Aztec Treasure House. Evan S. Connell
between reptile and mammal. He attempted to cross a carp with a goldfish in order to create a golden carp. He said he had unearthed a strange boat—half coracle, half canoe. Furthermore, he is known to have washed old bones with potassium bichromate.
Very well, suppose we ascribe the forgery to Dawson. Next, why did he do it? Why would Dawson, or anybody, go to all that trouble? For the pleasure of humiliating the authorities? To stir up a drowsy neighborhood? To make money? To obstruct and detour the search for knowledge?
And did he plan to reveal the hoax?
Fictional crimes are more gratifying: the author keeps you writhing in suspense, which is his job, but at last he tells you.
So much for cranks, fakes, jongleurs, and fanatics. Dawson, Hull, von Eckhart, M. Denis Henrion—no matter how diverting these testy eccentrics might be, they contributed nothing. They acted out their compulsions, that was all.
At the same time, offstage, a number of earnest men had been at work.
Eugène Dubois, following Darwin’s conjecture that originally we lived in a “warm, forest-clad land,” left Holland for the Dutch East Indies where he served with the colonial military forces as health officer, second class. In 1891 on the island of Java he unearthed some extremely heavy, chocolate-brown bones, harder than marble—remnants of a 700,000-year-old creature whose low skull resembled that of an ape, yet whose legs were adapted to walking erect. That the bones were ancient could not be disputed, but Dubois’ claim that they represented a transitional form of life was not greeted with much enthusiasm. Most professionals who examined these bones in Europe thought he had brought back the top of an ape and the bottom of a man.
A few years later a fossil-collecting German naturalist who was traveling through China noticed a human tooth in a druggist’s shop, where it was regarded as a dragon’s tooth and would soon have been ground up for medicine. This tooth, along with other fossilized scraps of humanity, led paleontologists to a hillside near the village of Choukoutien, southwest of Peking, which yielded the remains of some exceptionally old Chinese. But by now the Second World War was gathering and archaeological work became difficult, especially after Japanese forces occupied Choukoutien in 1939. Chinese scientists grew increasingly concerned, and in 1941 they asked that the fossils be taken to America.
It is known that the Choukoutien fossils were packed in two white wooden boxes, labeled A and B, destined for the port of Chingwangtao where they were to be put aboard the SS President Harrison. A detachment of U.S. Marines was assigned to guard them.
Almost certainly these boxes left the Peking Union Medical College in a car which was going either to the U.S. Embassy or to the Marine barracks.
Beyond this point the journey of the prehistoric Chinese is obscured by swirling mist. Their bones are said to have been scattered and lost when Japanese soldiers stopped a train carrying the Marines. They are said to have disappeared from a warehouse in Chingwangtao which was twice ransacked by the Japanese. They are said to have been aboard a barge that capsized before reaching the President Harrison—although this sounds unbelievable because the President Harrison ran aground at the mouth of the Yangtze, quite a long distance from Chingwangtao. Then there is the possibility that an enterprising chemist may have gotten hold of them, in which case we must assume they were pulverized and swallowed.
Even now, decades later, the search for these bones goes on. Considering how much evolutionary evidence has accumulated since 1941, we might ask why anthropologists are so anxious to locate one particular batch of fossils.
There has never been a loss of such magnitude, says Dr. Harry Shapiro of the American Museum of Natural History, “for these ancient bones represented a veritable population of at least forty individuals—men, women and children—from a stage of human evolution previously unknown. . . . Although a few additional representatives of this ancient population have recently been discovered as a result of renewed exploration by the Chinese, it is unlikely that anything approaching the original sample will ever be restored.”
Conceivably a few men might still be alive who know exactly what happened. If so, the inscrutable old Chinese could reappear. But more probably, somewhere between Peking and Chingwangtao, they passed from the hands of those who knew their scientific value into the hands of those who either didn’t know or didn’t care. And it is this last thought that appalls Dr. Shapiro, who reflects upon the dismay and sadness we would feel if we heard that Shakespeare’s manuscripts had been found, only to be burned by a maid who looked at them without comprehension.
In Africa it’s a different story, less tragic but more incredible because here we are concerned with men who supposedly knew what they were doing. The first important fossil turned up in Africa was contemptuously dismissed.
Momentous news is greeted like this more often than you would suspect. Einstein’s germinal bolt of lightning did not attract much notice for eight years. Francis Bacon anticipated Newton’s law of gravity by half a century, but the times were out of joint. The linguist Grotefend correctly deciphered an obscure cuneiform script and published his evidence in three reports, all of them ignored. Olaus Roemer, a seventeenth-century astronomer, discovered that light traveled at a fixed rate instead of propagating instantaneously, yet academic scientists rejected this idea for fifty years.
It happened again in 1924 when a Johannesburg anatomy professor named Raymond Dart reported on a miniature skull found in a limestone quarry near a railroad station called Taungs.
Two crates of fossil-bearing rock had been delivered to Professor Dart while he was getting dressed for the wedding of his friend Christo Beyers—“past international footballer and now senior lecturer in applied anatomy and operative surgery at the University of Witwatersrand.” Dart immediately opened both crates. The first was a disappointment; he saw nothing but petrified eggshells and turtle shells.
The second crate held a gem: nearly enclosed by rock was the skull.
Dart returned to it as soon as Beyers had been legally committed. With a hammer, a chisel, and one of Mrs. Dart’s knitting needles he set to work, delicately, because the little creature he meant to release had been imprisoned for almost a million years.
“No diamond cutter ever worked more lovingly or with such care on a priceless jewel,” he later wrote, “nor, I am sure, with such inadequate tools. But on the seventy-third day, December 23, the rock parted. I could view the face from the front, although the right side was still embedded. . . . What emerged was a baby’s face, an infant with a full set of milk teeth and its permanent molars just in the process of erupting. I doubt if there was ever any parent prouder of his offspring than I was of my ‘Taungs baby’ on that Christmas.”
The skull seemed to be that of a young ape, yet its cranium was too large—implying a large brain, a brain in which for the first time intellect might outweigh instinct—and its roundness suggested that the creature had walked erect. Dart estimated that when fully grown the baby would have been perhaps four feet tall and would have weighed about ninety pounds.
Cautiously he named it Australopithecus, Ape of the South; but in a paper for the British scientific journal Nature he pointed out certain human characteristics and indicated that his baby belonged in the family somewhere between Pongidae and Hominidae: “The specimen is of importance because it exhibits an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man.”
Not so! Not so in the least! cried European authorities, none of whom had examined the South African infant.
“Professor Dart is not likely to be led astray,” commented the British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith. “If he has thoroughly examined the skull we are prepared to accept his decision.” But presently Sir Arthur changed his mind: “. . . one is inclined to place Australopithecus in the same group or sub-family as the chimpanzee and gorilla. It is an allied genus. It seems to be near akin to both.”
“There are serious doubts. . . .” wrote Smith-Woodward of Piltdown fame.
“. . . the distorted skull of a chimpanzee just over four years old, probably a female,” said Professor Arthur Robinson.
Not