Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [370]
There the matter rested until 1926. In that year, the Crown Prince of Sweden, who was chairman of the Swedish China Research Committee and a patron of paleontological research, planned to visit Peking. Professor Wiman of the University of Uppsala, asked Zdansky, his former student, if he had come across anything interesting that could be presented to the Prince. Zdansky sent Wiman a report, with photographs, on the teeth he had found at Choukoutien. The report, later published in the Bulletin of the Geological Survey of China, was duly presented by J. Gunnar Andersson to a meeting in Peking, attended by the Crown Prince. Andersson declared in regard to the teeth: “The man I predicted had been found” (von Koenigswald 1956, p. 41).
9.1.2 Davidson Black
Another person who thought Zdansky’s teeth represented clear evidence of fossil man was Davidson Black, a young Canadian physician residing in Peking.
Davidson Black graduated from the University of Toronto medical school in 1906. To satisfy his strong interest in anatomy, he took a post at Western Reserve University in Ohio, where he worked with T. Wingate Todd, a noted English anatomist.
Todd was an associate of Grafton Eliot Smith, familiar to us from our discussion of Piltdown man (Chapter 8). A forceful advocate of human evolutionary theory, Todd organized at Western Reserve University an extensive skeletal museum, including casts of bones from all known forms of fossil man. Under Todd, Davidson Black therefore had an opportunity to become acquainted with the latest developments in the field of paleoanthropology.
In 1914, Black went to Manchester, England, to work under Grafton Elliot Smith, who was then occupied with Piltdown man. Black also developed a friendly relationship with Sir Arthur Keith, accompanying him to the Piltdown site.
In a letter of recommendation, Smith wrote of Black: “during his stay in my department he has seized every opportunity of familiarizing himself with the problem of human phylogeny [evolution]” (Hood 1964, p. 27).
After returning to Western Reserve, Black read Climate and Evolution by William Diller Matthew. In 1911, Matthew had said in an address to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States: “All authorities are today agreed in placing the center of dispersal of the human race in Asia. Its more exact location may be differently interpreted, but the consensus of modern opinion would place it probably in or about the great plateau of central Asia” (Osborn 1928, p. 192).
Today the center of dispersal is viewed as Africa rather than central Asia, and all fossil evidence must therefore be interpreted in light of an African origin. For example, most paleoanthropologists now believe that Homo sapiens sapiens evolved in southern Africa about 100,000 years ago, and then spread throughout the world, diversifying into the present races. But other scientists concerned with human origins, such as Carleton S. Coon (1969), have said the fossil evidence shows that the several modern human races evolved separately from Homo erec tus in Africa, Europe, and Asia. However, as we have several times noted, it is only by excluding or reinterpreting vast quantities of reported evidence that any evolutionary hypothesis whatsoever can be maintained.
From the time he first became acquainted with Matthew’s ideas in 1915, Black intended to go to northern China to search for the center of human origins (Hood 1964, p. 35). But the First World War delayed his plans.
9.1.3 The Rockefeller Foundation Sends Black to China
In 1917, Black joined the Canadian military medical corps. Meanwhile, a friend of Black, Dr. E. V. Cowdry, was named head of the anatomy department at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Peking Union Medical College. Cowdry asked Dr. Simon Flexner, director of the Rockefeller Foundation, to appoint Black as his assistant. After meeting Flexner in New York, Black was accepted and wrote to a colleague: “In addition to my work at the school I shall