Quick Thoughts: The People's Peking Man

I cannot write a full review of it yet as I am only about 70 pages in, but so far I am very impressed by Sigrid Schmalzer's new book The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in 20th Century Science. Most of what I have previously learned about "Peking Man" (Homo erectus specimens from Dragon Bone Hill) had to do with its identification of it as an early human that, at the time, confirmed that Asia was the birthplace of humans. Unfortunately the fossils were lost when scientists tried to ship them out of the country for safekeeping at the onset of WWII, but surprisingly the fossils became even more popular after they went missing.

Why should this be so? As Schmalzer argues the place of "Peking Man" in our family tree was initially unclear and popularizers of science in republican China during Chiang Kai-shek's government did not pay much attention to the fossils. This may have been due to the fact that paleontology & paleoanthropology did not precisely fit in with the more established interest in archaeology.

This changed when China came under the communist rule of Mao Zedong. "Peking Man" became a symbol of national pride and an example of the improvement dedicated labor could bring. What I found striking, however, was the importance of "Peking Man" to social evolution. In the west it was thought that social evolution, the progressive improvement of cultures to higher and higher states, was driven by competition. It was a laissez-faire system where the "cream" of society would rise to the top and government intervention to help the poor defied this "natural" scheme. (See my review of Banquet at Delmonico's.)

Eastern social evolution, by contrast, put emphasis on the labor of the masses to drive society upwards through the various stages of development. The trajectory of society was similar but the means by which it was driven was communist and not based upon free market ideals. The reason that "Peking Man" had risen above the apes was because he (or more often she, as Schmalzer explains) had toiled so long in making stone tools. It was labor that created humanity and drove its continuing evolution.

This new sort of origin story was paired with a systematic effort to drive out superstition, be it creation stories or the activities of witch doctors. The role of "Peking Man" in China's history was to take center stage, and while the new "scientific" stories meshed well with preexisting beliefs the goal was to replace superstition with a grander narrative about the virtues of communal labor. This was not entirely successful, however, as the popularity of "wild men" (beings akin to Bigfoot that represent the transition from human to more bestial) illustrates.

As I stated above I still have much of the book to read but it is an absolutely fascinating book. I will write a full book review once I finish it.