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Sinanthropus in Britain: human origins and international science, 1920–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2014

CHRIS MANIAS
CHRIS MANIAS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Samuel Alexander Building-N2.14, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, the University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

The Peking Man fossils discovered at Zhoukoudian in north-east China in the 1920s and 1930s were some of the most extensive palaeoanthropological finds of the twentieth century. This article examines their publicization and discussion in Britain, where they were engaged with by some of the world's leading authorities in human evolution, and a media and public highly interested in human-origins research. This international link – simultaneously promoted by scientists in China and in Britain itself – reflected wider debates on international networks; the role of science in the modern world; and changing definitions of race, progress and human nature. This article illustrates how human-origins research was an important means of binding these areas together and presenting scientific work as simultaneously authoritative and credible, but also evoking mystery and adventurousness. Examining this illustrates important features of contemporary views of both science and human development, showing not only the complexities of contemporary regard for the international and public dynamics of scientific research, but wider concerns over human nature, which oscillated between optimistic notions of unity and progress and pessimistic ones of essential differences and misdirected development.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 289 - 319
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Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2014 

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References

1 Illustrated London News, 2 December 1933.

2 While many accounts of the history of palaeoanthropology assert how little studied it has been, this is no longer really the case: Goodrum, Matthew, ‘The history of human origins research and its place in the history of science: research problems and historiography’, History of Science (2009) 47, pp. 337–357CrossRefGoogle Scholar, sketches the current historiography. General surveys include Regal, Brian, Human Evolution: A Guide to the Debates, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004Google Scholar; and Bowler, Peter, Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844–1944, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986Google Scholar. Significant specific works are Sommer, Marianne, Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007Google Scholar; Moser, Stephanie, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998Google Scholar; and Clark, Constance Areson, God – or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008Google Scholar. Theoretical works include Corbey, Raymond and Roebroeks, Wil (eds.), Studying Human Origins: Disciplinary History and Epistemology, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Landau, Misia, Narratives of Human Evolution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991Google Scholar; and Stoczkowski, Wiktor, Anthropologie naïve, anthropologie savante: De l'origine de l'homme de l'imagination et des idées reçues, Paris: CNRS, 1994Google Scholar.

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44 Davidson Black to Henry Houghton, 12 December 1922, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York (hereafter RAC), CMB, IV2B9, Box 11, Folder 72.

45 For British stereotypes of China see Bickers, Robert, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900–49, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 22–66Google Scholar; and Phoebe Chow, ‘British opinion and policy towards China, 1922–1927’, LSE PhD thesis, 2011, Ethesis: 228.

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47 Bulletin of the Geological Society of China (1926) 5, pp. 197–200; it was reported in Nature, 20 November 1926 and 31 December 1927.

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92 The Guardian, 17 March 1934.

93 The Guardian, 9 December 1932.

94 The Times, 23 August 1937.

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96 The Times, 17 March 1934.

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112 Illustrated London News, 4 March 1939.

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