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Black worked busily, carefully freeing the skull from its stone matrix and later making a cast of it. Copies of the cast were sent to museums all over the world. The site itself was purchased by the Geological Survey of China.

In September of 1930, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith arrived in Peking to inspect the site of the discovery and examine the fossils. During Smith’s stay, Black primed him for a propaganda blitz on behalf of Peking man. Smith then departed, and apparently did his job well. In December, Black wrote an extremely candid letter to Dr. Henry Houghton, director of the Peking medical school, who was vacationing in America: “I am thrilled beyond words to know how much you enjoyed Grafton Elliot Smith. . . . he is Irish to the extent that a friend is always spoken of in lurid hyperbole and, though I love him for it, I get the collywobbles when I reflect the brazen way I have plotted to have him exercise his talent in this respect on my behalf. . . . I warned him to hold off’n me . . . but your letter makes it clear that that balloon is busted and I’m the chappee who must spend the rest of his days trying to live up to and live down the reputation acquired by his own rash act.” This rash act appears to have been the Sinanthropus discovery.

Black went on to say: “But you, too, are dripping with the gore of the same hegoat and I love you, for your soul is white if your hood be scarlet and your aid, comfort and participation in the plot from its inception made success possible and doubly enjoyable. . . . You must admit that we have not been any blushing roses when it came to turning our wolf loose (if you don’t mind mixed metaphors)—if I blushed every time I thought of the cold-blooded advertising campaign I thought of and G. E. S. has carried through, I’d be permanently purple” (Hood 1964, p. 115).

Cold-blooded advertising campaign? That is not the way most people think scientific discoveries normally make their way into academic acceptance and public notice. Black is to be commended for his forthright statements. In any case, having turned the wolf of Sinanthropus loose on the world, he received many honors, including appointments as honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and honorary member of America’s National Academy of Sciences (Hood 1964, p. 116). Black was later elected a fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s foremost assembly of scientists.

His newly won fame also insured continued access to Rockefeller Foundation funds. Black wrote to Sir Arthur Keith: “We had a cable from Elliot Smith yesterday so he is evidently safe home after his strenuous trip. He characteristically has not spared himself in serving the interests of the Survey and the Cenozoic Laboratory and after his popularizing Sinanthropus for us in America I should have a relatively easy task before me a year from now when I will have to ask for more money from the powers that be” (Hood 1964, p. 116).

Peking man had come at just the right moment for advocates of human evolution. A few years previously, in one of the most famous trials in the world’s history, a Tennessee court had found John T. Scopes guilty of teaching evolution in violation of state law. Scientists wanted to fight back hard. Thus any new evidence bearing on the question of human evolution was highly welcome.

Then there had been the matter of Hesperopithecus, a highly publicized prehistoric ape-man constructed in the minds of paleoanthropologists from a single humanlike tooth found in Nebraska. To the embarrassment of the scientists who had promoted this human ancestor, the humanlike tooth had turned out to be that of a fossil pig.

Meanwhile, the lingering doubts and continuing controversy about Dubois’s Pithecanthropus erectus also needed to be resolved. In short, scientists in favor of evolutionary ideas, reacting to external threat and internal disarray, were in need of a good discovery to rally their cause.

Concerning the Java fossils, Jia Lanpo wrote: “The problem of what species did the owner of the remains belong to had not been settled.