Bones of Contention

Chinaside marines of the Old Corps had some strange responsibilities, but the colonel of the embassy guard in Peking suspected that chaperoning a collection of old bones was asking too much. Then Dr. Henry S. Houghton, director of Peking Union Medical College, explained what was in the boxes: the yellowed fossils were more than 500,000 years old, the only known remains of Peking man.* It was a few days before Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and Chinese authorities were anxious to get the bones to the U.S. before they were seized by the Japanese.

The marines were none too sure that they would get out of China themselves. But they packed the bones with their own gear, shipped everything on the Manchurian railway and planned to meet an American transport at the coastal town of Chinwangtao. A hospital corpsman was designated as escort for the bones, but the escort missed the train. A few days later marines, train, and transport were all in Japanese hands.

Diligent search by Japanese soldiers, who had been tipped off by a Tokyo anthropologist, failed to uncover the fossils. Postwar investigations by American scientists and marines were equally unsuccessful, although the searchers traced missing freight cars, ranged from Chinwangtao south to Tingtao, poked into long-sealed "godowns."

Sentimental Loss. Paleontologists felt little more than a sentimental sense of loss. Before Pearl Harbor, plaster casts had been made of the ancient bones and shipped to a number of Western museums. The cast of a female Peking cranium, fondly known as Suzanne, was built up into a composite skull. Then, early last spring, Dr. Pei Wen-chung, one of the men who found remnants of Peking man in a limestone cave at Choukoutien, sounded off in the Chinese Communist newspaper, Ta Kung Pao. The Japanese had indeed captured the fossils, he said: they had been shipped to Tokyo, later seized by American forces and shipped to the U.S. Last week Dr. Yang Chien-kien, head of the Chinese Institute of Anthropology at Peking, joined the chorus. Americans, he said, had stolen one of the world's paleontological treasures.

"Nonsense," retorted Dr. Harry L. Shapiro, head anthropologist at New York's Museum of Natural History. "What would we want them for? ... It just makes good propaganda."

Mortal Remains. Speculating on what actually happened to the bones, American scientists remembered still another theory: they had gotten as far as Tientsin, where they were loaded on a lighter for transfer to an offshore freighter. The lighter capsized and the precious boxes either sank or drifted away.

As far as Dr. Shapiro is concerned, Drs. Pei and Yang are taking soundings, trying to goad American scientists into disclosing, if they know, the whereabouts of the fossils. But American scientists obviously do not know. The bones may have been destroyed by ignorant Japanese soldiers, may lie at the bottom of Tientsin harbor or may still be waiting discovery in some godown. There is also a chance that they were pulverized and eaten by Chinese peasants, since ground "dragon's bones" (fossils) have made strong medicine in China for centuries. In one form or another, the remains of Peking man are probably still in his native land.

*Sinanthropus pekinensis, dating back to the Pleistocene era, is believed by some anthropologists to be older than Pithecanthropus erectus, the brutish apeman of Java.

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