Peking Man

In 1923, Andersson and Austrian palaeontologist Otto Zdansky found 2 human teeth in the Zhoukoudian site near Beijing (the romanisation of Beijing is Peking), but only reported them in 1926. To continue excavation of the site, Canadian palaeoanthropologist Davidson Black founded the Cenozoic Research Laboratory which discovered a skull in 1929. After Black's sudden death in 1934, Jewish-German anthropologist Franz Weidenreich carried on his study of the Zhoukoudian.[3]

In 1941, to safeguard them during the war, the Zhoukoudian human fossils—representing at least 40 different individuals—and artefacts were deposited into 2 wooden footlockers and were to be transported by the United States Marine Corps from the Peking Union Medical College to the SS President Harrison which was to dock at Qinhuangdao Port (near the Marine basecamp Camp Holcomb), and eventually arrive at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Unfortunately, the ship was attacked by Japanese warships en route to Qinhuangdao, and ran aground. Though there have been many attempts to locate the crates—including offering large cash rewards—it is unknown what happened to them after they left the college. Marine Richard Bowen recalled finding a box filled with bones while digging a foxhole one night next to some stone barracks in Qinhuangdao, while the city was under siege by the CCP Eighth Route Army who were under fire from Nationalist gunboats (a conflict of the Chinese Civil War). According to Mr. Wang Qingpu who had written a report for the Chinese government on the history of the port, if Bowen's story is accurate, the most probable location of the bones is 39°55′4″N 119°34′0″E underneath roads, a warehouse, or a parking lot.[4] Four of the teeth from the original excavation period are still in the possession of the Paleontological Museum of Uppsala University in Sweden.[5]

The war had halted excavation of the Zhoukoudian from 1941 until after the formation of the People's Republic of China in 1949.[3] In 1960, the lab was converted into an independent organisation as the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and was headed by Chinese palaeoanthropologists Yang Zhongjian, Pei Wenzhong, and Jia Lanpo.

Ernst Haeckel suggested early humans dispersed across the now-disproven hypothetical continent "Lemuria" (above according to William Scott-Elliot, 1896)

Despite what Charles Darwin had hypothesised in his 1871 Descent of Man, many late-19th century evolutionary naturalists postulated that Asia (instead of Africa) was the birthplace of humankind as it is midway between Europe and America, providing optimal dispersal routes throughout the world. Among the latter was Ernst Haeckel who argued that the first human species (which he proactively named "Homo primigenius") evolved on the now-disproven hypothetical continent "Lemuria" in what is now Southeast Asia, from a genus he termed "Pithecanthropus" ("ape-man"). "Lemuria" had supposedly sunk below the Indian Ocean, so no fossils could be found to prove this. Nevertheless, Haeckel's model inspired Dutch scientist Eugène Dubois to join the Dutch East India Company and search for his "missing link" in Java. He found a skullcap and a femur (Java Man) which he named "P. erectus" (using Haeckel's hypothetical genus name) and unfruitfully attempted to convince the European scientific community that he had found an upright-walking ape-man dating to the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene, who dismissed his findings as some kind of malformed non-human ape. Dejected, Dubois fully withdrew from anthropology by the turn of the century.[3]

Instead, in regard to the ancestry of Far Eastern peoples, racial anthropologists had long placed the origin of Chinese civilisation in the Near East. The most popular theory in China at the time was that proposed by Albert Terrien de Lacouperie in 1894 who drew parallels between the hexagrams from the Classical Chinese I Ching and the Near Eastern script cuneiform, as well as Mesopotamian and Chinese mythologies (notably between the Elamite god Nahundi and the first Chinese emperor Huangdi). Other Western theories include China descending from Ancient Egypt due to similarities between Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Terrien de Lacouperie believed that, due to having a common ancestor with the superior Europeans, the Han Chinese people progressively became more and more inferior, and that all Chinese achievements were simply inherited from Western Civilisation. His theory was criticised by European sinologists, but was nonetheless adapted by Jiang Zhiyou, and was used by late Qing Dynasty "national essence" scholars to push the racial superiority of the Han people over the Manchu people (the Manchu were the ruling people of the Qing dynasty) as the former was closely allied with the powerful European races, whereas the latter descended from northern "barbarians". The narrative formed that Huangdi was the ancestor of all Han people, and conquered the land for his descendants, advocating for the fall of the Qing Dynasty by pushing some natural state of Han dominance over the land.[3]

These claims were overturned by the 1920s in the face of the New Culture Movement, emphasising Chinese nationalism (about a decade after the Qing Dynasty fell to the Republic of China). In 1921, Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson working as the mining advisor for the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce identified the Yangshao culture with similar pottery work to older Near Eastern settlements, and, echoing some elements of Terrien de Lacouperie's earlier hypotheses, concluded a western origin for Chinese culture. While his model was popular in the West, Andersson was met with much derision by Eastern scholars for being too Eurocentric. Instead, an origin for the human species in Central Asia was much more accepted, championed primarily by American palaeontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn and his apprentice William Diller Matthew. They believed that Asia was the "mother of continents" and the rising of the Himalayas and Tibet and subsequent drying of the region forced human ancestors to become terrestrial and bipedal, and that populations which retreated to the tropics–namely Dubois' Java Man and the "Negroid race"—substantially regressed. They also rejected Raymond Dart's South African Taung child (Australopithecus africanus) as a human ancestor, favouring the hoax Piltdown Man from Britain.[3]

Giant bust of Peking Man at the entrance of the Zhoukoudian museum

In 1927, Black classified newly discovered human remains from the Zhoukoudian into a new genus and species as "Sinanthropus pekinensis". The Peking Man, with a brain volume much larger than living apes, was used to further invalidate African or European origin models. Peking Man's importance in human evolution was championed by geologist Amadeus William Grabau in the 1930s, who pushed that the lifting of the Himalayas caused the emergence of proto-humans ("Protanthropus") in the Miocene, who then dispersed during the Pliocene into the Tarim Basin in Northwest China where they learned to control fire and make stone tools, and then went out to colonise the rest of the Old World where they evolved into "Pithecanthropus" in Southeast Asia, "Sinanthropus" in China, "Eoanthropus" (Piltdown Man) in Europe, and "Homo" in Africa (again believing tropical environments promote mental degradation, degeneration theory). To explain the paucity of stone tools in Asia compared to Europe (an apparent contradiction if humans had occupied Asia for longer), he also stated that Pleistocene Central Asia was too cold to permit back-migration by early modern humans or Neanderthals until the Neolithic. The Central Asia model was the leading consensus of the time.[3]

Peking Man became an important matter of national pride, and was used to extend the antiquity of the Chinese people and the occupation of the region to 500,000 years ago, with discussions of human evolution becoming progressively Sinocentric. In the 1930s, Weidenreich began arguing that Peking Man was ancestral to the "Mongoloid race", though other scientists working on the site made no such claims. The sentiment that all Chinese ethnic groups—including the Han, Tibetan, and Mongols—were indigenous to the area for such a long time became more popular during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the occupation of China by Japan. This was notably perpetuated by ethnologist Li Guangming and sociologist Chen Zhengmo. By the 1940s, Andersson recanted his Western origin hypothesis and instead believed that the Yangshoa culture may have influenced Western pottery instead of the other way around.[3]

In 1950, Ernst Mayr had entered the field of anthropology, and, surveying a "bewildering diversity of names," decided to subsume human fossils into 3 species of Homo: "H. transvaalensis" (the australopithecines), H. erectus (including "Sinanthropus", "Pithecanthropus", and various other putative Asian, African, and European taxa), and Homo sapiens (including anything younger than H. erectus, such as modern humans and Neanderthals). Mayr defined them as a sequential lineage, with each species evolving into the next (chronospecies). Though later Mayr changed his opinion on the australopithecines (recognising Australopithecus), his more conservative view of archaic human diversity became widely adopted in the subsequent decades.[6]

By the late 20th century, human evolution had become Afrocentric with the gradual acceptance of Australopithecus as human ancestors, and consequent marginalisation of Peking Man.[3] Nonetheless, Peking Man's ancestral position is still widely maintained among Chinese scientists—such as palaeoanthropologists Wu Xinzhi and Gao Xin–who subscribe to Weidenreich's multiregional hypothesis, wherein archaic humans such Peking Man directly evolved or were absorbed into modern humans in their respective locations (so according to this, Peking Man has lent some ancestry to modern Chinese populations).[3] On this matter, palaeogenetic analyses—the first in 2010—have reported that all humans whose ancestry lies beyond Subsaharan Africa contain genes from the archaic Neanderthals and Denisovans (Subsaharan Africans display archaic introgression from an unidentified ghost lineage), indicating early modern humans interbred with archaic humans. These 2 archaic species in turn interbred with other archaic species even farther removed from modern humans.[7][8] The few Denisovan fossils bear some resemblance to Peking Man.[9]