Embryogeny and Phylogeny of the Human Posture 2. Anne Dambricourt Malasse
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ceded by the imperial power of the Qing Dynasty, notably in Tien-Tsin (Tianjin) in northeast China. It was a port city on the Yellow Sea, 100 km south of Beijing. Father Emile Licent (1876–1952), a naturalist from the French Jesuit mission, had taught there since 1914. He regularly went prospecting in northern China: the Tcheu-Ly plain, the Mongolian plains, the Yellow River basin or Hoang Ho, the province of Shaanxi and the Tibetan steps in Gansu. The year 1920 was promising. Licent came back from Gansu with 84 camels loaded with fossils collected in loess, as well as quartz stones that appeared to be cut. They were collected at the base of these same loess that marked the end of the Middle Pleistocene (120,000 years). Fossils were piling up at the Mission. Licent needed a museum, a laboratory and a collaborator to sort, identify and store them. He therefore contacted Marcellin Boule and sent him specimens, who entrusted them to a paleontologist who had just defended a particularly brilliant thesis, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), also a Jesuit, like his colleague from Tien-Tsin.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a native of the Auvergne, and the history of the Earth had fascinated him since childhood, especially geophysics and tectonics, which he studied on the island of Jersey. He was also passionate about paleontology, which he practiced by collecting fossils, particularly in Fayoum, Egypt, when he taught at the School of the Holy Family in Cairo. He passed his theologate in 1911, in exile at Ore Place, Hastings (UK). When his studies were complete, he returned to France at the age of 31 years. On July 19, 1912, he went to the paleontology laboratory of the Muséum, asking to meet Marcellin Boule who was about to leave for his summer vacation. The latter received him straight away:
Do you remember our first interview, around mid-July 1912? That day, I came timidly, around 2 o’clock, to ring the doorbell. It was the (sacred!) eve of your departure for your vacation and very busy. However Thévenin relented. You received me anyway. And you suggested to me to come and work at your home, at Gaudry’s school, at your school. (Teilhard de Chardin, Jubilé de Marcellin Boule, 1937, author’s translation)
Since the discovery of L’Homme de la Chapelle-aux-Saints, Marcellin Boule had become the French authority on human paleontology. The reason for this warm reception could only be a strong argument. It was a still unheard of discovery in the south of England, in the village of Piltdown, 100 km from Hastings. Teilhard witnessed it on June 2, 1912, invited to observe by the paleontologist Sir Arthur Smith Woodward (1864–1944). This discovery firmly placed the cradle of Homo sapiens in England and left the Neanderthals to old Europe.
Teilhard had read On the Origin of Species by Darwin but he did not know Lamarck, he had no training in anthropology and prehistory, he did not know what an excavation was and had no interest in the origins of Man. Marcellin Boule took the news seriously and directed Teilhard de Chardin to Henri Breuil in order to learn how to excavate and identify stone tools. He directed him to the work of the Paleontology Laboratory as early as 1912. Boule began the study of the Neanderthals of La Ferrassie; nobody understood the co-evolution of the neurocranium and the face better than him.
The discovery of Piltdown was announced by the British press in December of the same year and an illustrated description was published in 1913 (Dawson and Smith Woodward 1913). Boule immediately concluded that it was an ape’s jaw – which can be seen at first glance – and fragments of a human skull, with the “modern” cerebellar fossa. It was a typical model of the Pithecanthropus, but inverted: a modern neurocranium with a simian face. In other words, this showed the degradation of the fundamentals laid down by Georges Cuvier, with the principle of correlations. Boule never included these bones in his encyclopedia on human fossils and Teilhard would hardly ever refer to them, relying on his master. The “fossil” was a fake, composed of a neurocranium of present-day man and an orangutan mandible; the deception would be recognized definitively in 1959.
The Piltdown Man was the most incredible fraud in paleoanthropology. Teilhard was 29 years old and finishing his theology studies. He would never get over the idea that Sir Arthur Smith Woodward had deceived him, because his presence brought no credit, he represented no institution and he wasn’t looking for any kind of future in prehistory. The author of the scoop, Charles Dawson, had specified in his article, co-authored with Smith Woordward, that Teilhard was not involved in the discovery, the glory belonged to Charles Dawson alone, a subject of His Majesty King George V. In his book on the Piltdown affair, Herbert Thomas, a paleontologist affiliated to the chair of Prehistory and Paleoanthropology at the Collège de France, did not hesitate to qualify the accusations of fraud brought against Teilhard by the British paleontologist Louis Leakey (1903–1972) and the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) as being in bad faith (Gould 1980). The investigation was prefaced by Yves Coppens, honorary member of the Teilhard de Chardin Foundation, located in the Jardin des Plantes of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (Thomas 2002).
Welcomed by Marcellin Boule, Pierre Teilhard enrolled at La Sorbonne in 1912 to study for a bachelor’s degree in geology and paleontology. In 1914, Boule entrusted him with the study of an important collection of carnivore fossils from the region of Reims, bequeathed to him by Victor Lemoine, Professor of natural history at the medical school of said city (and future director of the Muséum). These fossils were among the oldest specimens of mammals, between 59 and 49 Ma, from the beginning of the Eocene (the second stage of the Tertiary era). They were collected in the northern hemisphere, in an age when tropical forests extended beyond 50° latitude, from Canada to Mongolia. This was the warmest period since the end of the Secondary era (the extinction of the dinosaurs).
French research had lagged behind in the comparative study of the fauna of this period.
On August 3, 1914, Germany declared war on France, and Teilhard was mobilized as a stretcher-bearer and a nurse, sent to the front and moved to the trenches of the various large battlefields. He came back deeply affected by the experience. When the First World War ended, he obtained his bachelor’s degree in 1919 and enrolled for a thesis in 1920. Teilhard was confronted with scientific knowledge that had discredited the supernatural character of the Bible and had put the character of Yeshua (Jesus) back into its historical context by Ernest Renan (1823–1892), a convinced evolutionist. The Jesuit had to reconsider 30 years of Catholic doctrine, shaken by 4 years of war, searching for the wounded between shell craters and corpses. He followed the courses of geologist Gustave Haugh (1861–1927) in the tradition of Georges Buffon at the Sorbonne, and completed his study of the tectonics of the island of Jersey, learning to reason on a planetary scale:
It is rational to admit that each continental unit has had its own fauna as long as it has remained isolated, that migrations occur whenever land communications are established with a neighboring unit, and that the fauna best organized in the struggle for existence manages to establish itself and push indigenous fauna to the more remote parts of the continent. If, later, continental unity is fragmented by a partial collapse, the remnants of fauna will allow the old connection to be re-established through thought. We can see what valuable services the study of terrestrial fauna can render us in attempts to reconstitute fragmented continents. (Haug, Les géosynclinaux et les aires continentales, 1900, author’s translation)
2.2. The primate ancestor of the human lineage in Montauban
Marcellin Boule suggested to Teilhard that he complete the Lemoine collection with those of the Museum of Montauban (in southwestern France) where fossils of carnivores from the phosphorites of Quercy dated from 38 to 34 Ma (Terminal Eocene) are preserved. Among the species of these phosphorites are tiny primates barely the size of a mouse, first described by Henri Filhol (1843–1902), the son of the curator of the Museum of Toulouse. They were classified in the group of prosimians of the Tertiary era called Necrolemur. Henri Filhol ended his career at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle as chair holder of Comparative Anatomy from 1894 to 1902. Paleontologists would therefore search among these fossils for those that would allow the identification of a possible ancestral lineage of the simians. In 1920, the name prosimian was still being used; it included several current families known in equatorial and tropical Africa, as well as in Madagascar and Southeast Asia. Lorisidae (from the name Loris described in 1796 by Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire) lived in Africa and Asia; Galagidae