11
Where Evolutionary Biology Meets History: Ethno-nationalism and Modern Human Origins in East Asia
Robin Dennell
Introduction
In keeping with the theme of this volume, the focus of this paper is on whether paleoanthropology is an evolutionary science, with a focus on natural selection, biogeography, genetic change, and drift, or a historical discipline which seeks to establish and explain a sequence of events or developments. “History” here is used in two ways: first, as part of “deep history,” in which the focus is on events and processes during the timespan of human evolution; and second, as part of modern history, during the lifetimes of those who study human origins. As I (Dennell 1990, 2001) and others (e.g., Hammond 1980, 1982) have previously argued, the two are interwoven and often inseparable: the study of our remote past is inextricably linked with our perceptions and concerns of the present. As examples, in British paleoanthropology before World War II, authors such as Sir Arthur Keith and Sir Grafton Eliot Smith focused on what they perceived as the deep antiquity of racial differences between whites and blacks in an era when Britain ruled most of sub-Saharan Africa; after World War II and the legacy of the Holocaust, American-led researchers emphasized instead the unity of humankind, the trivial nature of racial differences, and humankind’s adaptability and diversity (Dennell 2001).
Here, I explore the social and political context within which paleoanthropology has developed in China, and show how this has been used to promote a narrative about the antiquity and unity of the Chinese people. I begin with a quotation on the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 from the People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao), the official newspaper of the Chinese government. It describes how the Olympic Torch had been taken through five continents by 20,000 torch bearers. The final leg of the Olympic Torch to the Bird’s Nest Stadium was from Zhoukoudian, “once inhabited by the ancestors of the Chinese (my italics) … and marks a long awaited moment. This glorious historical moment congeals with the unswerving pursuit of a people; it records the steadfastly progressive steps of a nation; and is filled with true desires of the Chinese sons and daughters for friendship and peace with peoples of the world.” The choice of Zhoukoudian was significant and deliberate in two ways: first, because Peking Man (a.k.a. Sinanthropus pekinensis and Homo erectus) was one of the first to use fire (according to Chinese archaeologists, and contra Weiner et al. 1998)—thus establishing a link with the Olympic Torch—and second, it is presented in China by the official media as the direct ancestor of the modern Chinese. It would be unimaginable for a Tanzanian today to regard Olduvai as the birthplace of modern Tanzanians, or an Indonesian to see Sangiran or Trinil in the same light, or for a German to feel the same way about Mauer. (It is however worth noting that Woodward [1948] entitled his book on Piltdown The Earliest Englishman). The challenge thus is to explain how and why in 2008, Homo erectus at Zhoukoudian is seen in China as providing an unbroken link not only to Homo sapiens but also to the modern Chinese nation. As a first step, it is necessary to survey developments in China over the previous century.
The Context of Paleoanthropology in Twentieth-Century China
Paleoanthropological research in China extends back almost 100 years to the early part of the twentieth century, and it has experienced three main phases (Shen et al. 2015). Each has been heavily dependent upon China’s relations with the international community, particularly the USA and Western Europe. The first period was one in which Western influence was very strong in ideas, techniques, and researchers who often invested considerable parts of their careers in China. This period began in the last years of the Qing dynasty, and ended in 1941 when Japan attacked the United States and Britain.1 For much of this period, China was weak in the face of foreign aggression, and often in turmoil. As landmarks, the Qing dynasty fell in 1912 and was followed by a short-lived first republic. The years between World War I and World War II were marked by the era of the warlords, constant local wars, attempts to unify China under the Nationalists, the outbreak of civil war in 1927, the Japanese takeover of Manchuria in 1931, and their invasion of northern China and the eastern seaboard in 1937, and their attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Despite this background of instability and turmoil, this period saw some remarkable collaboration in paleoanthropology between Chinese and non-Chinese researchers, most conspicuously at Chou-kou-tien (now known as Zhoukoudian). The second period began in 1949 with the founding of the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC), and is most associated with Mao Zhedong, who died in 1976. During this period, China was largely isolated from the wider international community (particularly after 1960 following the Sino-Soviet split), and also anti-Western. There was thus no meaningful contact with Chinese and Western researchers between 1949 and the 1970s. It was during this period that the idea was developed that Peking Man was the ancestor of the modern Chinese. The third period has no clear beginning but largely took shape after 1989 under Deng Xiao Ping, and takes us to the present. This period is marked above all by China’s phenomenal economic development and re-engagement with the outside world, symbolized by the Olympic Games of 2008. In paleoanthropology, this has created new opportunities (particularly of collaboration with Western scientists) but also challenges to their own assumptions and beliefs. Conversely, for Western researchers, re-engagement with Chinese colleagues requires recognizing the social and political context in which their theories about human evolution have developed, as well as their own Western ones. To a far greater extent than in Europe and North America, ideas about human evolution that were prevalent in the 1930s are still evident in China 80 years later, and are also deeply politicized. These points are not appreciated as much as they should be by Western researchers.
To begin with, we can briefly review the wider background to the early study of paleoanthropology in China.
Background: Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century China
The nineteenth century had been disastrous for China: it had lost territory and sovereignty to Britain in two Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–1860), ceded Outer Manchuria to Russia in 1860, and Korea and Formosa (Taiwan) after its first war with Japan (1894–1895). Numerous indemnities almost bankrupted the Empire, which was further weakened by rebellions such as the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) and the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), which was the most lethal conflict of the nineteenth century. Most of its misfortune stemmed from the predatory behavior of the major European powers (Britain, France, Germany, and Russia) and in the late nineteenth century, Japan. On a more positive side, Western military and commercial intrusion was also accompanied by the influx of Western ideas. In the final years of the Qing dynasty before its end in 1912, China was like a sponge that soaked up the full spectrum of Western thinking, from liberalism, constitutional monarchy, and parliamentary democracy to republicanism, Marxism, and class warfare. In most cases, these ideas were developed to suit Chinese concerns and perceptions. A key institution in which many of these ideas were developed by Peking University (“Beida”), which was established in 1898 and largely replaced the traditional Confucian examination system that was by then glaringly inappropriate for China and finally abolished in 1905. Students from Beida were usually at the forefront of any mass movement, from the May 4th movement of 1919 (following the decision at the Versailles peace conference to transfer the German colony of Shandong to Japan instead of China) up to the Cultural Revolution and the events of 1989.
Darwinism and human evolution in China
In the case of paleoanthropology, there was an indigenous community of Chinese researchers at the turn of the twentieth century who were familiar with Western ideas of natural and social evolution. Darwin’s theories on evolution, perhaps surprisingly to Western scholars, had an early and enthusiastic start in China (see Pusey 1983, Schmalzer 2008). However, the main interest was in social Darwinism, as developed by Huxley and Spencer. Huxley’s (1893) Evolution and Ethics was translated into Chinese by a Westernizer, Yan Fu, to promote the necessity of social and political change in China (Schmalzer 2008, p. 20–21). The reformers and modernizers appreciated Darwin for three reasons. First, the implicit atheism of Darwinism—the absence of a Grand Design or a benevolent creator—fitted well with a materialist outlook that was hostile to the idea of gods and spirits controlling human destiny. Secondly, Darwin offered a way of countering superstition with science: Instead of dragons, there were instead dinosaurs and a demonstrable fossil record of extinct animals. Thirdly, when linked to Huxley’s and Spencer’s ideas of social evolution and the survival of the fittest, Darwin’s ideas helped emerging Marxists legitimate a class struggle against a reactionary, elite (and foreign) dynasty. For non-Marxist modernizers, ideas about social evolution could be used to champion Chinese reformers against a conservative, non-Chinese rule under the Manchus. Although the main ideas that developed in paleoanthropological research in China before Japan invaded China in 1937 were Western-led, there was already a small but influential Chinese community that was comfortable with the idea of human evolution, and its usefulness in documenting the origins of races in general and the Chinese (i.e., the Han and the minorities within the former Empire) in particular. As example, when Black secured funding for the excavations of Chou-kou-tien, the excavations were under the direction of the Chinese. Three were particularly important: Zhongjian Yang (a.k.a. C. C. Young, 1897–1979), who graduated from Peking University in 1923 and took a Ph.D. in Munich in 1927; Pei Wenzhong (1904–1982), who also graduated from Peking University, in 1928; and Jia Lanpo (1908–2001), who graduated in geology from Huiwen Academy in 1929. As seen below, all three went on to be senior figures in human origins research in the PRC after 1949.
Nationalism and the Search for Chinese Origins
As with Europe, nationalism was a powerful force in China in the late nineteenth century for the modernizers who wished to see their country unified, strong enough to withstand foreign (Western and Japanese) interference, and freed from rule by a foreign, Manchu, dynasty. As with Europe, the past could be harnessed to reinforce a sense of national identity, and thus there was great interest among Chinese thinkers in the origins of the Chinese people. These ideas were initially developed by Europeans.
Chinese origins and the ancient Near East
One early theory was that the Chinese were derived from Egypt or Mesopotamia, on the basis of some spurious similarities between hieroglyphics or cuneiform and Chinese writing, as well as some similarities in ceramics (see Yen 2014). For a Chinese audience, this could be seen in a positive light, since both Chinese and European civilization could be seen as derived from Southwest Asia, and thus if they both shared the same roots, they should be of equal standing: China might therefore one day, it was thought, be treated as an equal. The negative of course was that Chinese culture was seen as derivative and not original. Debate over this was sharpened by the discovery of the Neolithic Yangshao culture in Northwest China by the Swede John Gunar Andersson (1874–1960), whom we’ll meet later at Zhoukoudian. Initially, Andersson argued that the pottery style showed similarities with Southwest Asia. Later, Davidson Black (1884–1934)—one of the key figures at Zhoukoudian—argued that the skulls from Yangshao were identical to those of modern Chinese, and the Yangshao culture was thus indigenous. Andersson in time accepted this conclusion, and Yangshao thus gave the Chinese an ancestry that extended to the Neolithic.
Human Evolution and the Discovery of a Remote Past: Centers and Dispersal
Those who thought about human evolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to think about (as now) centers in which humanity first developed, and from which they subsequently dispersed to other regions. As is well known, Darwin (1871, p. 161) cautiously hypothesized that as our nearest relatives, the chimpanzee and gorilla, lived in Africa, so it was “somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.” Less often remembered is that he immediately qualified this suggestion in the sentence that followed: “But it is useless to speculate on this subject: for … since so remote a period the earth has certainly undergone many great revolutions, and there has been ample time for migration on the largest scale.”
Darwin, Haeckel, and Lemuria
Initially, the main rival to Darwin’s cautious suggestion about an African center of human evolution was Ernst Haeckel’s (1834–1919) fantastical theory that humanity originated on the lost continent of Lemuria, which sank somewhere in the Indian Ocean. This idea was expounded in his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte in 1868, and translated into English in 1876 as The History of Creation. On Lemuria, the ancestors of chimpanzees and gorillas supposedly managed to reach Africa, while the ancestors of humans and orang-utans arrived in Southeast Asia. He even named this hypothetical human ancestor Pithecanthropus allalus, or speechless ape-man, on the grounds that it was language that most distinguished us from the apes. Perversely, it was a rare example of a theory about human evolution seemingly being proven correct (a false positive) because it inspired Eugene Dubois (1858–1940) to go to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where he found a hominin skull-cap and associated femur at Trinil, Java, in 1891 (see Theunissen 1989). In homage to Haeckel, he named it Pithecanthropus, but selected erectus as the specific name because of his conviction that it was associated with the skull, and indicated an upright posture. Lemuria had a surprisingly long inning as one of the most bizarre notions of human origins.2 For example, A. C. Haddon (1912, p. 54) considered, “There is reason to believe that mankind did not originate in Africa, but that all the main races in that continent reached it from southern Asia.” One of the last academic sightings of Lemuria in Western writing was in a ghastly racist book called Savage Survivals by J. H. Moore (1933, p. 60) in a series inappropriately named The Thinkers Library: “It is believed that man evolved somewhere in southern Asia … in land now drowned by the Indian Ocean. This supposed land is called Lemuria.” Strangely, however, and thanks to an impeccable Marxist pedigree, Lemuria enjoyed a long life in Chinese writing.
Lemuria and Engels
Less well-known by Western researchers is that Lemuria played an important, and long-lived role in Chinese paleoanthropology, thanks to Engel’s (1876) essay, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.” This was translated into Chinese in 1928 (Schmalzer 2008, p. 60–61), and was widely quoted in communist writing for its message that “labour created humanity” through the liberation of the hands by bipedalism. (This theme later played a large part in the iconic significance of Sinanthropus in Marxist and Maoist writing). Engels also postulated that “a particularly highly-developed species of anthropoid apes lived somewhere in the tropical zone—probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.” The longevity of Engel’s essay of 1876 is evident in that the quotation is taken from Jia Lanpo’s “Early Man in China,” published in English in 1980.
Central Asia
A much more significant theory involving a center was that proposed by the American researcher William Dillinger Matthew (1871–1930), whose paper “Climate and Evolution” was published in 1915. Here, he firmly placed human origins on Central Asia.3 In his model, the tectonic uplift that resulted in the Tibetan Plateau was the prime mover in mammalian (and not just human) evolution: tectonic instability and uplift prompted the appearance of new species that then dispersed outwards, thus displacing earlier and more primitive types. In his view, “The most advanced stages should be nearest the centre of dispersal, the most conservative stages furthest from it” (cited in Black 1925, p. 141). He effectively inverted Darwin’s suggestion that humans evolved in Africa because that was where our closest cousins are found; for Matthew, the existence of the chimpanzee and gorilla in Africa indicated that they had been dispersed there by more advanced types (such as humans) that originated in Central Asia.
Matthew’s Central Asian hypothesis had serious support in North America, particularly from fellow American Henry Osborn (1857–1935), William Gregory (1876–1970), and most importantly, the Canadian Davidson Black (1884–1934), who later discovered Sinanthropus at Chou-kou-tien (now Zhoukoudian) near Beijing. For Gregory (1927, p. 463) human origins lay “somewhere between western Europe and eastern Asia,” with “the Tarim desert as the most likely place.” For Osborn (1918, p. 19), “Western Europe is to be viewed as a peninsula, surrounded on all sides by the sea and stretching westward from the great land mass of eastern Europe and of Asia, which was the chief theatre of evolution both of animal and human life.” In greater detail, “The most likely part of the world in which to discover these ‘Dawn Men’ … is the high plateau region of Asia embraced within the great prominences of Chinese Turkestan, of Tibet and of Mongolia” (Osborn 1927, p. 377). Osborn was a key figure at this time. He visited China, and lectured to a Chinese audience about the Central Asia hypothesis, and this was published in Chinese. Another influential figure at the time was the German geologist Walter Grabau, who taught at Beida, and argued to a Chinese audience, including his students, on the probability that humanity originated in Central Asia, in territory that included parts of China (Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Chinese Turkestan). He also published these ideas in both English and Chinese (see Yen 2014).
As events showed, the most significant support came from Davidson Black, who put theory into action by seeking employment at the newly created Peking Medical College in order to be nearer this potential center of human evolution—just as Dubois had accepted a medical post in the Dutch East Indies in order to test Haeckel’s theory about Lemuria. Black’s (1925) paper was a thorough development of Matthew’s (1915) paper, in which he highlighted the fossiliferous Siwaliks of British India, and the Yung-Ling and Tarim Basins of North China as areas worth prospecting. His 1934 paper to the Royal Society probably marks the apogee of this line of thinking.
Two other developments helped the Central Asian theory. The first was the remarkable reconnaissance in 1922 by the French missionary Émile Licent (1876–1952) and the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) through the Ordos Desert of North China (where they found the first Pleistocene remains of humans), to the Nihewan Basin (where there was a small Christian community) and on to Shuidonggou, where they excavated SDG1, which is still the classic Early Upper Paleolithic site in China (Boule et al., 1928, Licent and Chardin 1925). Second, the showman and explorer Ray Chapman Andrews (1884–1960), a later director of the American Museum of Natural History, raised lavish funding for expeditions from 1922–1928 into the Gobi Desert and Inner Mongolia to search for man’s ancestors; he was unsuccessful, but did find important dinosaur remains. The preface to his book On the Trail of the Ancient Man (Andrews 1926) was written by none less than Osborne, who stated (Osborne 1926, p. ix) that he had predicted as early as 1900 (Osborne 1900) “that the home of the most remote ancestors of man, Primates, was placed in northern Asia.”
Chou-kou-tien was thus on the edge of what was hypothesized as the likely cradle of humankind. Nevertheless, it was by far the nearest to it compared to any other site in Asia. Thus when Andersson found Locality 1 (“Dragon Bone Hill”) at Chou-kou-tien in 1921 and Otto Zdansky (1894–1988) found two human teeth in 1924 in samples that had been sent back to Sweden, it seemed to confirm the Central Asian hypothesis. These were published in 1927 by Zdansky as Homo sp., but it was Black (1927) who announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis on the basis of a single left lower molar. Where Black was shrewd was in using this discovery to ask the Rockefeller Foundation (which was already responsible for running Peking Medical College4) for additional funding to continue excavations under the direction of Li Jie. The discovery in 1928 of more teeth, part of a juvenile mandible, and some skull fragments enabled Black to secure another $80,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Geological Survey of China in 1928. Black thus had at hand the most important paleoanthropological site in the world, and the laboratory in which to study the hominin remains that were found there. (The terms of the grant also insisted that Chinese researchers could study the animal remains, but that Black was solely responsible for any hominin material. As Jia (1980, p. 22) comments with understandable bitterness, “In recognition of a $80,000 donation to the project by the Rockefeller Foundation, the reactionary Chinese government at that time had gone to the length of relinquishing the right to study these human remains found on its own territory.”)
Development, Not Origins: Weidenreich, 1937–1948 and Multiregionalism
After the sudden death of Davidson Black in 1934, his replacement by Franz Weidenreich (1873–1948) in 1935 as the senior anatomist studying the Sinanthropus specimens marked a significant shift of emphasis in the Chou-kou-tien project. In China, Weidenreich was more concerned with development than with origins5 and came from a completely different intellectual framework from that of the North Americans such as Matthew, Osborne, Gregory, and Black. While not hostile to the idea that Central Asia was the cradle of mankind, he was more interested in how hominins such as Sinanthropus and Pithecanthropus fitted into the greater scheme of human evolution in Asia, Europe, and Africa. His background as an anatomist lay in Central Europe; he studied under Gustav Schwalbe (1844–1916), who in turn had studied the Neanderthal remains from Krapina, Croatia, and concluded (contrary to Boule) that Neanderthals had evolved into H. sapiens. As is well-known, it was during and after his time at Chou-kou-tien (1937–1941) that he developed his theory of multiregional evolution, best summarized by his famous (or infamous) trellis figure, published in 1946 (see figure 11.1). For Weidenreich, hominins such as Sinanthropus and Pithecanthropus were linked by gene exchange to each other and their counterparts in Europe and Africa, and in each continent, H. sapiens emerged as a result of gene exchange. Pithecanthropus seemed more primitive, as there was no evidence that it used stone tools or fire, unlike Sinanthropus, which could thus be regarded as one of the ancestors of H. sapiens.
Weidenreich’s model of multiregional evolution. Note first that he placed the Chinese Gigantopithecus at the base of the hominin lineage rather than the South African Meganthropus. Second, in his figure, the modern Mongolian group is shown as directly descended from Choukoutien Upper Cave and Sinanthropus pekinensis.
Source: Weidenreich, F. 1948. Apes, Giants, and Man, Fig. 30. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
In addition to Locality 1, the other important locality at Zhoukoudian was Upper Cave (now Locality 26), which Pei excavated in 1933–1934 and which dates to the late Upper Pleistocene. According to Weidenreich, the human remains showed affinities to Sinanthropus and also to modern Mongolians (with traits such as shovel-shaped incisors, and an Inca bone) as well as to Eskimos. This implied a deep ancestry of both peoples, and could be interpreted (or misinterpreted) as extending Chinese identity deep into the Pleistocene.
Human Origins Research in Asia before World War II
The field research in China in the years before 1937 can be assessed for both its intellectual and social context.
The intellectual context
Several points stand out when considering the ideas driving paleoanthropology in China in the years before World War II. The first is that it developed within an intellectual framework that could be considered as linked to evolutionary biology, particularly biogeography. Second, it was perhaps the only time when a theory about human origins preceded the discovery of data that was then used to confirm it. In contrast, the reverse has normally happened: unexpected discoveries in an area are usually then followed by theories that attempt to explain why the area might have been a center of evolution, or have played an important role within it. A clear example is East Africa, where the discovery of Zinjanthropus, Homo habilis, and Australopithecus afarensis was later followed by theories as to why East Africa might have been a cradle of humankind. A third feature of pre-World War II paleoanthropology is that most authority figures supported theories that gave Asia primacy over Africa as the cradle of humankind; no major writer of any significance at this time appears to have advocated Africa over Asia. This was due partly to the belief that a hallmark of early hominins was a large brain (as shown notoriously by Piltdown), and partly due to an implicit and sometimes explicit racial prejudice against envisaging black Africa as the place where white Europeans had originated (see Dennell 2001). The belief in the primacy of the brain and a bias against black Africa as a potential cradle doubly stymied Dart’s small-brained Australopithecus africanus from southern Africa. However, the main driving forces behind the Asian paradigm were biogeographical.
The social context
In the years preceding the outbreak of World War II, most research into human origins took place in Asia, or more specifically, in three areas of Asia. These were in British India, in the Siwaliks and major river valleys such as the Narmada; in the Dutch East Indies, particularly Java; and in China. In the case of British India and the Dutch East Indies, this research was undertaken almost entirely by Western scientists. Examples from British India are the fieldwork in Kashmir, in the Soan and Narmada valleys by the Swiss-German Helmut de Terra, the British archaeologist Thomas Paterson, the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, the Americans G. Edward Lewis at Haritayangar, and Barnum Brown, and members of the India Geological Survey such as Guy Pilgrim, who was one of the giants of Siwalik research. In Java, the main figures were staff of the Dutch Geological Survey, such as Duyfijes, Oppenorth, Koenigswald, and of course Dubois, who pioneered field research in the 1890s with his discovery of Pithecanthropus. In both British India and the Dutch East Indies, indigenous “natives” played only very minor roles as field assistants; they did not study or publish the artifacts and fossils that were collected, even though they were often invaluable in the field as collectors. When British and Dutch rule ended after World War II, there were no indigenous, qualified Indian or Indonesian scientists who could step into the shoes of their former rulers and continue research into paleoanthropology. There is no indication that research in the Siwaliks of British India or the Sangiran Basin played any role in developing national consciousness by the indigenous Indians and Javanese.
China stands out as significantly different from British India and the Dutch East Indies in that it was not part of a Western empire, and there was an emerging educated group of Chinese researchers who could and did work in collaboration with Western scientists. To a much greater extent than in India and the Dutch East Indies, Western ideas were assimilated, debated, and developed by local groups. Although the story of Chou-kou-tien has been told many times by Western writers, the emphasis is nearly always upon the key Western figures such as Andersson, Chardin, Black, and Weidenreich, and the significance of this research for the Chinese is usually overlooked, as is the importance of the Chinese scientists such as Yang, Pei, and Jia who were an integral part of this work. As seen below, Chinese involvement in the research at Chou-kou-tien played a major role in the development of ideas about how the Chinese define themselves.
Chinese Isolation (1937–c.1980) and the Development of Ethno-nationalism
Two developments killed off the international collaboration at Chou-kou-tien. The first was the Japanese invasion of 1937, when fieldwork became too dangerous for the Chinese workforce.6 The second was the continuation of the civil war in China between the nationalists and communists after 1945, resulting in the proclamation of the PRC in 1949 and the defeat of the United States’ main ally in the region, the nationalists. The ending of American influence in mainland China, and Mao’s anti-imperialist foreign policy, resulted in the “bamboo curtain,” and China’s isolation from the West, with the USSR and later, North Korea and Albania as its only allies. Chinese isolation increased further following the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, and the turmoil created by the Great Leap Forward (and ensuing Great Famine) and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The severance of contact between China and the outside world thus marooned a generation of Chinese researchers who could only warily tread their own path (Shen et al. 2015), and hope to avoid censure by whichever political storm blew their way.7 The thawing of China’s isolation from the wider international community, and the United States in particular began to end only after Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, but did not really begin to take effect until the Deng Xiao Ping era of the 1990s.
Nevertheless, although few in number, Chinese paleoanthropologists achieved a great deal after 1949. Excavations resumed at Locality 1, Zhoukoudian, from 1949–1951, and several times thereafter (1958–1960; 1966; and 1978–1982), resulting in the discovery of a further 100 hominin fossils from 40 individuals. Hominin fossils were found at several other locations, notably Dali, Lantian, and Yuanmou (Shen et al. 2015), and many important paleolithic sites were excavated, such as Dingcun, Xujiayao, and several sites in the Nihewan Basin. Institutionally, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing emerged as the leading research center, where the main researchers were Pei Wen-Zhong and his student Jia Lanpo, and C. C. Young, all of whom had learned their trade at Chou-kou-tien before World War II, and the physical anthropologist Wu Rukang (1916–2006).
For the generation of Chinese researchers who had begun their careers before World War II and who remained in mainland China, their main intellectual capital were the ideas and techniques that they had assimilated before 1937. The two main ideas that were carried forward in paleoanthropology were the primacy of Asia over Africa, and the idea of multiregional evolution. Both ideas proved remarkably resilient. For adherents of the Central Asian model, the acceptance of the South African australopithecines (in 1948) was interesting, but did not demonstrate a direct ancestral link to the genus Homo; the unmasking of Piltdown as a fraud demonstrated the gullibility of Western scientists; and even the discovery of Homo habilis in 1960 could be seen as comparable to Pithecanthropus. It was only when the trickle of new discoveries in East Africa in the 1950s and 1960s became a flood that an African origin of hominins, including our own genus, became convincing to the likes of Pei Weizhong. However, even in the 1980s (as seen previously), Jia Lanpo adhered to the theory of an Asian origin of humanity.8 As recently as 1998, the Chinese government granted 5 million yuan (ca. £500,000) to find australopithecines in China (Schmalzer 2008, p. 257), so far without success.
The shift from Asia-centricism to Chinese ethno-nationalism
The founding of the PRC in 1949 had direct consequences on paleoanthropology in China. First, the resumption of excavations at Zhoukoudian was made an immediate priority (unlike in India or Indonesia, where fieldwork in the Siwaliks or Sangiran was not resumed for several decades), and were restarted at only a few weeks’ notice in 1949 (Jia and Huang 1990, p. 191). Second, Weidenreich’s multiregionalism was reformulated in terms of ethno-nationalism, whereby Sinanthropus was officially portrayed as the direct ancestor of not only H. sapiens but also the Chinese people. This was not an original idea: according to Dikötter (2015, p. 85), Chinese archaeologist Lin Yan in 1940 cited Sinanthropus as proof that the Chinese race had inhabited the Middle Kingdom from the earliest stage of human history. This claim needs to be understood in the context of its time. In 1940, the existence of China was under severe threat from the Japanese, and in 1949, the newly founded PRC was faced with the problems of ruling a huge country that had been traumatized by eight years of Japanese occupation (14 years in the case of Manchuria), over two decades of civil war, and was also confronted by hostile Western powers. Sinanthropus thus became a very useful device for stressing the unity and deep historic roots of the Chinese people9 (see Yen 2014, Sautman 2001, and Schmalzer 2008). Following Engel’s essay of 1876, Sinanthropus also served socialism in showing the primacy of human labor, particularly (in the Mao era) of male strength, as Sinanthropus (unlike Pithecanthropus) had mastered the ability to make tools (Schmalzer 2008). These “messages” of the deep antiquity and unity of the Chinese people, and the primacy of human labor were disseminated to as many as possible through visits to the Zhoukoudian museum by mass groups from schools, army, and work units (Schmalzer 2008, p. 153). As seen from the quotation about the 2008 Olympic Games, this official view remains unchanged.
Hallam Movius (1907–1987) and the marginalization of China
An additional but external development that contributed greatly to severance of Old World paleolithic archaeology from China was Hallam Movius’s publication in 1948 of his synthesis of the early paleolithic of East Asia. As is well known, Movius depicted the early paleolithic world as comprising two blocks: one in Africa, western Europe, and Southwest and South Asia defined by the presence of hand-axes, and the other in East and Southeast Asia (with an outlier in Northwest India, the Soanian) that was defined by a simple chopper-chopping tool technology. This dichotomy was seen in cognitive, or even implicitly, racial terms: those with hand-axes were seen as “progressive” and “dynamic”; those without as “conservative” and an example of “cultural retardation” (see Dennell 2014a, 2014b for a critique of these views). In the words of Movius, (1948, p. 411), in East and Southeast Asia the tools are “relatively monotonous and unimaginative assemblages of choppers, chopping tools, and hand-adzes … as early as Lower Palaeolithic times, southern and eastern Asia was a region of cultural retardation … it seems very unlikely that this vast area could ever have played a vital and dynamic role in early human evolution.… Very primitive forms of Early Man apparently persisted there long after types at a comparable stage of physical evolution had become extinct elsewhere.” Movius, who had no prior experience of early palaeolithic archaeology, was undoubtedly heavily influenced by Teilhard de Chardin, who was the senior figure in the field expedition to Burma in 1938 in which he collaborated with Helmut de Terra (as he had already in Kashmir in 1935). Chardin was unambiguous about China’s context in the wider paleolithic world: “Early Palaeolithic China was a quiet and conservative corner on account of its marginal geographical position … in contrast with the already ‘steaming’ West, Early Pleistocene Eastern Asia seems to have represented … a quiet and conservative corner amidst the fast advancing human world” (Chardin 1941, p. 60). He went on to state that “East Asia gives the impression of having acted (just as historical China and in sharp contrast with the Mediterranean world) as an isolated and self-sufficient area, closed to any major human migratory wave” (1941, p.86, 88; italics mine). Movius and Chardin effectively stripped East Asia of any paleolithic history, since it was seen as static and thus unchanging.
In effect, Movius extended the bamboo curtain from post-war China to the early Pleistocene: in his view, China is, and always had been isolated from the West. It provided an ideal excuse for Western scholars to ignore East Asia: they were unable to work there as they had done before World War II, but even if they had been able to, there was no point in wasting effort on a culturally “retarded” region that had played no significant role in human evolution. As Athreya (2010) has pointed out, between 1950 and 2003, there was not a single session on Asian paleoanthropology by the annual meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
Post-1989: The Ending of China’s Isolation
There is no clear turning point at which China re-joined the wider international community. Landmarks in this process are: Nixon’s visit in 1972 and the PR display of table-tennis diplomacy; Howells et al.’s visit in the 1970s; visits—not always a meeting of minds—by Binford, Weiner, Boaz, Desmond Clark, Schick, and Toth working at Nihewan in the 1980s, and others such as Ciochon, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, Pope, and Olsen. All these helped in that it was the first time for many Chinese to have met a Westerner.10 Equally significant was that young Chinese researchers such as Gao Xing, Shen Chen, and Lipeng Zhou could now leave China to train for a Ph.D. or undertake post-doctoral research in the West. Likewise, Chinese and Western scholars met more frequently at international conferences (e.g., myself in Beijing in 1999, Huang Weiwen in Honolulu in 2001). Other changes were more gradual, notably younger Chinese researchers learning English and being bold enough to practize it by talking to foreigners, and now, frequently publishing their research in peer-reviewed Western journals.
For the study of human evolution, these developments were marked by the encounter of ideas that had been preserved since the 1930s on multiregional evolution with Western-led ideas. For the Chinese, this has been a very exciting time in which they have been exposed to Western ideas about the central importance of Africa, and the nature of lithic variability. They have also encountered techniques such as taphonomic analysis, 3D recording of archaeological excavations, GIS data manipulation, soil micromorphology, use wear analysis, and advanced dating techniques. On the whole, they have been very adept at learning these, and integrating them with their own field programs, as at Shuidonggou, for example. The post-1989 generation of Chinese researchers has been highly successful at assimilating and adapting new techniques of dating, analysis, recording, and so on. There has also been a subtle but important shift in Chinese perceptions of human evolution.
Continuity with Hybridization
The term “continuity with hybridization” is often used by Chinese researchers to summarize current thinking about the evolution of Homo sapiens. This model deserves to be examined for its academic content along with its rival, the Out-of-Africa model. The term “continuity with hybridization” also provides an accurate description of the political context in which modern human origins are studied in China, and this also needs examination.
“Continuity with hybridisation”: the academic context
According to this view, the basic tenets of multiregional evolution still hold true: that Homo erectus at Zhoukoudian evolved into H. sapiens, and this process is marked by transitional specimens of “archaic H. sapiens.” In their eyes, Chinese specimens such as Zhirendong that they attribute to “archaic H. sapiens” (Liu et al. 2010) are comparable to African specimens such as Herto, Ethiopia, that are also classified as “archaic H. sapiens” by some Western researchers. For most non-Chinese researchers, this practice is very confusing because the Out-of-Africa model requires only one source of “archaic H. sapiens” from which all other modern humans are derived.
For many years, debate over the origin of “modern” humans was highly polarized between those advocating that H. sapiens originated in Africa and then replaced all indigenous populations in Europe and Asia, such as Neanderthals, East Asian H. erectus, and H. floresiensis on Flores, and thus argued for multiregional evolution. For many years, there was little common ground between the two camps, as evident by the papers and not infrequent clashes by the likes of Stringer and Wolpoff and their supporters.
In recent years, the debate has become more nuanced and is no longer so bipolar. One important discovery has been from studies of ancient DNA (aDNA) of Neanderthals, showing that there is some (ca. 2–4%) of Neanderthal DNA in all modern non-Africans, that is, those in Europe and Asia and their descendent populations in the Americas and Australia (Prüfer et al. 2013). Some degree of hybridization has to therefore be accepted by those arguing for a model based on dispersal and replacement. Another development is the discovery—again from studies of aDNA—of Denisovans, a population first identified from the analysis of specimens from Denisova Cave, Siberia, of a previously unsuspected population that was neither Neanderthal nor H. sapiens, and likely a sister clade of Neanderthals (Krause et al. 2010, Reich et al. 2010, Meyer et al. 2012). As Denisovan DNA appears in modern populations in Melanesia but not on mainland or island Southeast Asia, there may therefore have been a dispersal event involving those of Denisovan ancestry, followed by their replacement in Southeast Asia by groups lacking Denisovan DNA (Reich et al. 2011). In other words, the emergence of H. sapiens in Southeast Asia is likely to have been a complex process rather than a single replacement event of H. erectus by H. sapiens, or unilinear evolution from one to the other. Some indication of the likely degree of complexity is indicated by the presence of Denisovan aDNA in a tibia from the Middle Pleistocene site of Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain (Meyer et al. 2014). As this specimen (and the associated ones in the same cave) are usually referred to as early Neanderthal or as H. heidelbergensis, the presence of Denisovan aDNA was unexpected and provides an additional indicator of the emerging complexity of human evolution in Eurasia.
A similar pattern is emerging from recent detailed studies of Middle and Upper Pleistocene specimens in China, such as those at Dali, Panxian Dadong, and Xujiayao. On environmental grounds, it is likely that China was not always isolated during the Middle Pleistocene but open to immigration. One such interval may have been between MIS 15 and MIS 13 because MIS 14 (563−533 ka) is very weakly expressed in Siberia and North China, and this may have “provided favorable conditions for the second major dispersal episode of African hominins into Eurasia” (Hao et al. 2015, p.1).
The likelihood that such dispersals occurred is reflected in the Chinese fossil hominin record. Rightmire (2001), for example, classified the specimens from Dali and Jinnuishan as H. heidelbergensis, which has to imply that “[The] spread of some populations of Homo heidelbergensis into the Far East cannot be ruled out” (Rightmire 1998, p. 225). For others, this possibility is a near-certainty: “Homo erectus at first existed by itself in China; Homo heidelbergensis then entered and the two coexisted for a time; finally H. erectus became extinct there, and H. heidelbergensis persisted alone: an early ‘replacement’ event” (Groves and Lahr 1994, p. 3). Others have commented on the overlap between H. erectus and non-erectus Middle Pleistocene Homo. As example, Wu and Athreya (2013, p. 154) comment, “This overlap reflects the fact that the evolutionary trajectory from archaic to more modern forms was the result of highly variable patterns of population dynamics across the Old World between different regional groups.” As Howell (1999, p. 223) remarked, “Such shifts are still ill-appreciated.” Under the “continuity with hybridization model” of hominin evolution in East Asia (see e.g., Liu et al., 2010), “the suite of traits exhibited by Dali could be indicative of a local transition between H. erectus and H. sapiens that included some influence from western Eurasian populations during the Middle Pleistocene” (Wu and Athreya 2013, p. 154). As Bae (2010, p. 89) comments, “The question of whether eastern Asian archaic H. sapiens should be classified as H. heidelbergensis can also be viewed in the light of dispersing hominin populations. In particular, if H. heidelbergensis dispersed from the western Old World and into eastern Asia some time during the Middle Pleistocene, then it would support the hypothesis that a third major dispersal event out of Africa occurred.” Bae (2010, p. 90) further comments “Even small amounts of gene flow from dispersing H. heidelbergensis groups into eastern Asia during the Middle Pleistocene is probably the most parsimonious explanation as to why similar morphological features occasionally appear among penecontemporaneous western and eastern Old World hominins.”
The teeth from Panxian Dadong (Liu et al. 2013) that are ca. 300–130 ka show how far we are from a clear picture of later human evolution in China. They are described as non-Neanderthal but not obviously linked to H. sapiens. The same is true of the later site of Xujiayao, North China (Song et al. 2015, p. 224): “… Evinces the existence in China of a population of unclear taxonomic status with regard to other contemporary populations such as H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis. The morphological and metric studies of the Xujiayao teeth expand the variability known for early Late Pleistocene hominin fossils and suggest the possibility that a primitive hominin lineage may have survived late into the Late Pleistocene in China.”
“Continuity with hybridization”: The social and political context
As the quotation at the start of this paper about the historic link between Zhoukoudian and the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 shows very clearly, the official line in China is that modern Chinese are the product of multiregional evolution from an ancestral population of H. erectus at Zhoukoudian. According to this view, the Chinese originated in China, and have always lived within China as a coherent grouping, and there is no reason to suppose that this view will change in the foreseeable future.
What we do have now is some degree of hybridization with foreign scientists, and an acceptance that some hybridization occurred in the deep past—though not enough to override the driving force of evolution directly from Sinanthropus (H. erectus s.s) to H. sapiens. So long as the debate is left open-ended, Chinese scientists are prepared to recognize that the Chinese fossil record is complex, and more evidence is required. Non-Chinese researchers for their part should recognize that human origins research in China is highly politicized, and there are well-defined limits to any debate. Those Western researchers who engage with Chinese researchers need to appreciate the deep background to Chinese perceptions of human evolution, and the role of Zhoukoudian within it. If there is to be a productive dialogue, there has to be respect and understanding of the way that Chinese paleoanthropology has developed.
Another way of looking at the “continuity with hybridization” model is to consider it from the viewpoint of Chinese researchers. At an individual level, two aspects stand out. The first is a desire that Western scientists should regard the Chinese fossil hominin and paleolithic record as important, and not marginal to a global paleoanthropology. “Hybridization” thus implies that the Chinese record is integrated into its wider Eurasian and African context, and not seen as separate and marginal. The second is the entirely understandable desire to be treated with respect as equal collaborators with non-Chinese researchers. Here, the memory of how Black and Weidenreich monopolized the study of the Zhoukoudian Sinanthropus fossils runs deep, and they (entirely reasonably) expect their views and analyses to be treated with as much respect and rigor as that given to Western researchers. “Hybridization” thus implies interacting with non-Chinese researchers on an equal footing: prestige and respect are integral aspects of discussions about the role of hybridization.
The Movius Line—a zombie that refuses to die?
The Movius Line (Movius 1948) was based on fieldwork in Burma in 1937–1938, and is probably the longest-accepted example of pre-World War II fieldwork that has still found adherents. In my own writing (Dennell 2014a, 2014b, 2015), I have argued that it was a house built on sand, has no validity, and needs to be forgotten. Bar-Yosef (2015) has expressed a similar opinion. This is one concept that could be dropped with equal benefits to Chinese and non-Chinese researchers.
Conclusion
From the above, it is obvious that the Chinese fossil record is viewed very differently by Chinese and (most) Western researchers: “In the West, scientists treat the Chinese fossil evidence as part of the broad picture of human evolution worldwide; in China, it is part of national history—an ancient and fragmentary part, it is true, but none the less one that is called upon to promote a unifying concept of unique origin and continuity within the Chinese nation” (Reader 1990, p. 111). Given the profound differences in the intellectual traditions and histories of China and the West, these differences of interpretation should not be surprising. “Human evolution is our origin narrative, and such narratives have cultural salience” (Marks 2015, p. 15) within specific cultural milieux. In China, both the Central Asian hypothesis and multiregionalism—the fundamental theories that initially drove the study of human evolution in China—were developed within a framework of evolutionary biology. The ethno-nationalism that was imposed upon the fossil hominin record after 1949 needs to be placed in its historical and political context, and is thus part of the study of modern history. As these ideas present a sequence of events that directly links Locality 1 at Zhoukoudian with the Birds’ Nest Stadium and the 2008 Olympic Games, they are also historical in that they narrate a sequence of events—even if imperfectly understood—between the deep past and the present. Non-Chinese researchers in paleoanthropology have to understand that their Chinese counterparts operate within a very different social and political context from their own. At the same time, non-Chinese researchers need also to examine their own belief frameworks and academic traditions as critically as they examine those of their Chinese colleagues.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Jeff Schwartz for inviting me to the workshop underlying this volume, and to the KLI for their exemplary generous hospitality, which did so much to make this meeting a truly memorable occasion.
Notes
1. As a symbolic ending of this period in Chinese paleoanthropology, the Sinanthropus remains from Zhoukoudian were lost at this time when in transit from Beijing to the USA.
2. Lemuria still lurks on the Internet on what might be termed the lunatic fringes of mysticism and spiritualism, and is located variously in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
3. Central Asia here was defined as Tibet, Mongolia, and Inner Mongolia, and not, as now, the “Five Stans” of Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
4. Despite the phenomenal growth and modernization of Beijing in recent years, the Peking Medical College is still there in its original buildings. Somewhat incongruously for a Communist state, it contains a bust of J. D. Rockefeller, the ruthless capitalist who provided the key funding.
5. However, in his 1946 book Apes, Giants, and Man, Weidenreich did propose an evolutionary lineage from Asian Gigantopithecus to Homo. Although this now seems strange, Krogman (1947, p. 118) thought “The biological continuity is an uncontestable one.”
6. At Chou-kou-tien, three workers were used for bayonet practice (Jia and Huang 1990, p. 153).
7. These political storms are incomprehensible for any post-war west European or American researcher. As example, in the Cultural Revolution, C. C. Young was forced to bend at right angles for long periods with a heavy placard around his neck, and was not allowed to eat until everyone else had finished (Schmalzer 2008, p. 124); Jia Lanpo was placed under house arrest (Schmalzer 2008, p. 124) and burnt the manuscript of his book on Chou-kou-tien because of its too-frequent references to Western researchers, and the fear that he might be accused of being an American spy (Jia and Huang, 1990, p. 2). At a time when I was enjoying undergraduate life at Cambridge, a Chinese friend and colleague spent three years planting trees and digging ditches in a labor camp as part of an Education through Labor program.
8. The rationale now had shifted to the argument that the Miocene Ramapithecus, known mainly from modern Pakistan, was a hominin. This notion gained traction in the 1960s through the work of David Pilbeam and Elwyn Simons, but it was invalidated by the discovery of GSP15000 in Pakistan, which showed the main affinities were with orang-utans. We should also note that Weidenreich (1946) postulated an evolutionary line from Gigantopithecus to Homo, and Koenigswald was also sympathetic to East Asia as the cradle of humanity.
9. It is not unusual for the past to be used for propaganda purposes at times of national crisis. As example, see Boule’s contrast of the creative (French) Cro-Magnons with the brutal (German) Neanderthals in WW1, or Jaquetta and Christopher Hawke’s (1940) depiction in their popular bestseller Prehistoric Britain, of Britain as a beleaguered isle that developed its own specific identity.
10. I had the same experience working in Bulgaria in the early 1970s in the early phase of détente.
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