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By Root 1260 0

a twist in the direction which agrees with their theories. A man may imagine, for example, that the law of progress in pre-historic industries must show itself everywhere and always in the smallest details. Seeing the simultaneous presence in a deposit of carefully finished artefacts and others of a coarser type, he decides that there must be two levels: the lower one yielding the coarser specimens. He will class his finds according to their type, not according to the stratum in which he found them. If at the base he finds a finely worked implement he will declare there has been accidental penetration and that the specimen must be re-integrated with the site of its origin by placing it with the items from the higher levels. He will end with real trickery in the stratigraphic presentation of his specimens; trickery in aid of a pre-conceived idea, but more or less unconsciously done by a man of good faith whom no one would call fraudulent. The case is often seen, and if I mention no names it is not because I do not know any” (Vere 1959, pp. 1–2).

This sort of thing goes on not just in the British Museum, but in all museums, universities, and other centers of paleoanthropological research the world over. Although each separate incident of knowledge filtration seems minor, the cumulative effect is overwhelming, serving to radically distort and obscure our picture of human origins and antiquity.

An abundance of facts suggests that beings quite like ourselves have been around as far back as we care to look—in the Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene, and beyond. Remains of apes and apelike men are also found throughout the same expanse of time. So perhaps all kinds of hominids have coexisted throughout history. If one considers all the available evidence, that is the clearest picture that emerges. It is only by eliminating a great quantity of evidence— keeping only the fossils and artifacts that conform to preconceived notions—that one can construct an evolutionary sequence. Such unwarranted elimination of evidence, evidence as solidly researched as anything now accepted, represents a kind of deception carried out by scientists desiring to maintain a certain theoretical point of view. This deception is apparently not the result of an deliberately organized plot, as with the Piltdown man forgery (if that is what Piltdown man was). It is instead the inevitable outcome of social processes of knowledge filtration operating within the scientific community.

But although there may be a lot of unconscious fraud in paleoanthropology, the case of Piltdown demonstrates that the field also has instances of deception of the most deliberate and calculating sort.

Peking Man and Other Finds in China

After the discoveries of Java man and Piltdown man, ideas about human evolution remained unsettled. Dubois’s Pithecanthropus erectus fossils did not win complete acceptance among the scientific community, and Piltdown simply complicated the matter. Scientists waited eagerly for the next important discoveries—which they hoped would clarify the evolutionary development of the Hominidae. Many thought the desired hominid fossils would be found in China.

Eventually, such fossils did turn up, at Choukoutien, near Peking. The creature to which the bones originally belonged was designated Peking man or Sinanthropus. The Peking man fossils were lost to science during World War II, but more fossil discoveries were made in the postwar era. In this chapter, we will discuss the controversial nature of the Peking man fossils and the questionable practice of dating later Chinese hominid fossils by their morphology, in the absence of more secure means of determining their actual age.

In the course of this discussion, the reader will be confronted with various spellings of names of Chinese geographical locations and scientists. Over the years, scholars have adopted different conventions for rendering Chinese names into English. For example, Peking is now spelled Beijing. And Choukoutien is now spelled Zhoukoudian. In the first part of the chapter, we use