about Zdansky’s teeth: “There is great news to tell you—actual fossil remains of a man-like being have at last been found in Eastern Asia, in fact quite close to Peking. This discovery fits in exactly with the hypothesis as to the Central Asiatic origin of the Hominidae which I reviewed in my paper ‘Asia and the Dispersal of Primates’” (Hood 1964, p. 84). Black in China, like Dubois in Java, had found what he was looking for.

Hood (1964, p. 85) stated in her biography: “Black’s next task was to approach the Rockefeller Foundation through Roger Greene to ask for funds with which to make a large-scale excavation at the caves of Chou-K’ou-tien. To his delight and relief a generous sum was forthcoming. This response showed a marked change in the attitude of the authorities in New York towards Black’s efforts to promote research into China’s prehistory from his experience in 1921.”

By spring 1927, work was underway at Choukoutien, in the midst of the Chinese civil war. During several months of painstaking excavation, there were no discoveries of any hominid remains. Finally, with the cold autumn rains beginning to fall, marking the end of the first season’s digging, a single hominid tooth was uncovered. On the basis of this tooth, and the two previously reported by Zdansky (now in Black’s possession), Black decided to announce the discovery of a new kind of fossil hominid. He wrote in Nature: “The newly discovered specimen displays in the details of its morphology a number of interesting and unique characters, sufficient, it is believed, to justify the proposal of a new hominid genus Sinanthropus, to be represented by this material” (Black 1927, p. 954).

Black was eager to show the world his discovery. Dr. Heinrich Neckles, a friend of Black, later recalled: “One night he came to my office very excited, to show the precious tooth of homo pekinensis. He wanted me to advise him about the safest method to take the invaluable find to England (where he was going shortly) safe against loss or theft. I suggested a brass capsule with a screw closure and a ring at the top, with a strong ribbon through it, so he could wear it around his neck. We had a good Chinese mechanic in the Physiology Department who made a very nice capsule for him and he was as happy as a little boy” (Hood 1964, p. 90).

In the course of his travels with his newly found tooth, Black discovered that not everyone shared his enthusiasm for Sinanthropus. At the annual meeting of the American Association of Anatomists in 1928, some of the members heavily criticized Black for proposing a new genus on so little evidence.

In addition, Zdansky was not at all very happy regarding the purposes for which his teeth were being used: “I am indeed convinced that the existing material provides a wholly inadequate foundation for many of the various theories based upon it. . . . I decline absolutely to venture any far-reaching conclusions regarding the extremely meager material described here, and which, I think, cannot be more closely identified than as Homo sp. [species undetermined ] . . . my purpose here is only to make it clear that my discovery of these teeth should be regarded as decidedly interesting but not of epoch-making importance” (Bowden 1977, pp. 80– 81).

Regarding such criticism of Black’s activities, Grafton Elliot Smith wrote: “It had no other effect upon him, beyond awaking his sympathies for anthropologists who are unfairly criticized and to make him redouble his efforts to establish the proof of his claim” (Hood 1964, p. 93).

Black kept making the rounds, showing the tooth to Ales Hrdlicka in the United States and then journeying to England, where he met Sir Arthur Keith and Sir Arthur Smith Woodward. At the British Museum, Black had casts made of the Peking man molars, for distribution to other workers. This is the kind of propaganda work necessary to bring a discovery to the attention of the scientific community. This serves to illustrate that even for a scientist political skills are not unimportant.

On returning to China, Black kept in close touch with the excavations at Choukoutien. Dynamite was used to blast out sections of rock. Crews of workers then searched through the debris, sending the larger chunks back to Peking, where any fossils were carefully extracted. The sole aim of the whole project was, of course, to find more Peking man remains. For months nothing turned up.

But Black wrote to Keith on December 5, 1928: “It would seem that there is a certain magic about the last few days of the season’s work for again two days before it ended Böhlin found the right half of the lower jaw of Sinanthropus with the three permanent molars in situ” (Hood 1964, p. 97).

Now a financial problem loomed. The Rockefeller Foundation grant that supported the digging would run out in April of 1929. So in January, Black wrote the directors, asking them to support the Choukoutien excavations by creating a Cenozoic Research Laboratory (the Cenozoic includes the periods from the Paleocene to the Holocene). In April, Black received the funds he desired.

9.1.5 The Transformation of the Rockefeller Foundation

Just a few years before, Rockefeller Foundation officials had actively discouraged Black from becoming too involved in paleoanthropological research. Now they were backing him to the hilt, setting up an institute specifically devoted to searching for remains of fossil human ancestors. Why had the Rockefeller Foundation so changed its attitude toward Black and his work? This question bears looking into, because the financial contribution of foundations would turn out to be vital to human evolution research carried out by scientists like Black. Foundation support would also prove important in broadcasting the news of the finds and their significance to the waiting world.

As Warren Weaver, a scientist and Rockefeller Foundation official, said (1967, p. 82): “In a perfect world an idea could be born, nourished, developed and made known to everyone, criticized and perfected, and put to good use without the crude fact of financial support ever entering into the process.

Seldom, if ever, in the practical world in which we live, does this occur. The influence of money on ideas can be powerful; it can be good, or it can be downright vicious. . . . Money can be used to lure the gullible to devote their time to spiritualism, to fanatical religions, to pseudo-science, and so on.”

For Weaver, biological questions were of the highest importance. Writing in

1967, Weaver stated that he regarded the highly publicized particle accelerators and space exploration programs as something akin to scientific fads. He added: “The opportunities not yet rigorously explored lie in the understanding of the nature of living things. It seemed clear in 1932, when the Rockefeller Foundation launched its quarter-century program in that area, that the biological and medical sciences were ready for a friendly invasion by the physical sciences. . . . the tools are now available for discovering, on the most disciplined and precise level of molecular actions, how man’s central nervous system really operates, how he thinks, learns, remembers, and forgets. . . . Apart from the fascination of gaining some knowledge of the nature of the mind-brain-body relationship, the practical values in such studies are potentially enormous. Only thus may we gain information about our behavior of the sort that can lead to wise and beneficial control” (W. Weaver 1967, p. 203).

It thus becomes clear that at the same time the Rockefeller Foundation was channeling funds into human evolution research in China, it was in the process of developing an elaborate plan to fund biological research with a view to developing methods to effectively control human behavior. Black’s research into Peking man must be seen within this context in order to be properly understood.

Over the past few decades, science has developed a comprehensive cosmology that explains the origin of human beings as the culmination of a 4-billion-year process of chemical and biological evolution on this planet, which formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang, the event that marked the beginning of the universe some 16 billion years ago. The Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, founded upon particle physics and astronomical observations suggesting we live in an expanding cosmos, is thus inextricably connected with the theory of the biochemical evolution of all life forms, including human beings. The major foundations, especially the Rockefeller Foundation, provided key funding for the initial research supporting this materialistic cosmology, which has for all practical purposes pushed God and the soul into the realm of mythology—at least in the intellectual centers of modern civilization.

The extent of the Rockefeller Foundation’s support of biological research is remarkable. The Foundation funded the fruit fly genetics work of Thomas Hunt Morgan and Theodosius Dobzhansky. Dr. Max Perutz said the Cambridge Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in England owed its existence to the Rockefeller Foundation. The Foundation furnished funds for the Laboratory’s X-ray diffraction equipment, which provided critical research results used by Watson and Crick in their pioneering work on DNA’s helical structure (W. Weaver 1967, p. 235).

The Foundation was equally supportive of selected projects in the realm of the physical sciences. Lee A. Dubridge, President of the California Institute of Technology, wrote: “The sciences of physics and astronomy could hardly have emerged from the primitive state in which they found themselves in America in the first two decades of the twentieth century had it not been for the generosity of the great private foundations” (W. Weaver 1967, p. 252). As we have seen, the Carnegie Foundation built the Mt. Wilson Observatory. The Rockefeller Foundation built the Mt. Palomar Observatory, where much of the work on the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe took place. The Foundation also gave funds to Ernest O. Lawrence for building the world’s first particle accelerators.

If the Big Bang and biochemical evolution represent the Godless and soulless cosmology of the scientific world view, psychiatry and psychology represent its secular moral code and guidelines for practical behavior. In the early 1930s, around the time the Choukoutien excavations were in full swing, the medical division of the Rockefeller Foundation chose psychiatry as its principal focus, establishing schools of psychiatry at major medical colleges. Later the Foundation would fund the famous Kinsey reports on sexual behavior.

During the 1930s, psychiatry was fairly well dominated by the figure of Sigmund Freud, who had encountered ideas about human evolution as a youth and later wrote: “The theories of Darwin, which were then of topical interest, strongly attracted me, for they held out hopes of an extraordinary advance in our understanding of the world” (Jones 1953, pp. 27–28).

In Totem and Tabu, Freud explained Christianity and all organized religion in terms of his Oedipus complex. According to one of his biographers, Freud “took into account, too, the work of Charles Darwin. He recalled Darwin’s conjecture that originally men had lived in hordes, each horde dominated by a single, powerful, violent, suspicious man” ( Puner 1947, p. 167). In his autobiography, Freud wrote: “The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal. . . . the primal father, at once feared and hated, honored and envied, became the prototype of God himself. . . . This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity” ( Puner 1947, pp. 167–168). If one takes seriously the theory of evolution, one must explain the origin of God and religion as an historical occurrence within the mind of evolving man, though perhaps not in the exact manner suggested by Freud.

The Rockefeller Foundation saw in psychiatry a way to influence human social behavior. Dr. Alan Gregg, head of the Medical Sciences Division of the Foundation, wrote: “I should not be satisfied with the definition of psychiatry as that specialty in medicine which deals with mental disorders.” He believed its “province is the conduct of man, his reactions, his behavior as an indivisible sentient being with other such beings” (Fosdick 1952, p. 130). During the Second World War, Gregg served as an Army consultant and wrote of “the possibility that through psychiatric understanding our successors may be able to govern human politics and relationships more sagely” (Fosdick 1952, p. 133). The desire to bring about better human relations is certainly laudable. But our main point is that the Rockefeller Foundation scientists believed this goal could best be achieved by having science establish beneficial control over human society.

All this is quite remarkable, when one considers that John D. Rockefeller’s charity was initially directed toward Baptist churches and missions. Raymond D. Fosdick, an early president of the Rockefeller Foundation, said (1952, p. 2) that both Rockefeller and his chief financial adviser, Frederick T. Gates, were “inspired by deep religious conviction.” Rockefeller believed “a man should make all he can and give all he can” (Fosdick 1952, p. 6).

According to Fosdick (1952, p. 6), Rockefeller was at first “giving to a multiplicity of small causes mostly related to his church interests—schools, hospitals, and missions.” As a result, he was continually being approached by Baptist ministers. To relieve Rockefeller from personally having to handle individual requests, Gates organized a system whereby Rockefeller would give a lump sum to a mission board that would distribute the funds in an appropriate fashion.

Moving on to bigger things, Rockefeller and Gates gave 35 million dollars for building the University of Chicago, which, according to Fosdick (1952, p. 7), started out as “as an idea for a Baptist institution of higher learning, under Baptist auspices and control.” It is hard to imagine such a school promoting the idea that humans evolved from extinct apelike creatures. Gates, it may be noted, was formerly head of the American Baptist Education Society.

In 1913, the present Rockefeller Foundation was organized. The trustees included Frederick T. Gates; John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; Dr. Simon Flexner, head of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; Henry Pratt Judson, president of the University of Chicago; Charles William Eliot, former president of Harvard; and A. Barton Hepburn, president of the Chase National Bank.

At first, the Foundation concentrated its attention on public health, medicine, agriculture, and education, avoiding anything controversial. Thus the Rockefeller Foundation began to distance itself from religion, particularly the Baptist Church. Exactly why this happened is difficult to say. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Rockefeller was coming to realize that his fortune was founded on exploiting the advances of modern science and technology. Perhaps it was the increasing role that science was beginning to play in the objects of traditional charitable giving—such as medicine. But whatever the reason, Rockefeller began to staff his foundation with scientists, and the giving policies reflected this change.

Even Gates, the former Baptist educator, seemed to be changing his tune. He wanted to create a nonsectarian university in China. But he noted that the “missionary bodies at home and abroad were distinctly and openly, even threateningly hostile to it as tending to infidelity” (Fosdick 1952, p. 81). Furthermore, the Chinese government wanted control, an idea that the Foundation could not support.

President Eliot, who had overseen the Harvard Medical School in Shanghai, proposed a solution: a medical college, which would serve as an opening to the rest of Western science. Fosdick (1952, p. 81) wrote: “To President Eliot there was no better subject than medicine to introduce to China the inductive method of reasoning which lies at the basis of all modern science. He thought it would be the most significant contribution that the West could make to the East.” Here mechanistic science shows itself a quiet but militant ideology, skillfully, yet somewhat ruthlessly, promoted by the combined effort of scientists, educators, and wealthy industrialists, with a view towards establishing worldwide intellectual dominance.

The medical hospital strategy outlined by Eliot worked. The Chinese government approved establishment of the Peking Union Medical College under Foundation auspices. Meanwhile, Dr. Wallace Buttrick, director of Rockefeller’s newly created China Medical Board, negotiated with the Protestant mission hospitals already in China. He agreed to provide financial support for these hospitals, in effect bribing them (Fosdick 1952, pp. 83–84).

In 1928, the Rockefeller Foundation and other Rockefeller charities underwent changes to reflect the growing importance of scientific research. In 1923, Wycliffe Rose, head of the General Education Board, had said: “All important fields of activity, from the breeding of bees to the administration of an empire, call for an understanding of the spirit and technique of modern science.

. . . Science is the method of knowledge. It is the key to such dominion as man may ever exercise over his physical environment. Appreciation of its spirit and technique, moreover, determines the mental attitude of a people, affects the entire system of education, and carries with it the shaping of a civilization” (Fosdick 1952, p. 141).

All programs in various Rockefeller charities “relating to the advance of human knowledge” were shifted to the Rockefeller Foundation, which was organized into five divisions: international health, medical sciences, natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities (Fosdick 1952, pp. 137–138). Each division was run by a highly competent academic and technical staff, who advised the trustees of the Foundation where to give their money. Raymond D. Fosdick, president of the Foundation at the time, said (1952, p. 140) that the year of 1928 marked “the end of an era in philanthropy.” And the beginning of a new one.

The change reached right to the top, with Dr. Max Mason, a scientist himself, taking over as president. Mason, a mathematical physicist, was formerly president of the University of Chicago. According to Fosdick (1952, p. 142), Mason “emphasized the structural unity involved in the new orientation of program. It was not to be five programs, each represented by a division of the Foundation; it was to be essentially one program, directed to the general problem of human behavior, with the aim of control through understanding.”

The Foundation also saw itself engaged in a kind of thought control. Fosdick (1952, p. 143) said: “The possession of funds carries with it power to establish trends and styles of intellectual endeavor.”

The theme of control was echoed in 1933 by Warren Weaver, who headed the Rockefeller Foundation’s natural sciences division, which funded the Cenozoic Research Laboratory in Peking. In a report to the trustees, Weaver, a mathematician from the University of Wisconsin, said: “The welfare of mankind depends in a vital way on man’s understanding of himself and his physical environment. Science has made magnificent progress in the analysis and control of inanimate forces, but it has not made equal advances in the more delicate, more difficult, and more important problem of the analysis and control of animate forces” (Fosdick 1952, p. 157). The Rockefeller Foundation’s annual report for the year 1933 (p. 199) asked: “Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed in the future superior men? . . . In short, can we rationalize human behavior and create a new science of man?”

The Foundation scientists outlined a coordinated program, approved by the Foundation trustees, to attain this goal. Fosdick (1952, p. 158) stated: “the trustees, in the spring of 1933, voted to make experimental biology the field of primary interest. . . . It was conceived, moreover, as being closely linked with other aspects of the Foundation’s program, notably the program in psychiatry of the Medical Sciences division and the social-science program in human relations. Biology is important because it has the potentiality of contributing to the problem of understanding ourselves, and the three programs—in widely separated fields— could be thought of as a unified endeavor to stimulate research in the sciences underlying the behavior of man.”

Some commentators make light of research into the reproductive habits of earthworms and other apparently obscure research projects. But these have their purpose. According to Weaver: “Before we can be wise about so complex a subject as the behavior of a man, we obviously have to gain a tremendous amount of information and insight about living organisms in general, necessarily starting with the simpler forms of life. Experimental biology is the means for such exploration. It furnishes the basis necessary for progress in solving the sequence of problems which begins with the strictly biological and moves through the mental to the social” (Fosdick 1952, p. 158). Here once more, the intent to use science for perfecting methods of social control (and who would the controllers be but the scientists?) is stated explicitly.

And what about something as apparently innocent as stargazing through the 200-inch telescope at Mt. Palomar? Fosdick (1952, p. 179) stated: “Superficially the 200-inch and the lesser projects in astronomy which have received Foundation aid would seem to be far removed from the main interest of the Natural Sciences program. What possible relationship can there be between the stars and experimental biology?” Fosdick (1952, p. 180) answered that astronomy gives the first glimmers of regularity in nature, the understanding of which will lead to control of humanity and the universe.

It bears repeating that one should see Black’s Peking man research within the larger framework of the explicitly stated goal of the Rockefeller Foundation, which reflected the implicit goal of big science—control, by scientists, of human behavior. In particular, Peking man strengthened the concept of human evolution, by which scientists attempt to determine the way we think about ourselves. Essentially, evolution defines human nature in a totally materialistic way. This materialistic definition of human nature tends to justify making the primary goal of human life the attainment of control, by science, over the visible universe.

9.1.6 An Historic Find and a Cold-Blooded Campaign

With the financial backing of the Rockefeller Foundation for the Cenozoic Research Laboratory secure, Black resumed his travels for the purpose of promoting Peking man. In May of 1929, he arrived in Java, for the Fourth Pacific Science Congress. There he was able to give a report on Sinanthropus before an audience that included Grafton Eliot Smith. Black stated: “Elliot Smith’s cordial backing after my presentation of the material at the conference made all the difference in the world to its reception there” (Hood 1964, pp. 100 –101). Nevertheless, Peking man still had not achieved the worldwide celebrity he would later enjoy. While in Java, Smith and Black visited the Trinil site, where Dubois had originally discovered Pithecanthropus, the southern relative of Sinanthropus.

Black then returned to China, where work was proceeding slowly at Choukoutien, with no new major Sinanthropus finds reported. Enthusiasm seemed to be waning among the workers. But then on the first of December, at the very end of the season, W. C. Pei (Pei Wenzhong) made an historic find. Pei later wrote: “At about four o’clock next afternoon I encountered the almost complete skull of Sinanthropus. The specimen was imbedded partly in loose sands and partly in a hard matrix so that it was possible to extricate it with relative ease” (Hood 1964, p. 104).

In order to protect the skull, Pei immediately wrapped it in paper and cloth soaked with flour paste. He then rode 25 miles on a bicycle to the Cenozoic Research Laboratory, where he presented the skull to Black, who gave him full credit for the discovery.

By early 1930, Black had published two preliminary papers on the skull and set about publicizing the find around the world. His secretary, Miss Hempel, recalled: “For weeks and months we did nothing but write letters” (Hood 1964, p. 109).

Black wrote to Dr. Pearce at the Rockefeller Foundation: “Yes, Sinanthropus is growing like a bally weed. I never realized how great an advertising medium primitive man (or woman) was till this skull turned up. Now everybody is crowding around to gaze that can get the least excuse to do so and it gets embarrassing at times. Being front page stuff is a new sensation and encourages a guarded manner of speech” (Hood 1964, pp. 110–111).

Black worked busily, carefully freeing the skull from its stone matrix and later making a cast of it. Copies of the cast were sent to museums all over the world. The site itself was purchased by the Geological Survey of China.

In September of 1930, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith arrived in Peking to inspect the site of the discovery and examine the fossils. During Smith’s stay, Black primed him for a propaganda blitz on behalf of Peking man. Smith then departed, and apparently did his job well. In December, Black wrote an extremely candid letter to Dr. Henry Houghton, director of the Peking medical school, who was vacationing in America: “I am thrilled beyond words to know how much you enjoyed Grafton Elliot Smith. . . . he is Irish to the extent that a friend is always spoken of in lurid hyperbole and, though I love him for it, I get the collywobbles when I reflect the brazen way I have plotted to have him exercise his talent in this respect on my behalf. . . . I warned him to hold off’n me . . . but your letter makes it clear that that balloon is busted and I’m the chappee who must spend the rest of his days trying to live up to and live down the reputation acquired by his own rash act.” This rash act appears to have been the Sinanthropus discovery.

Black went on to say: “But you, too, are dripping with the gore of the same hegoat and I love you, for your soul is white if your hood be scarlet and your aid, comfort and participation in the plot from its inception made success possible and doubly enjoyable. . . . You must admit that we have not been any blushing roses when it came to turning our wolf loose (if you don’t mind mixed metaphors)—if I blushed every time I thought of the cold-blooded advertising campaign I thought of and G. E. S. has carried through, I’d be permanently purple” (Hood 1964, p. 115).

Cold-blooded advertising campaign? That is not the way most people think scientific discoveries normally make their way into academic acceptance and public notice. Black is to be commended for his forthright statements. In any case, having turned the wolf of Sinanthropus loose on the world, he received many honors, including appointments as honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and honorary member of America’s National Academy of Sciences (Hood 1964, p. 116). Black was later elected a fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s foremost assembly of scientists.

His newly won fame also insured continued access to Rockefeller Foundation funds. Black wrote to Sir Arthur Keith: “We had a cable from Elliot Smith yesterday so he is evidently safe home after his strenuous trip. He characteristically has not spared himself in serving the interests of the Survey and the Cenozoic Laboratory and after his popularizing Sinanthropus for us in America I should have a relatively easy task before me a year from now when I will have to ask for more money from the powers that be” (Hood 1964, p. 116).

Peking man had come at just the right moment for advocates of human evolution. A few years previously, in one of the most famous trials in the world’s history, a Tennessee court had found John T. Scopes guilty of teaching evolution in violation of state law. Scientists wanted to fight back hard. Thus any new evidence bearing on the question of human evolution was highly welcome.

Then there had been the matter of Hesperopithecus, a highly publicized prehistoric ape-man constructed in the minds of paleoanthropologists from a single humanlike tooth found in Nebraska. To the embarrassment of the scientists who had promoted this human ancestor, the humanlike tooth had turned out to be that of a fossil pig.

Meanwhile, the lingering doubts and continuing controversy about Dubois’s Pithecanthropus erectus also needed to be resolved. In short, scientists in favor of evolutionary ideas, reacting to external threat and internal disarray, were in need of a good discovery to rally their cause.

Concerning the Java fossils, Jia Lanpo wrote: “The problem of what species did the owner of the remains belong to had not been settled. Sceptics asserted that they might belong to a deformed ape, or an abnormally developed animal which had no relation to man whatsoever. The most vociferous critics were from the religious community, who held that man’s ancestor was Adam, and that man’s history dates back only 4,004 years before Christ. Anyone who held that those specimens were related to man was accused of being a heretic. In the end, because of the pressure or some other reason, Dubois himself gave in and stated that what he had discovered was the remains of a ‘giant gibbon.’ It was not until 1929 after Professor Pei Wenzhong discovered the Peking Man skullcap and later, stone artifacts and traces of the use of fire in association with it that the absurd clamor gradually died down” (Jia 1980, p. 27).

Peking man caught on like wildfire, not only in the world of science, which needed him, but among the general public as well. Therefore scientists went overboard to confirm his status as a genuine human ancestor. And as suggested by Jia, “stone artifacts and traces of the use of fire” were to be an important element in this confirmation.

9.1.7 Evidence for Fire and Stone Tools at Choukoutien

It was in 1931 that reports showing extensive use of fire and the presence of well-developed stone and bone tools at Choukoutien were first published. What is quite unusual about these announcements is that systematic excavations had been conducted at Choukoutien by competent investigators since 1927, with no mention of either fire or stone tools. For example, Black wrote in 1929 (p. 208): “though thousands of cubic meters of material from this deposit have been examined, no artifacts of any nature have yet been encountered nor has any trace of the usage of fire been observed.”

On the question of tools, P. Teilhard de Chardin and C. C. Young (Yang Zhongjian) wrote: “Embedded in the fine grained material of the Lower Cave, Mr. Pei picked up an angular piece of quartz—a type of stone which is not found within one mile at least of the locality 1. Similar quartz fragments have been found from time to time in the course of the excavations, the first ones being noticed by Dr. J. G. Andersson, but none of them has ever shown any recognizable trace of artificial breaking” (1929, p. 182). In addition, Teilhard de Chardin (1965, pp. 62–63) wrote in an article published in 1930: “since the beginning of the excavation no trace has yet been found on the site suggesting the use of fire or any industry of any kind.”

Grafton Eliot Smith, who had personally visited the Choukoutien site, wrote (1931, p. 36): “It is a very significant phenomenon that at Chou Kou Tien, in spite of the most careful search in the caves during the last three years, no trace whatever of implements of any sort has been found. . . . It must not be forgotten, however, that Dr. Andersson in 1921 found pieces of quartz in association with the fossil bones, and that in the later stages of the excavation Mr. Pei found further examples of this alien material. Those who have been searching in vain for evidence of human craftsmanship on this site are being forced to the conclusion that Peking Man was in such an early phase of development as not yet to have begun to shape implements of stone for the ordinary needs of his daily life.”

Then Teilhard de Chardin, while visiting Paris in 1930, showed a piece of stag horn from Choukoutien to Henri Breuil, without telling Breuil its source. Breuil studied the specimen and noted that it showed signs of having been deliberately burned by fire. He also concluded it had been modified by hammering for use as a tool, and noted cut marks that appeared to have been made by a stone implement (Breuil 1932, pp. 1–2). At that point, Teilhard de Chardin revealed the source of the bone and suggested Breuil visit Choukoutien. There are mysterious undercurrents here. At this point in time, Teilhard de Chardin was on record as saying there were no signs of human industry at Choukoutien. But then why was he carrying around a rather ordinary piece of deer horn? And why did he show it to Breuil? It does not make much sense, unless we assume that Teilhard de Chardin himself had suspicions that the bone showed signs of intentional work.

While still in Paris, Teilhard de Chardin presented, at the Institute of Human Paleontology, a paper that was published the following year in L’Anthropologie. In this paper, Teilhard de Chardin (1931) cautiously suggested that the use of fire by Sinanthropus might be established after further study of blackened bones and antlers recovered from the site. Nevertheless, he still made no mention of any beds of ashes or hearths at the Choukoutien cave.

As requested by Teilhard de Chardin, Breuil visited Choukoutien in the fall of 1931 and encountered extensive signs of fire as well as stone and bone tools, many of advanced type. He reported his findings on November 3 at a meeting of the Geological Society of China in Peking, and published essentially the same material in an article for L’Anthropologie the following year.

Teilhard de Chardin himself had also begun to cautiously mention fire and implements in his writings, but Breuil’s exceedingly direct and thorough report was explosive in its impact. Concerning the Quartz 2 level in the Kotzetang cave section, Breuil (1932, p. 3) said: “I observed the black layer indicated by Pei was a veritable hearth, or rather a hearth covered by very light-colored ash, doubtlessly mixed with clay. Soot-covered stones and burned bones were both brought out in my presence.” Breuil here used the French word foyer, which can be variously translated as hearth, fireplace, or furnace.

Describing level 4 of the main cave, Breuil (1932, p 5) stated: “I first observed, in scraping away the surface from top to bottom, a succession of a number of ribbonlike layers of bright colors—-grey, yellow, and occasionally violet, which constitute level 4. The appearance of this uncompacted deposit is exactly that of a mass of ash derived from vegetal matter, comparable, for example, to the ash deposit, called ‘ribbons’ by E. Piette, in the Azilian levels of Mas d’Azil. In these masses one can observe numbers of particles of carbon, stones, occasionally in heaps, covered in soot, and fragments of burned bone. I did not encounter anything else, but I did observe between layers of ash numerous nodules and slabs of a bubbly concretion that appeared to be composed of phosphates derived from the alteration of bone. At the base of the great mass of ash, almost 7 meters [about 23 feet] in depth, one finds an ink-black layer, which, according to analysis by the Geological Survey and its color, shows itself to be composed of wood carbon reduced to particles. Worked quartz and other stones belong to this layer.”

Breuil (1932, p. 5) further stated: “The layer of breccia covered by the mass of cinders is actually inaccessible, but I have examined a great heap of blocks that have been removed and broken apart for examination. These blocks are literally pastes of chipped quartz (horizon 1) and bone burned to various degrees.”

In some final remarks on the evidence for fire, Breuil (1932, pp. 6 –7) said: “As a result of these facts, confirmed by chemical analysis of the burned bones in Paris and Peking, it can be concluded that fire was used on a large scale at Chou Kou Tien. Perhaps the fact that such a mass of ash corresponds with a single black, carbonaceous basal level could enable one to deduce that the fire, ignited just once, was constantly maintained for a considerable period, enough to have produced the enormous accumulation of almost 7 meters that I have mentioned. This amount would actually correspond to a much greater accumulation at the time.”

About the presence of stone implements, Breuil (1932, p. 7) wrote: “I might add that I collected some chipped quartz in the great mass of ash at that place. . . . at the base of that mass, lying on the stalagmitic floor . . . I extracted, along with M. Pei and Pierre Licent, a series of decomposed pieces of very compact volcanic rock. . . . It was the residue, unfortunately very much decomposed, of a great collection of tools made from large flakes of volcanic rock. I do not know if they are found in other levels.”

Breuil (1932) also recorded the presence of many other stone tools, including some rounded bola stones. He reported that in some features the stone tool industry was similar to that of the Mousterian period in Europe, although he mentioned that it would be pointless to attempt to fit the Choukoutien stone tool industry exactly into the European classifications. The Mousterian period is identified with the Neanderthals.

Black, along with Teilhard de Chardin, Pei, and Yang (Young), stated in similar fashion: “In a very broad sense, the Choukoutien culture could be defined as an industry of old palaeolithic type, showing some external Mousterian analogies. But no close comparison with any Asiatic or European industry can well be made at present” (Black et al. 1933, p. 133).

Later investigators added considerably to the collection of stone tools from Choukoutien. To date, over 100,000 have been found, including a variety of choppers, scrapers, and small pointed flakes. According to Jia Lanpo, the most common material is quartz, followed by sandstone and opal. Jia (1980, p. 28) described a “mastery of rather complex methods of manufacture.” He further stated: “The assemblage consists mainly of small tools but there are also larger ones, such as bifacial handaxes. . . . Scrapers of various types made on flakes are the most numerous. The blade after secondary working of the edge may be linear, convex, concave, multi-edged or disk-like. . . . The finest of the lot are the ‘points.’ About a hundred of them have been collected . . . their process of manufacture clearly indicates a higher level of skill. To make one, a flake is first struck from a core, then the edges are shaped until a slender point is achieved at one end. Up to now, nowhere in the world has yielded such finds of comparable quantity and workmanship” (Jia 1980, pp. 28–29).

Jia’s description suggests a relatively advanced industry at Choukoutien, but other researchers have expressed differing opinions about the quality of the stone tools found there. David Pilbeam (1972, p. 166) quoted Kenneth Oakley as saying that the stone tools were similar to the crude Oldowan tools from Africa. Paleoanthropologists have highlighted different features of the stone industry at Choukoutien—hence one may get a completely different impression depending upon whose account one reads.

As far as bone tools were concerned, Breuil noted that the ancient population at Choukoutien had systematically employed a sizable industry. Large antlers, too big to be effectively used in one piece, had been cut down into manageable tool shapes. Since deer antlers are extremely difficult to cut, the place where an incision was to be made was first burned with fire, then a V-shaped groove was gouged out, and finally the bone was broken by a blow.

In 1931, Black, apparently embarrassed by the new revelations about fire and tools from Choukoutien, sought to explain how such important evidence had for several years escaped his attention and that of the other researchers at the site. In a report delivered at the same time as that of Breuil, Black (1931, p. 107) tried to cover himself on the critical question of fire: “From time to time since 1929 occasional specimens of apparently charred or partly calcined animal bones have been recovered from among the material excavated from the Main Deposit at Choukoutien. The physical appearance of these specimens left little room for doubt that they had been subjected at some time to the action of fire. But until the present season it has remained a question whether or not such specimens had been burned within the Choukoutien caves while the latter were occupied by Sinanthropus or were altered simply as the result of a surface fire from natural causes and had subsequently been washed within the deposit. In view of this uncertainty no report on these specimens has hitherto been published.”

This seems unusual, especially when considered in the light of the following statement, published in 1933, by Black: “Traces of artificial fire in the Locality 1 deposit are so clear and abundant that they require only to be mentioned without any further demonstration” (Black et al. 1933, p. 113). If this was true in 1933, why not in 1931, or 1929, or even earlier? And even if, as Black said in his 1931 report, signs of fire had been noted but not reported because of doubts about the origin of the fire, this does not absolve him of responsibility. The burned bones could at least have been mentioned, and the alternative explanations discussed.

Teilhard de Chardin also thought it wise to explain why he had not reported the presence of stone or bone implements at the time of his discussions with Breuil in Paris. In 1934, he stated in the journal Revue des Questions Scientifiques (vol. 25): “In writing my first article here on Choukoutien three years ago, I was still able to say that ‘up to now’, despite certain indications, no trace of industry had yet been certainly recognised in association with the bone remains of Sinanthropus. Two months later, returning to the site with Mr. W. C. Pei [ Pei Wenzhong], the young scholar in charge of the excavation, I gathered with him in situ incontestable fragments of flaked stone and burnt bones. These traces had hitherto escaped attention because the works have been carried on for some years in a part of the site where they would have been extremely hard to recognise. . . . But once we recognised the first flakes of quartz, all became clear. . . . From that moment, archaeological discoveries multiplied—the most important being the discovery (Summer 1931) of a red, yellow, and black clay bed about two metres [about six and a half feet ] thick, extremely rich in stone and bone debris” (Teilhard de Chardin 1965, pp. 70 –71). Again, it does seem quite unusual that such experienced researchers as Teilhard de Chardin and Pei could have completely overlooked the presence of literally thousands of implements at Choukoutien.

In reference to the question of fire, Teilhard de Chardin and C. C. Young (Yang Zhongjian) wrote in 1929 about Layer 4 in the Choukoutien cave deposits: “Very conspicuous fine grained, sedimentary zone, formed by red loam and sandy clay of various colors (yellow, reddish, brown, gray, etc.) thinly bedded and interbedded. At several levels some black layers occur which are full of Rodent remains and other micro fauna. . . . Thickness 6.7 meters [22 feet ]” (Teilhard de Chardin and Yang 1929, p. 181). A few years later, in 1932, this same layer would be described by Teilhard de Chardin and Pei in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of China (vol. 11) as “an ashy deposit” almost 7 meters deep (Bowden 1977, p. 92). The main ash piles were 300 feet long by 100 feet wide (Fix 1984, p. 118). It is quite remarkable that Teilhard and Young (Yang) could have examined this same formation in 1929 and reported on it with no suggestion at all of fire.

Concerning the failure of Teilhard de Chardin, Black, Pei, and others to report abundant tools and signs of fire at Choukoutien, there are two possible explanations. The first is the one they themselves gave—they simply overlooked the evidence or had so many doubts about it that they did not feel justified in reporting it. The second possibility is that they were very much aware of the signs of fire and stone tools, before Breuil reported them, but deliberately withheld this information.

But why? At the time the discoveries were made at Choukoutien, fire and stone tools at a site were generally taken as the work of Homo sapiens or Neanderthals. According to Dubois and von Koenigswald, no stone tools or signs of usage of fire were found in connection with Pithecanthropus erectus in Java. The Selenka expedition did report remnants of hearths at Trinil, but this information did not attain wide circulation.

So perhaps the original investigators of Choukoutien purposefully held back from reporting stone tools and fire because they were aware such things might have confused the status of Sinanthropus. Doubters might have very well attributed the fire and tools to a being contemporary with, yet physically and culturally more advanced than Sinanthropus, thus removing Sinanthropus from his position as a new and important human ancestor.

As we shall see, that is what did happen once the tools and signs of fire became widely known. For example, Breuil (1932, p. 14) said about the relationship of Sinanthropus to the tools and signs of fire: “Several distinguished scientists have independently expressed to me the thought that a being so physically removed from Man. . . . was not capable of the works I have just described. In this case, the skeletal remains of Sinanthropus could be considered as simple hunting trophies, attributable, as were the traces of fire and industry, to a true Man, whose remains have not yet been found.” But Breuil himself thought that Sinanthropus was the manufacturer of tools and maker of fire at Choukoutien.

9.1.8 Recent Views

Modern investigators have tended to confirm Breuil’s views. Like Breuil, they hold that certain deposits in the Choukoutien caves are deep layers of ash, indicating the massive use of fire. For example, Wu Rukang and Lin Shenglong (1983, p. 93) reported that there are four “large thick layers of ashes” and that the thickest layer is six meters [about 19.7 feet ] thick in certain places.

Paleontologist Jia Lanpo stated (1975, pp. 33–36) that there are four thick layers of ash and that the layer in the upper-middle part of the cave is six meters deep and consists of beds of ash of different colors—purple, red, yellow, white, and black. He also reported burned bones, colored black, blue, white, grey, green, or dull brown. Jia believed that Peking man knew how to use but not make fire, that the fires once lit were kept burning continuously for a long time—even passed down from generation to generation. We are not, however, aware of the discovery anywhere else in the world of a cave as old as Choukoutien having such huge beds of ash, providing, of course, that the above reports, identifying the deposits as ash layers, are correct.

Father P. O’Connell, a Roman Catholic priest who lived in China during the period of the Peking man discoveries, offered an intriguing explanation for the massive ash deposits at Choukoutien. He suggested that the site had been used for producing lime for the construction of the ancient city of Cambalac, situated on land now occupied by present-day Beijing (O’Connell 1969). Lime, a caustic substance produced by heating limestone to a high temperature, is used in making mortar and plaster.

But almost all modern investigators agree with Breuil that Sinanthropus was responsible for the signs of fire. Breuil wrote in the 1930s: “Sinanthropus kindled fire and did so frequently, he used bone implements and he worked stone, just as much as the Paleolithics of the West. In spite of his skull, which so closely resembles that of Pithecanthropus, he was not merely a Hominian, but possessed an ingenious mind capable of inventing, and hands that were sufficiently adroit and sufficiently master of their fingers to fashion tools and weapons” ( Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 144). One gets an impression of a fairly humanlike being, a hunter who brought game felled with his stone weapons back to his cave home, where he cooked the flesh on fires he kindled for that purpose.

A somewhat different view of Sinanthropus at Choukoutien is provided by Lewis R. Binford and Chuan Kun Ho, anthropologists at the University of New Mexico. Concerning the signs of fire, they stated: “The so-called ash layers are not hearths and may not all be ash layers. . . . There seems to be little doubt that much of the content of the so-called ash layers is largely owl or other raptor droppings. They are systematically described as dominated by rodent bone. . . . It would appear that at least some of them were originally huge guano accumulations inside the cave. In some cases, these massive organic deposits could have burned. . . . The assumption that man introduced and distributed the fire is unwarranted, as is the assumption that burned bones and other materials are there by virtue of man’s cooking his meals” (Binford and Ho 1985, p. 429).

Binford and Ho’s theory that the ash deposits are composed mostly of bird droppings has not received unanimous support. But their assertions about the unreliability of the common picture of Peking man drawn from the presence of bones, ashes, and hominid remains at the site are worthy of serious consideration.

For Binford and Ho, the presence of hominid bones in the caves was not a demonstration that Peking man ever permanently lived there. They gave the following information about the Peking man fossils: “It is not uncommon to find hominid remains in direct association with hyena coprolites and adjacent to cave walls, where larger bones tend to end up in animal dens. Smaller hominid bones, such as isolated teeth, already broken cranial fragments, and mandible parts, are more common in contexts that appear to represent areas near the entrances of the cave. The picture one obtains is one in which hominid carcasses or parts thereof were introduced to the active, entrance area of the cave. It is unclear whether hominids died there or parts of hominid carcasses were brought there by scavenging animals. The extreme bias in body parts [mostly skulls and lower limb bones] would favor the latter interpretation. These parts were then further dispersed within the cave, most likely by bone-carrying animals such as hyena or wolf ” (Binford and Ho 1985, p. 428).

The presence of stone tools at Choukoutien is generally taken as confirmation of a picture of Sinanthropus as a hunter sitting around his hearth cutting up deer carcasses. But Binford and Ho felt that the kind of tools found at Choukoutien, mostly primitive scrapers and choppers, were not very well adapted to hunting. Furthermore, they pointed out: “Layers that yield hominid remains only rarely produce stone tools and almost never are they designated as ash layers. In addition, excavations conducted in areas that would have been deep in the interior of the cave, beyond the limits of natural light, may yield hominid remains but only rarely yield tools in any concentration” (Binford and Ho 1985, p. 428). In other words, there is no clear connection between the stone tools and the hominid remains.

The most that can be said of Peking man, if we confine ourselves to the actual evidence at the site, is that he was perhaps a scavenger who may or may not have used primitive stone tools to cut meat from carcasses left by carnivores in a large cave where organic materials sometimes burned for long periods. Or perhaps Peking man was himself prey to the cave’s carnivores, for it seems unlikely he would have voluntarily entered such a cave, even to scavenge.

Binford and Ho did not believe there existed a bone tool industry at Choukoutien. They said Breuil’s recognition of a bone tool industry was founded on “modifications that today we routinely recognize as the by-product of animal gnawing” (Binford and Ho 1985, p. 428).

In making this judgement, Binford and Ho were in agreement with the original assessment made by the members of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory. Black, Teilhard de Chardin, Young (Yang), and Pei (1933, p. 130) believed that the recurring types of broken bones, which Breuil said had been shaped intentionally, may have been shaped by purely accidental forces. They believed, however, that further research would be required before this issue could be definitely resolved.

But a modern authority, Jia Lanpo of the Republic of China’s Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, reported, like Breuil, numerous tools shaped from deer bones (Jia 1975, p. 31). Jia believed deer antler roots may have served as hammers. Antler tines showing criss-crossed scratches may have been used for digging, and deer skullcaps may have been used as drinking bowls. “Antlers are hard to hack off,” stated Jia (1980, p. 29), “but if a spot is first scorched, the cutting is much easier, and this was what Peking man did, for some of the ends bear signs of scorching.”

A bone industry at Choukoutien is also recognized by a Western authority on Chinese prehistory, J. S. Aigner, who wrote (1981, p. 144): “While Breuil may have been advocating tools overly, there is no question that human alteration of bones through processing activities and to a lesser extent through use (as tools) is clearly indicated.”

Unfortunately, it is not possible to completely verify these claims, because many of the older pre-World War II specimens were lost. As related by W. C. Pei (Pei Wenzhong) in a introduction to a series of photos of the bones published by Breuil in 1939: “The specimens described herein by Professor H. Breuil have been placed at the disposal of the Museum of Geological Survey of China in Nanking for exhibition purposes, but owing to the hostilities in 1937 have become lost. It is indeed most unfortunate that these valuable objects, once so carefully studied by such a leading authority in pre-history as Professor Breuil, should no longer be available to science” (Bowden 1977, p. 99). Pei, it may be noted, was not very much in favor of the bone tool industry.

9.1.9 The Fossil Bones of Sinanthropus and Signs of Cannibalism

On March 15, 1934, Davidson Black was found at his work desk, dead of a heart attack. He was clutching his reconstruction of the skull of Sinanthropus in his hand. Shortly after Black’s death, Franz Weidenreich assumed leadership of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory and wrote a comprehensive series of reports on the Peking man fossils. According to Weidenreich, the fossil remains of Sinan thropus individuals, particularly the skulls, suggested they had been the victims of cannibalism.

Most of the bones discovered at Choukoutien were cranial fragments. Weidenreich (1943, p. 7) stated: “none of the 14 skulls recognised as belonging to Sinanthropus is complete.”

Weidenreich said that the skulls had been broken after fossilization by huge masses of stone falling from the roof of the cave. He pointed out that the other animal bones found at Choukoutien were similarly crushed and fragmented. But certain aspects of the cranial fragments of Sinanthropus led Weidenreich to conclude that they had also been broken before being covered by material from collapsed portions of the cave.

Weidenreich particularly noted that the relatively complete skulls all lacked portions of the central part of the base. He observed that in modern Melanesian skulls “the same injuries occur as the effects of ceremonial cannibalism” (Weidenreich 1943, p. 186).

Besides the missing basal sections, Weidenreich also noted other signs that might possibly be attributed to the deliberate application of force. For example, some of the skulls showed impact marks of a type that “can only occur if the bone is still in a state of plasticity,” indicating that “the injuries described must have been inflicted during life or soon after death” (Weidenreich 1943, pp. 186–187).

Weidenreich (1943, p. 188) admitted that some of these injuries might have been caused by “stones falling from the roof of the cave on the individuals living in it” or “the bites of big carnivores having their dens near-by,” but pointed out that others “look like incisions made by cutting implements.”

Weidenreich (1943, p. 188) observed: “Blows inflicted on living individuals or corpses by stones falling accidentally cannot be held responsible for the destruction of the base of the skull. This fact, together with the cut-like lesions, rather points to injuries incidentally practiced by man.”

Some of the skull fragments showed depressions that possibly could be interpreted as animal bites. But Weidenreich (1943, p. 189) stated: “considering the size, form and thickness of the vault it is difficult to imagine how the animal could find adequate points at which to drive its teeth and crack the vault by seizing it between its upper and lower jaws.”

Also, according to Weidenreich (1943, p. 189), there were no cases on record that could be cited as “as examples of bites of carnivores inflicted on completely intact human skulls.”

Some of the few long bones of Sinanthropus found at Choukoutien also displayed signs that to Weidenreich suggested human breakage. “It seems to be certain,” he said (1943, p. 189), “that the lengthwise splitting involving the greater part of the shaft bones, cannot have been executed by carnivores but must have been done by man.”

Von Koenigswald (1956, p. 49) agreed with this analysis, stating: “The thigh bones of Peking man found at Chou K’ou Tien are all severely damaged and often smashed into small pieces to extract the marrow. The damage was not the work of beasts of prey, but undoubtedly of humans.”

Weidenreich (1943, p. 190) then offered this summary of his observations: “My verdict is that the destruction of the base and the blows on the top of the skull are the incidental work of man, although the possibility cannot be entirely excluded that at least those lesions which indicate they were produced by pointed or blunt agents may have been caused by stones falling from the roof of the cave on a living individual. Later on the skulls were broken as carrion by carnivores, probably hyaenas, which lived in the cave and cracked the bones as long as they were fresh.” It is not very likely that Sinanthropus and the hyenas inhabited the cave at the same time. Accepting Weidenreich’s version of events, Sinanthropus would have been an infrequent visitor, or perhaps the cave was inhabited alternately by Sinanthropus and other creatures.

As to why mostly cranial fragments were found, Weidenreich believed that with the exceptions of some long bones, only heads were carried into the caves. He stated: “the strange selection of human bones we are facing at Choukoutien has been made by Sinanthropus himself. He hunted his own kin as he hunted other animals and treated all his victims in the same way. Whether he opened the human skulls for ritual or culinary reasons cannot be decided on the basis of the present evidence of his cultural life; but the breaking of the longbones of animals and man alike, apparently for the purposes of removing the marrow, indicates that the latter alternative is the more likely. The remains of his meals became the prey of his predatory neighbors at the foothills of Choukoutien” (Weidenreich 1943, p. 190).

Some modern authorities have suggested that Weidenreich was mistaken in his interpretation of the fossil remains of Sinanthropus. Binford and Ho (1985, p. 414) pointed out that hominid skulls subjected to transport over river gravel are found with the basal section worn away. But the skulls recovered from Choukoutien were apparently not transported in this fashion.

Binford and Ho also believed that damage to one skull, which Weidenreich thought could have been caused by cutting, was typical of a kind of animal breakage. But Weidenreich (1943, p. 189) had considered this possibility and still proposed cutting by an implement as the most likely cause. Even Binford and Ho (1985, p. 415) admitted that the kind of animal breakage they were proposing had “the appearance of cut or hack marks.”

Binford and Ho also disagreed with Weidenreich’s view that the Sinanthro pus long bones were deliberately broken. They stated: “Binford has examined the photographs and casts of the bones in question, and the breakage appears to be unequivocally attributable to weathering. There is no evidence that these bones were broken fresh or by percussion” (Binford and Ho 1985, p. 414).

This statement is contradicted by Weidenreich (1941, p. 5), who said about one of the femurs: “The appearance of the bony surface exposed by . . . fractures indicates that the breakage occurred prior to mineralisation. . . . The remaining surface of the bone is practically intact and scarcely weathered.” It should be kept in mind that Weidenreich was working from the original fossils, while Binford could only study photographs and casts because the original specimens were lost during the Second World War.

Another modern authority objecting to Weidenreich’s cannibalism interpretation was Jean S. Aigner. She suggested: “The fact that the base of several brain cases is missing is not a particularly strong point when we recall the numerous examples of Recent burials with this portion missing. The absence is due to natural processes, not artificial ones, with the part of the skull resting in contact with the ground being eroded and dissolved away” (Aigner 1981, p. 128). But the Choukoutien finds were not burials, and there is no indication that the skulls were oriented in such a way (basal section down) as to produce the effects suggested by Aigner.

Aigner (1981, p. 128) offered this conclusion: “Weidenreich’s reconstruction of the practices associated—murder, severing the head, and removing the brain, dissecting the long-bones and depositing just those parts in the cave—is difficult indeed to understand in light of the strong evidence (hearths) that the cave was a habitation site and not simply a dump.” However, we have already seen, according to one modern opinion (Binford and Ho 1985), that there is no real evidence for hearths at Choukoutien. It is hard to attribute the huge masses of ash found there to campfires. Furthermore, the distribution of Sinanthropus remains is rather indicative of a dump. As noted by Weidenreich (1943, p. 186): “The distribution of Sinanthropus bones both horizontally and vertically throughout the deposit is an accidental one as is that of the animal bones.”

Binford and Ho (1985, p. 428), as mentioned previously, proposed that carnivores had brought the hominid bones into the caves. But Weidenreich (1935, p. 453) said: “transportation by . . . beasts of prey is impossible. . . . traces of biting and gnawing ought to have been visible on the human bones, which is not the case. Therefore, the only possibility is that man himself brought the bones into the cave, by preference brain cases and jaws.”

As evidence of cannibalism, Weidenreich pointed out that the Sinanthropus remains were predominantly those of children and females, the easiest to kill. Weidenreich (1935, p. 456) then cited several examples of cannibalism from Europe, stating: “Matiegka . . . has reviewed rather completely human skeletal material of prehistoric times of all Europe giving testimony about cannibalism. In many of these cultural places bones have been found which were broken to pieces and mingled with those of animals, with charcoal, ashes, and stone tools or splinters of them. Very frequently there were among the human bones skulls, isolated jaws, or fragments of them. . . . In some finding places the remains of children, adolescents and sometimes also of women were prevailing. The resemblance to the conditions existing in Choukoutien is obvious.”

But Marcellin Boule, director of the Institute de Paleontologie Humaine in France, suggested another possibility—namely, that Sinanthropus had been hunted by a more intelligent type of hominid. Boule believed that the small cranial capacity of Sinanthropus implied that this hominid was not sufficiently intelligent to have created the stone and bone implements that were discovered in the cave.

In his description of the stone tool industry, Boule said: “It is important to note that this industry is not primitive, since M. Breuil himself acknowledges that ‘many of (its) features are not found in France until the Upper Palaeolithic’. . . . Accompanying a being like Sinanthropus one would have expected to find an eolithic industry, and not true gravers and scrapers and other tools ‘sometimes of fine workmanship’” (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 145). Hence Boule concluded that the Choukoutien implements and fires were created by a “true man,” Homo sapiens, who preyed upon Sinanthropus. Professor Boule did not believe that Sinanthropus necessarily represented an intermediate link in the chain of evolution from ape to Homo sapiens. He believed instead that Sinanthropus was simply an apelike being who was hunted for food by Homo sapiens.

Boule stated his position quite clearly: “We may therefore ask ourselves whether it is not over-bold to consider Sinanthropus the monarch of Choukoutien, when he appears in its deposit only in the guise of a mere hunter’s prey, on a par with the animals by which he is accompanied” (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 145).

If the remains of Sinanthropus were the trophies of a more intelligent hunter, who was that hunter and where were his remains? Boule pointed out that there are many caves in Europe that have abundant products of Paleolithic human industry, but the “proportion of deposits that have yielded the skulls or skeletons of the manufacturers of this industry is infinitesimal” (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 145).

Boule further observed: “We may say that the absence of human bone remains is the rule and their presence the exception” (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 145). For example, Boule stated that 4,000 cubic yards of deposits were systematically and carefully removed from the Prince’s Cave at Grimaldi in the hope of finding human bones; however, not a single fragment of a human bone was discovered, despite the discovery of numerous animal bones and stones shaped by humans (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 145).

Therefore, the hypothesis that a more intelligent species of hominid hunted Sinanthropus at Choukoutien is not ruled out simply because its fossil bones have not yet been found at Choukoutien. From our previous chapters, it may be recalled that there is evidence, from other parts of the world, of fully human skeletal remains from periods of equal and greater antiquity than that represented by Choukoutien. For example, the fully human skeletal remains found at Castenedolo in Italy are from the Pliocene period, over 2 million years ago.

9.1.10 Discoveries in the Upper Cave

In the early 1930s, some fully human remains were found at Choukoutien, in the Upper Cave, which lies above the main deposits. Modern researchers, using a combination of carbon 14 tests and studies of faunal remains, have said these human fossils are only about 20,000 years old.

A Sinanthropus upper jaw was found along with the human fossils. The usual explanation is that the Sinanthropus jaw was derived from the Lower Cave deposits. Weidenreich (1943, p. 16) said about the jaw found in the Upper Cave: “it distinctly differs from the other bones found in this cave by the high degree of mineralization, the special color, the primitiveness of the form, the considerable size of the teeth, and the way in which the bone is broken. In all these particularities the maxilla shows a greater resemblance to the Sinanthropus jaws recovered from Locality 1 than to the maxillae of the Upper Cave Man which have been found in connection with their pertaining skulls.”

Stone implements were also discovered in the Upper Cave. According to Pei (1939, p. 16) some of these quartz implements look “surprisingly similar to some pieces found in the much older Sinanthropus deposits.” Pei (1939, p. 16) then added that “it is quite possible that the here described quartz implements were collected by the Upper Cave Man or introduced by natural agencies into the Upper Cave from the Sinanthropus deposits.”

9.1.11 Our Knowledge of Peking Man

All in all, the picture we get of Sinanthropus is not very much like the almost human ancestral hominid seen in textbook paintings and museum exhibits—the expert hunter sitting by his hearth in his cave home. Instead, making use of all the available evidence and points of view, we see through the haze of several hundred thousand years the outlines of a somewhat apelike creature, who was most likely a scavenger who sometimes got scavenged himself—perhaps by his own kind, perhaps by a more advanced hominid.

In Boule’s opinion, Weidenreich and others tended to overemphasize the humanlike features of Sinanthropus. Von Koenigswald (1956, p. 51) wrote: “Our real knowledge of Peking man does not amount to very much. The skull is the best-known factor, and Weidenreich used it to have a rather excessively idealized reconstruction made by the American sculptress Lucille Swan, which came to be known in Peking as ‘Nelly.’” Of course, even the very term Peking “man” carries with it strong, and undeserved, overtones of human attributes and ancestorship.

This idealization was perhaps to be expected, because according to modern evolutionary theory Sinanthropus (or Homo erectus) is supposed to be the immediate ancestor of Homo sapiens. But Boule (1937), considering reports coming from Choukoutien, said: “To this fantastic hypothesis, that the owners of the monkey-like skulls were the authors of the large-scale industry, I take the liberty of preferring an opinion more in conformity with the conclusions from my studies, which is that the hunter was a real man and that the cut stones, etc., were his handiwork” (Fix 1984, pp. 130 –131).

Why did Boule say the skull of Sinanthropus was monkeylike? There are several reasons. One, of course, is the large brow ridges. When the skull of Sinanthropus is seen from directly above, the ridges stick out like handlebars on a bicycle (Figure 9.1, p. 556). Another apelike feature is the “postorbital constriction,” or narrowing of the skull in back of the eye sockets. Humans do not have this. Place your fingers at the corners of your eyes and then run them back to your temples, just above the ear. You will notice that the surface is flat. But in Sinanthropus, immediately in back of the eyes, there is a very pronounced indentation on either side ( Figure 9.1). Another apelike feature is the general shape of the skull when seen from behind. The skull of Sinanthropus is somewhat narrower at the top than at the bottom ( Figure 9.1). In contrast, human skulls are normally wider at the top than at the bottom (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 135). Also, as previously noted, the walls of the Sinanthropus skull are twice as thick as those of the average human skull.

Figure 9.1. The first Sinanthropus skull, discovered in 1929 at Choukoutien, viewed from above (Jia 1975, p. 17) and from the rear ( Boule1937, p. 7). Like the apes, Sinanthropus has enormous brow ridges and a pronounced postorbital constriction (top). Also, the Sinanthropus skull, seen from the rear (bottom), is narrower at the top than at the bottom, another apelike feature.

The capacity of the Sinanthropus cranium is said to average around 1000 cubic centimeters, more than the anthropoid ape average of 600 cubic centimeters but less than the human average of about 1400 cubic centimeters. There have been suggestions that Black and Weidenreich reconstructed shattered Sinanthropus skulls in such a way as to increase their cranial capacity above the range for apes. Concerning the initial skull recovered in1929, Bowden, after careful study of Black’s three reports and accompanying photographs, noted that the bottom edge of the reconstructed skull pictured in the last report was lower than the bottom edge shown in the first photograph, taken shortly after the skull was excavated. Bowden believed this discrepancy could be accounted for if one assumed the lower part of the skull had been carelessly cropped out of the original photograph. More likely, according to Bowden (1977, p. 118), was the possibility that the “reconstruction of the base of the skull was carried out in such a way that it was made deeper” thus yielding a larger and less apelike volume.

Boule pointed out that there was strong sexual dimorphism in Sinan thropus. That is to say, there was great variation between the size of males and females, much more than in human beings. This is an apelike feature, which is reflected in the Sinanthropus jaws found at Choukoutien (Figure 9.2). Weidenreich noticed the dimorphism when studying reconstructed jaws of a male, female, and child, which showed unusual variation in size. Boule stated: “The total result was so polymorphous that Weidenreich wondered whether it was really a single species, or at least a single race. It is a fact, however, that this polymorphism is a simian characteristic in singular contrast to the slight sexual dimorphism in human jaws” (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 138). Another apelike feature of the Sinanthropus jaw is that it has several openings for the dental nerve that reaches out to the skin of the chin, while the human jaw has only one (Keith 1931, pp. 262–265). Boule also believed the dentition of Sinanthropus was less human than some originally thought.

Boule therefore came to the following conclusion: “By the sum total of their characters, the mandibles and teeth of Sinanthropus denote a large Primate that was . . . certainly less human than the Mauer [Heidelberg] jaw, which is probably older than the Peking fossils” (Boule and Vallois 1957, p. 140).

In his physiological demotion of Peking man, Boule is in harmony with some modern researchers, such as Binford and Ho, who hesitate to attribute typically human behavior to the Choukoutien hominids.

Figure 9.2. Restored jaws of an adult Sinanthropus male (above) and female ( below). They display substantial sexual dimorphism, an apelike feature (Boule 1937, p. 13).

Binford and Ho characterized Sinanthropus behaviorally as a simple scavenger who was not clearly responsible for either the animal bones or beds of ashes at the cave of Choukoutien. They concluded: “What, then, was life like in the ‘cave home of Beijing man?’ We think we must conclude that we do not know” (Binford and Ho 1985, p. 429). We agree with this honest statement, which respects the limitations of the empiric method when applied to such questions.

9.1.12 The Fossils Disappear

As we have previously mentioned, one reason that it may be difficult to resolve many of the questions surrounding Peking man is that the original fossils are no longer available for study. By 1938, excavations at Choukoutien, under the direction of Weidenreich, were halted by guerilla warfare in the surrounding Western Hills. Later, with the Second World War well underway, Weidenreich left for the United States in April of 1941, carrying a set of casts of the Peking man fossils.

In the summer of 1941, it is said, the original bones were packed in two footlockers and delivered to Colonel Ashurst of the U.S. Marine Embassy Guard in Peking. In early December of 1941, the footlockers were reportedly placed on a train bound for the port of Chinwangtao, where they were to be loaded onto an American ship, the President Harrison, as part of the U.S. evacuation from China. But on December 7, the train was intercepted, and the fossils were never seen again. In a statement published on March 22, 1951 in the New York Times, Pei Wenzhong (W. C. Pei) said the Americans found the fossils at the University of Tokyo after the war and secretly transported them to the American Museum of Natural History. The chairman of the department of anthropology at the Museum denied the charge (Bowden 1977, pp. 106–107).

After World War II, the Chinese Communist government continued the excavations at Choukoutien, adding a few fossils to the prewar discoveries. The present total of Homo erectus (Sinanthropus) discoveries since 1927 is 6 fairly complete skullcaps along with 12 other skull fragments, 15 pieces of lower jaws, 157 teeth, 3 fragments of upper arm bones, 1 clavicle, 7 fragments of thighbones, 1 fragment of a shinbone, and 1 wrist bone. These are said to represent the remains of 40 individuals ( Wu and Lin 1983, p. 89). Recent opinion is that the clavicle is not from a hominid. In any case, most of the Peking man fossil bones, over 90 percent, were lost during the Second World War.

9.1.13 An Example of Intellectual Dishonesty

In an article about Zhoukoudian (Choukoutien) that appeared in the June 1983 issue of Scientific American, two Chinese scientists, Wu Rukang and Lin Shenglong, presented misleading evidence for human evolution.

Wu and Lin made two claims: (1) The cranial capacity of Sinanthropus increased from the lowest level of the Zhoukoudian excavation (460,000 years old) to the highest level (230,000 years old), indicating that Sinanthropus evolved towards Homo sapiens. (2) The type and distribution of stone tools also implied that Sinanthropus evolved.

In support of their first claim, Wu and Lin analyzed the cranial capacities of the 6 relatively complete Sinanthropus skulls found at Zhoukoudian. Wu and Lin (1983, p. 94) stated: “The measured cranial capacities are 915 cubic centimeters for the earliest skull, an average of 1075 cubic centimeters for four later skulls and 1140 cubic centimeters for the most recent one.” From this set of relationships (Table 9.1, column A), Wu and Lin (1983, p. 94) concluded: “It seems the brain size increased by more than 100 cubic centimeters during the occupation of the cave.”

A chart in the Scientific American article showed the positions and sizes of the skulls found at Zhoukoudian Locality 1. But in their explanation of this chart, Wu and Lin neglected to state that the earliest skull, found at layer 10, belonged to a child, who according to Franz Weidenreich (1935, p. 448) died at age 8 or 9, and according to Davidson Black died between ages 11 and 13. In the text of their article, Wu and Lin (1983, p. 90) did mention that one of the 6 skulls they considered was from a child who died at age 8 or 9; yet they did not specify the level at which this skull was found. Wu and Lin acknowledged that a child’s skull is smaller than an adult’s. But to establish an evolutionary trend in their chart, they still compared the child’s skull from layer 10 with the other skulls, which are from adults.

TABLE 9.1

Evidence for Supposed Evolutionary Increase

In Sinanthropus Cranial Capacity at Zhoukoudian, China

Years b.p.

Layer

A: Data Reported by

Wu and Lin, 1983

B: Complete Data

230,000

1–2

230,000

3

1140 cc (V)

1140 cc (V)

290,000

4

290,000

5

350,000

6

350,000

7

420,000

8

1075 cc = average

of 4 skulls

1225 cc (X), 1015 cc (XI),