A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [219]
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