Embryogeny and Phylogeny of the Human Posture 2. Anne Dambricourt Malasse
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Mission in China” as soon as possible. In 1923, an agreement was reached between the Muséum and three financial backers, the Ministry of Public Instruction, the Académie des Sciences and the IPH. Teilhard de Chardin was officially attached to the IPH as a geologist-paleontologist with a spacious office reserved for chair professors and which was assigned to him until December 1954.
He was therefore commissioned on behalf of the IPH to enrich the collections. In accordance with the Jesuits, the single specimens would be sent to France, while duplicates would remain at the Museum of Tien-Tsin. The latter would be entirely financed by the French State (French Embassy and Mission for the fieldworks and studies of Teilhard). The reasons for his visits to China were exclusively scientific.
Teilhard left the Catholic Institute of Paris during the summer vacation and planned to resume his classes at the start of the 1923 academic year, unaware that he had just lost his status as professor. A confidential note written on the dogma of “original sin” confronted with the simian origins of Man was sent to the Holy Office which immediately suspended his teaching duties. Teilhard joined Licent in Tien-Tsin to explore the Ordos loop of the Yellow River. As early as 22 July, 1923, they discovered the first Chinese prehistoric locality in situ at Shui-Dong-Gou (Choei Tung K’eou). They returned with three tons of fossils loaded on 30 donkeys and mules and sent 100 kg of stone tools to the IPH. The prehistoric collection was presented to the Academy of Sciences by its perpetual secretary, Alfred Lacroix (1863–1948), geologist at the Muséum, who obtained the funds for the Mission. The lithic technology dated from the ancient Upper Paleolithic (40,000–25,000 years). This presentation marked the official birth of Chinese prehistory. Lacroix wrote to Teilhard to announce the continuation of the Mission on the orders of Marcellin Boule and the Jesuit Superior General. Relations with the Holy Office were tense, and he was forced to spend the winter of 1923/1924 between Tien-Tsin and Beijing.
In France, Louis Vialetton was deconstructing Lamarcko-Darwinian gradualism. Teilhard took advantage of this discovery to affirm his position and wrote a text in 1925 entitled “L’hominisation. Introduction à une étude scientifique du Phénomène humain” (Hominization. Introduction to a scientific study of the human phenomenon), which was unpublished until 1957:
Illusion, the ordered, organized, inescapable distribution of the living through time and space? This I deny with all the strength of my paleontological experience. There is a natural (i.e. scientific) reason for the phenomenon of their successive appearance. (Teilhard de Chardin, Le paradoxe transformiste, 1925, author’s translation)
Vialleton did not question evolution but rather the impotence of the Lamarcko-Darwinian model to account for the complexity of organisms, and the evolution of these organized complexities, while Teilhard was convinced of an organic uniqueness between geophysics and biophysics, between organisms and their environments considered at the biospheric and atmospheric scales of the planet. He would often tend to confuse physics with nature. Physics is a scientific discipline that studies light, phenomena of attraction (magnetization), the smallest levels of organization that always refer to forces of attraction, cohesion or repulsion, electromagnetics, waves and/or particles. This science extrapolates what the eyes do not see with equations, and, for evolution, a science confronted with the phylogenetic and irreversible self-organization processes that cannot be reproduced experimentally and that will escape measurement forever. Evolution in the past is not an illusion thanks to fossils, but its explanation will always be a theory limited by the absence of its object of study: the scientific reconstruction of a series of successive ontogenetic transformations, will always be that of a disappeared duration.
Teilhard worked over long durations, which made all the difference with regard to the hyper-specialization of paleoanthropology at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, which is limited to very short periods, or to very specific taxa such as the Neanderthal, Homo erectus or Homo sapiens. Deprived of geochronological hindsight, the specialization on a short lineage of taxa is thus unable to identify an emergence process involving the central nervous system and its straightening dynamics. Limiting the study of a fossil to its ecological context would result in the simplification of the interpretation of innovative traits by placing them all at the same level: that of the variety of a trait at a given instant t, without considering the structural context, which obeys neither the same rhythms nor the same morphogenetic rules influenced by past history and stored in memory in sexual cells.
The Earth is a dynamic system that evolves ineluctably toward a state of equilibrium because of the cooling of its core; for Teilhard and the geologists this reality must never be lost sight of, under the biosphere the planet is cooling and the crust moves accordingly. Hominization is part of the irreversible organic co-evolutions of this planetary geological scale, it continues the mega-evolution that generated the increasing complexity of the nervous system and of the organization that it controls, this evidence is no longer perceived today because of the hyper-specialization on fossil anatomical details.
For Teilhard, the formation of the biosphere was prolonged by the “anthroposphere”. He distinguished the place of the human phenomenon in this mega-evolution thanks to long geological durations. Hominization was said to be orthogenetic, or oriented, and he called it “orthogenèse de fond” or “background orthogenesis”, insofar as it prolonged the complexification of the central nervous system. Teilhard developed his thought by comparing the human lineage from the prosimian stem with other mammalian phylums he studied. The Paninae (gorilla and chimpanzee) and the hominins have a common ancestor, but Paninae’s lineage diverged from this “background orthogenesis” 8 million years ago, forming divergent branches, whereas hominins were the manifestation of this “background orthogenesis”, they were the apex of the growing trunk. And China was going to prove it with what the eyes see immediately: the organization of the cerebral hemispheres.
2.6. Peking Man: a small brain but well-cut tools
Forced to stay in China in 1923, Teilhard became closer to the scientific community that met regularly in Beijing, which was divided into foreign legations. He reconnected with Wong Wenhao, who he had met in Brussels, and met Johann Andersson’s team, who organized the study of the Zhoukoudian karst. A Canadian doctor, Davidson Black (1884–1934), taught at the Peking Union Medical College, the nascent American Faculty of Medicine built in 1921 thanks to the Rockefeller funds. Black held the chair of Neurology and Embryology and later became head of the Department of Anatomy. He had been interested in the origin of man since he took anatomy courses with Elliot Smith (1871–1937) at the University of Manchester, when he described the remains of Piltdown Man. Black hypothesized the original cradle of the Tarsiiformes by visualizing the Earth from the North Pole, showing how the fossiliferous and present-day zones of Southeast Asia, North America and Western Europe converge toward Tibet. His article was published in Beijing in 1925 (Black 1925). The theory of a vast cradle of hominization in Central Asia took shape, supported by the Miocene great apes of the Himalayan foothills. Black was convinced of the existence of a hotbed of emergence in the final Tertiary, going back 1 million years, with Tibet as the epicenter, surrounded by India to the south, the Tarim Basin to the north and the Yunling or Youn-Ling mountains to the east (Yunnan). This was therefore supported by paleontological data (Sivapithecus, Pithecanthropus) and primatology, which observed a concentration of species derived from large groups of primates: Tarsiiformes, Hylobatidae (gibbon) and the great apes (orangutan). Africa did not offer anything equivalent; Charles Darwin did not write that the origins of Man could be found only in Africa, he wrote that the cradle could be in Europe, Asia and, indeed, why not in Africa, because of the presence of chimpanzees and gorillas (Darwin 1871).
China took new measures and prohibited the sending of fossils abroad. In 1926, Teilhard was definitively excluded from the chair of Geology at the Catholic Institute, and Marcellin Boule was forced to resign, since Licent was no longer allowed to send the collections. His only attachment remained to the IPH and he wanted the Institute and the Muséum to contribute to the development of paleontology in China. In October 1926, the Crown Prince of Sweden, Gustav VI, who was also an archeologist, was received by the Geological Survey of China. A colloquium was organized in his honor at the Peking Union Medical