Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

Many people refused to accept that the Neandertal bones were ancient at all. August Mayer, a professor at the University of Bonn and a man of influence, insisted that the bones were merely those of a Mongolian Cossack soldier who had been wounded while fighting in Germany in 1814 and had crawled into the cave to die. Hearing of this, T. H. Huxley in England drily observed how remarkable it was that the soldier, though mortally wounded, had climbed sixty feet up a cliff, divested himself of his clothing and personal effects, sealed the cave opening, and buried himself under two feet of soil. Another anthropologist, puzzling over the Neandertal’s heavy brow ridge, suggested that it was the result of long-term frowning arising from a poorly healed forearm fracture. (In their eagerness to reject the idea of earlier humans, authorities were often willing to embrace the most singular possibilities. At about the time that Dubois was setting out for Sumatra, a skeleton found in Périgueux was confidently declared to be that of an Eskimo. Quite what an ancient Eskimo was doing in southwest France was never comfortably explained. It was actually an early Cro-Magnon.)

It was against this background that Dubois began his search for ancient human bones. He did no digging himself, but instead used fifty convicts lent by the Dutch authorities. For a year they worked on Sumatra, then transferred to Java. And there in 1891, Dubois-or rather his team, for Dubois himself seldom visited the sites-found a section of ancient human cranium now known as the Trinil skullcap. Though only part of a skull, it showed that the owner had had distinctly nonhuman features but a much larger brain than any ape. Dubois called it Anthropithecus erectus (later changed for technical reasons to Pithecanthropus erectus ) and declared it the missing link between apes and humans. It quickly became popularized as “Java Man.” Today we know it as Homo erectus .

The next year Dubois’s workers found a virtually complete thighbone that looked surprisingly modern. In fact, many anthropologists think it is modern, and has nothing to do with Java Man. If it is an erectus bone, it is unlike any other found since. Nonetheless Dubois used the thighbone to deduce-correctly, as it turned out-that Pithecanthropus walked upright. He also produced, with nothing but a scrap of cranium and one tooth, a model of the complete skull, which also proved uncannily accurate.

In 1895, Dubois returned to Europe, expecting a triumphal reception. In fact, he met nearly the opposite reaction. Most scientists disliked both his conclusions and the arrogant manner in which he presented them. The skullcap, they said, was that of an ape, probably a gibbon, and not of any early human. Hoping to bolster his case, in 1897 Dubois allowed a respected anatomist from the University of Strasbourg, Gustav Schwalbe, to make a cast of the skullcap. To Dubois’s dismay, Schwalbe thereupon produced a monograph that received far more sympathetic attention than anything Dubois had written and followed with a lecture tour in which he was celebrated nearly as warmly as if he had dug up the skull himself. Appalled and embittered, Dubois withdrew into an undistinguished position as a professor of geology at the University of Amsterdam and for the next two decades refused to let anyone examine his precious fossils again. He died in 1940 an unhappy man.

Meanwhile, and half a world away, in late 1924 Raymond Dart, the Australian-born head of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, was sent a small but remarkably complete skull of a child, with an intact face, a lower jaw, and what is known as an endocast-a natural cast of the brain-from a limestone quarry on the edge of the Kalahari Desert at a dusty spot called Taung. Dart could see at once that the Taung skull was not of a Homo erectus like Dubois’s Java Man, but from an earlier, more apelike creature. He placed its age at two million years and dubbed it Australopithecus africanus , or “southern ape man of Africa.” In a report to Nature , Dart called the Taung remains “amazingly human” and suggested the need for an entirely new family, Homo simiadae (“the man-apes”), to accommodate the find.

The authorities were even less favorably disposed to Dart than they had been to Dubois. Nearly everything about his theory-indeed, nearly everything about Dart, it appears-annoyed them. First he had proved himself lamentably presumptuous by conducting the analysis himself rather than calling on the help of more worldly experts in Europe. Even his chosen name, Australopithecus , showed a lack of scholarly application, combining as it did Greek and Latin roots. Above all, his conclusions flew in the face of accepted wisdom. Humans and apes, it was agreed, had split apart at least fifteen million years ago in Asia. If humans had arisen in Africa, why, that would make us Negroid , for goodness sake. It was rather as if someone working today were to announce that he had found the ancestral bones of humans in, say, Missouri. It just didn’t fit with what was known.

Dart’s sole supporter of note was Robert Broom, a Scottish-born physician and paleontologist of considerable intellect and cherishably eccentric nature. It was Broom’s habit, for instance, to do his fieldwork naked when the weather was warm, which was often. He was also known for conducting dubious anatomical experiments on his poorer and more tractable patients. When the patients died, which was also often, he would sometimes bury their bodies in his back garden to dig up for study later.

Broom was an accomplished paleontologist, and since he was also resident in South Africa he was able to examine the Taung skull at first hand. He could see at once that it was as important as Dart supposed and spoke out vigorously on Dart’s behalf, but to no effect. For the next fifty years the received wisdom was that the Taung child was an ape and nothing more. Most textbooks didn’t even mention it. Dart spent five years working up a monograph, but could find no one to publish it. Eventually he gave up the quest to publish altogether (though he did continue hunting for fossils). For years, the skull-today recognized as one of the supreme treasures of anthropology-sat as a paperweight on a colleague’s desk.

At the time Dart made his announcement in 1924, only four categories of ancient hominid were known- Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis , Neandertals, and Dubois’s Java Man-but all that was about to change in a very big way.

First, in China, a gifted Canadian amateur named Davidson Black began to poke around at a place, Dragon Bone Hill, that was locally famous as a hunting ground for old bones. Unfortunately, rather than preserving the bones for study, the Chinese ground them up to make medicines. We can only guess how many priceless Homo erectus bones ended up as a sort of Chinese equivalent of bicarbonate of soda. The site had been much denuded by the time Black arrived, but he found a single fossilized molar and on the basis of that alone quite brilliantly announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis , which quickly became known as Peking Man.

At Black’s urging, more determined excavations were undertaken and many other bones found. Unfortunately all were lost the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 when a contingent of U.S. Marines, trying to spirit the bones (and themselves) out of the country, was intercepted by the Japanese and imprisoned. Seeing that their crates held nothing but bones, the Japanese soldiers left them at the roadside. It was the last that was ever seen of them.

In the meantime, back on Dubois’s old turf of Java, a team led by Ralph von Koenigswald had found another group of early humans, which became known as the Solo People from the site of their discovery on the Solo River at Ngandong. Koenigswald’s discoveries might have been more impressive still but for a tactical error that was realized too late. He had offered locals ten cents for every piece of hominid bone they could come up with, then discovered to his horror that they had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones to maximize their income.