ancient history
Michael McGirr
Penny van Oosterzee
Dragon Bones: the story of Peking Man
Allen & Unwin $24.95pb, 198pp
1 86508 123 X
THE WEEK I READ this book, three separate people asked me what my
plans were for New Year's Eve. They all expected I wanted to
organise something special for the turn of the millennium. My
only gesture so far in that direction has been to enter a
competition. If I win, I and nine of my friends, if I can find
that many, will be flown to Sydney on December 31. We will sit
in a swish hotel and watch the third millennium dawn over Sydney
Harbour. Then we will be transferred to the airport and flown
across the dateline to Hawaii so we can watch the millennium dawn
all over again. We will be having a once in a lifetime experience
twice in one day. Frankly, I'd rather win the tea canister from
Lan Choo for which I have also entered.
Dragon Bones is the perfect book to read on December 31,
1999. The main characters in it are millions of years old. One
of them is called Lucy. Her remains, described as 'harder to find
and more precious than diamonds' were discovered in Ethiopia in 1973. Lucy was 105 centimetres tall and weighed 27 kilograms. Her teeth were the same size as a 200 kg gorillas. She was not recognisably human. Or was she? If she wasn't, where can you draw a line between human and pre-human life? Dragon Bones jousts with the difficult question of what it is that constitutes human being. While the archaeological story it tells is far longer than a mere 2,000 years, it is also frighteningly contemporary. It offers philosophy with little abstraction. It uses a narrative to probe questions of human identity. It makes the turn of a millennium feel like just another day.
Like small bones buried hundreds of metres below the earth's surface, this kind of science writing is a rare find. Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 attributes the dawn of human identity to the first stirrings of grief and loss, emotions which Stanley Kubrick, who turned the book into a film, seemed incapable of understanding. But Dragon Bones , is not science fiction. Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, one of the last popular books which could ever have been published with such an exclusive title, says that the hallmark of humanity is creativity: 'Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.' But Dragon Bones is not so speculative. It works by suggestion.
In 1919, one Davidson Black arrived in China to take up a professorship at the Peking Union Medical College. During the years of China's civil war, he continued his research. In 1927, his team unearthed a single human tooth. Armies were warring on both sides of the dig. Such was Black's sense of both the significance and fragility of the discovery that he had a secure brass capsule made so he could keep the find safely around his neck. In December 1929, a human skull was found. The existence of another species of human, known as Peking Man, had been established. Slowly, more and more evidence came to light.
Penny van Oosterzee recreates the fine detail involved in archaeological detective work of this kind. She weaves the story of Davidson Black, his collaborators and successors in and around the history of China's tragic century. She deals with the moral ambiguity of foreign scientists damaging fields and crops and expatriating their plunder. At the same time, one of the most moving and powerful sequences concerns what happened to the remains of Peking Man during the chaos of World War II. Nobody knows for sure. It appears most likely that, having been painstakingly packed into crates and put on a train,The train was halted by Japanese troops, who ransacked the luggage, including perhaps the treasure boxes. As a result, the unassuming-looking fossils would have been scattered and smashed along the railway line, the protective tissue paper, cotton and gauze left blowing in the wind.