Eugene O'Neill's short play, The First Man, is a tale of birth, death, scandal, and family infighting, all involving an anthropologist set to scour Asia in search of the earliest humans. Collected with two other plays (The Hairy Ape and Anna Christie) in a 1922, the play contains a fleeting reflection of the scientific consensus at the time.
For a variety of reasons, from the pattern of fossil finds to racism and "pithecophobia", Asia was the preferred place to look for the earliest humans. (See Peter Bowler's Theories of Human Evolution for a survey, and Constance Clark's God - or Gorilla for view of human evolution in the 1920's.) It was not long after O'Neill's play was performed at The Neighborhood Playhouse at 466 Grand Street in New York City that the first remains of "Sinanthropus" (Homo erectus to you and me) would be found at Dragon Bone Hill in China. Perhaps influenced by the view of Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, O'Neill provided the following background for the anthropologist in the play;
Curtis--[With an earnest enthusiasm.] And this expedition is what you call a large affair, Big. It's the largest thing of its kind ever undertaken. The possibilities, from the standpoint of anthropology, are limitless.
Bigelow--[With a grin.] Aha! Now we come to the Missing Link!
Curtis--[Frowning.] Darn your Barnum and Bailey circus lingo, Big. This isn't a thing to mock at. I should think the origin of man would be something that would appeal even to your hothouse imagination. Modern science believes--knows--that Asia was the first home of the human race. That's where we're going, to the great Central Asian plateau north of the Himalayas.
Bigelow--[More soberly.] And there you hope to dig up--our first ancestor?
Curtis--It's a chance in a million, but I believe we may, myself--at least find authentic traces of him so that we can reconstruct his life and habits. I was up in that country a lot while I was mining advisor to the Chinese government--did some of my own work on the side. The extraordinary results I obtained with the little means at my disposal convinced me of the riches yet to be uncovered. The First Man may be among them.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
As I recall, Roy Chapman Andrews' expedition to the Gobi in 1922 was to find human ancestors. Andrews made some stunning discoveries, including dinosaur eggs and the 20-foot tall hornless rhinoceros Paraceratherium, but alas, no members of our lineage. It was part of institutional racist dogma at the time that our evolutionary relatives would be found in Asia, and not "primitive" Africa. I'm happy to know that such ideologues were proven wrong, and that we first stood on our own two feet in Africa, even if there have been amazing finds in Asia.
Raymond; Right. The expedition was not only to find "Eohomo" among what Osborn thought as the more vigorous environment of Asia, but of all mammals in general. Andrewsarchus was another fascinating creature found during the expedition.
Racism was definitely one of the factors anthropologists preferred Asia as the birthplace of humanity, but it was not the only reason. Recent fossil humans came from Europe, and Dubois had found "Pithecanthropus" (again, Homo erectus) in Indonesia, so Asia seemed like a good place to look. The discovery of "Sinanthropus" seemed to confirm what had been suspected, and even when Australopithecus was discovered, it was overlooked in favor of Asian hominins.
Even though we often credit Darwin with asserting that we evolved in Africa, his hypothesis was only really supported on indirect evidence; the presence of gorillas and chimpanzees. Dubois used much the same logic, using orangutans and gibbons, in his preference of Indonesia.
Like I said, racism definitely played a part, but from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, Asia really seemed like the best place to look. Their preferences were influenced by subjective factors, but I would not consider them all to be racist ideologues.