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The Peking Man fossils discovered at Zhoukoudian in north-east China in the 1920s and 1930s were some of the most extensive palaeoanthropological finds of the twentieth century. This article examines their publicization and discussion in Britain, where they were engaged with by some of the world's leading authorities in human evolution, and a media and public highly interested in human-origins research. This international link - simultaneously promoted by scientists in China and in Britain itself - reflected wider debates on international networks; the role of science in the modern world; and changing definitions of race, progress and human nature. This article illustrates how human-origins research was an important means of binding these areas together and presenting scientific work as simultaneously authoritative and credible, but also evoking mystery and adventurousness. Examining this illustrates important features of contemporary views of both science and human development, showing not only the complexities of contemporary regard for the international and public dynamics of scientific research, but wider concerns over human nature, which oscillated between optimistic notions of unity and progress and pessimistic ones of essential differences and misdirected development.
The Peking Man fossils discovered at Zhoukoudian in north-east China in the 1920s and 1930s were some of the most extensive palaeoanthropological finds of the twentieth century. This article examines their publicization and discussion in Britain, where they were engaged with by some of the world's leading authorities in human evolution, and a media and public highly interested in human-origins research. This international link - simultaneously promoted by scientists in China and in Britain itself - reflected wider debates on international networks; the role of science in the modern world; and changing definitions of race, progress and human nature. This article illustrates how human-origins research was an important means of binding these areas together and presenting scientific work as simultaneously authoritative and credible, but also evoking mystery and adventurousness. Examining this illustrates important features of contemporary views of both science and human development, showing not only the complexities of contemporary regard for the international and public dynamics of scientific research, but wider concerns over human nature, which oscillated between optimistic notions of unity and progress and pessimistic ones of essential differences and misdirected development.
One hundred and sixty years ago, fossilized human remains were discovered in the Neander valley of north-west Germany. 1 Twenty-five years ago, Misia Landau published Narratives of Human Evolution, her structural analysis of human origin accounts. 2 Separating these events were the discoveries of thousands more hominid fossils and hundreds of thousands more stone tools. The interpretation of these remains posed a series of conceptual and methodological challenges for scholars, as they became focal points of interest for many established and nascent scientific disciplines. Anatomists, geologists, archaeologists and palaeontologists all approached the excavated material from different perspectives, and even members of the same disciplines did not themselves necessarily agree. Forceful debate within the academy was matched by intense media and public interest: people were able to follow in near real time via The Times and The Guardian as excavations and expeditions unearthed new material, while considering at greater leisure the lengthier elucidation of these discoveries by armchair or lab-stool savants.The stones and bones discovered both before and since 1856 have direct implications for the understandings of what constitutes humanity: their analysis and understanding
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