1 Illustrated London News, 2 December 1933.

2 While many accounts of the history of palaeoanthropology assert how little studied it has been, this is no longer really the case: Goodrum, Matthew, ‘The history of human origins research and its place in the history of science: research problems and historiography’, History of Science (2009) 47, pp. 337–357CrossRefGoogle Scholar, sketches the current historiography. General surveys include Regal, Brian, Human Evolution: A Guide to the Debates, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004Google Scholar; and Bowler, Peter, Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate, 1844–1944, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986Google Scholar. Significant specific works are Sommer, Marianne, Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007Google Scholar; Moser, Stephanie, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998Google Scholar; and Clark, Constance Areson, God – or Gorilla: Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008Google Scholar. Theoretical works include Corbey, Raymond and Roebroeks, Wil (eds.), Studying Human Origins: Disciplinary History and Epistemology, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Landau, Misia, Narratives of Human Evolution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991Google Scholar; and Stoczkowski, Wiktor, Anthropologie naïve, anthropologie savante: De l'origine de l'homme de l'imagination et des idées reçues, Paris: CNRS, 1994Google Scholar.

3 Goodrum, op. cit. (2), p. 338.

4 The interaction between these is discussed in Kjærgaard, Peter, ‘The fossil trade: paying a price for human origins’, Isis (2012) 103, pp. 340–355Google Scholar.

5 Secord, James, ‘Knowledge in transit’, Isis (2004) 95, pp. 654–672Google Scholar; and the essays in Lightman, Bernard, McOuat, Gordon, and Stewart, Larry (eds.), The Circulation of Knowledge between Britain, India, and China: The Early-Modern World to the Twentieth Century, Leiden: Brill, 2013Google Scholar.

6 The excavations are discussed in Boaz, Noel and Ciochon, Russell, Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice-Age Saga of Homo erectus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004Google Scholar; Regal, op. cit. (2), pp. 82–93; and Shapiro, Harry, Peking Man, London: Simon and Schuster, 1974Google Scholar. Lanpo, Jia and Weiwan, Huang, The Story of Peking Man: From Archaeology to Mystery, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990Google Scholar; and Andersson, Johan Gunnar, Children of the Yellow Earth: Studies in Prehistoric China, London: Kegan Paul, 1934Google Scholar, provide participant accounts.

7 Schmalzer, Sigrid, The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008Google Scholar, is by far the best; also Sautman, Barry, ‘Peking Man and the politics of palaeoanthropological nationalism in China’, Journal of Asian Studies (2001) 60, pp. 95–124Google Scholar; and Leibold, James, ‘Competing narratives of racial unity in Republican China: from the Yellow Emperor to Peking Man’, Modern China (2006) 32, pp. 181–220Google Scholar. The author is grateful to one of the reviewers for suggesting Frängsmyr, Tore, Pekingmänniskan: En Historia Utan Slut, Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2006Google Scholar, as a work which engages with the extensive Swedish participation in Chinese geological networks.

8 The Guardian, 20 February 1930.

9 Illustrated London News, 4 March 1939.

10 The largest discussions are in Kjærgaard, Peter, ‘The missing link expeditions; or how the Peking Man wasn't found’, Endeavour (2012) 36, pp. 97–105Google Scholar; and the first chapter of Schmalzer, op. cit. (7), pp. 17–54.

11 Fan, Fa-ti, ‘Redrawing the map: science in twentieth-century China’, Isis (2007) 98, pp. 524–538, 531Google Scholar.

12 See the essays in Lawrence, Christopher and Mayer, Anna-K. (eds.), Regenerating England: Science, Medicine and Culture in Inter-war Britain, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000Google Scholar; Overy, Richard, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars, London: Allen Lane, 2009Google Scholar; Smith, Roger, ‘Biology and values in interwar Britain: C.S. Sherrington, Julian Huxley and the vision of progress’, Past and Present (2003) 178, pp. 210–242Google Scholar; and Bowler, Peter, Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009Google Scholar.

13 Smith, op. cit. (12), p. 242.

14 Daily Mirror, 21 December 1929.

15 Clark, op. cit. (2), p. 4.

16 See particularly Moser, op. cit. (2). Newspaper science is discussed in Bowler, op. cit. (12), pp. 185–214.

17 Its significance is noted by Bowler, op. cit. (12), p. 49; and Moser, op. cit. (2), pp. 154–156.

18 Bowler, op. cit. (12), pp. 48–49.

19 Cohen, Claudine, Un néanderthalien dans le métro, Paris: Seuil, 2007, p. 12Google Scholar. For more on changing concepts of Neanderthals see Sommer, Marianne, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall: Neanderthal as image and “distortion” in early 20th-century French science and press’, Social Studies of Science (2006) 36, pp. 207–240Google Scholar; and Hammond, Michael, ‘The expulsion of the Neanderthals from human ancestry: Marcellin Boule and the social context of scientific research’, Social Studies of Science (1982) 12, pp. 1–36Google Scholar.

20 While Sinanthropus literature tends to revolve around the ‘whodunnit’ fate of the specimens, Piltdown work tends to look for the perpetrator of the fraud. However, Goulden, Murray, ‘Boundary-work and the human–animal boundary: Piltdown Man, science and the media’, Public Understandings of Science (2009) 18, pp. 275–291Google Scholar; and Sawday, Jonathan, ‘“New men, strange faces, other minds”: Arthur Keith, race and the Piltdown affair (1912–53)’, in Ernst, Waltraud and Harris, Bernard (eds.), Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960, New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 259–288Google Scholar, place it within its contemporary media and scientific contexts.

21 Illustrated London News, 28 December 1912.

22 See Goodrum, Matthew and Olson, Cora, ‘The quest for an absolute chronology in human prehistory: anthropologists, chemists and the fluorine dating method in palaeoanthropology’, BJHS (2009) 42, pp. 95–114Google Scholar, for attempts to develop absolute dating methods in this period.

23 Daily Express, 7 August 1926.

24 See Schaffer, Gavin, Racial Science and British Society, 1930–62, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 45–47Google Scholar; and Overy, op. cit. (12), p. 197; Bowler, op. cit. (12), pp. 230–233; Sawday, op. cit. (20); and Rhodri Hayward, ‘The biopolitics of Arthur Keith and Morley Roberts’, in Lawrence and Mayer, op. cit. (12), pp. 251–274, 251.

25 Keith, Arthur, The Antiquity of Man, London: Williams & Norgate, 1929, p. ivGoogle Scholar.

26 There is rather less work on Elliot Smith than on Keith, and this tends to focus on his models of diffusionist archaeology. See Stout, Adam, Creating Prehistory: Druids, Ley Hunters and Archaeologists in Pre-war Britain, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 74–112Google Scholar; and Crook, Paul, Grafton Elliot Smith, Egyptology and the Diffusion of Culture: A Biographical Perspective, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012Google Scholar.

27 Smith, Elliot, Human History, London: Jonathan Cape, 1934, p. 73Google Scholar.

28 Elliott Smith, op. cit. (27), p. 497.

29 Barkan, Elazar, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 38–53Google Scholar; Sommer, op. cit. (2), pp. 187–212; and Misia Landau, ‘Keith's womb’, in Landau, op. cit. (2), pp. 67–101; and Landau, ‘Elliot Smith's tomb’, in ibid., pp. 102–42.

30 For this shift see Hammond, Michael, ‘Anthropology as a weapon of social combat in late nineteenth-century France’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (1980) 16, pp. 188–132Google Scholar; Sommer, Marianne, ‘Ancient hunters and their modern representatives: William Sollas's (1849–1936) anthropology from disappointed bridge to trunkless tree and the instrumentalisation of racial conflict’, Journal of the History of Biology (2005) 38, pp. 327–365CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and de Bont, Raf, ‘The creation of prehistoric man: Aimé Rutot and the eolith controversy, 1900–1920’, Isis (2003) 94, pp. 604–630Google Scholar.

31 Keith, Arthur, ‘Conceptions of Man's ancestry’, Nature, 4 May 1935Google Scholar.

32 This visual language has been discussed in Clark, op. cit. (2), pp. 132–161; and Delisle, Richard, ‘Welcome to the Twilight Zone: a forgotten early phase of human evolutionary studies’, Endeavour (2012) 36, pp. 55–64Google Scholar.

33 Clark, Constance Areson, ‘“You are here”: missing links, chains of being, and the language of cartoons’, Isis (2009) 100, pp. 571–589Google Scholar; and Foley, Robert, ‘In the shadow of the modern synthesis? Alternative perspectives on the last fifty years of palaeoanthropology’, Evolutionary Anthropology (2001) 10, pp. 5–14Google Scholar.

34 Discussed in Hammond, op. cit. (19); and as a trend of the field in Bowler, op. cit. (2), pp. 75–111.

35 Fan, Fa-ti, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004Google Scholar.

36 Wang, Zuoyue, ‘Saving China through science: the Science Society of China, scientific nationalism, and civil society in Republican China’, Osiris (2002) 17, pp. 291–322CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Shen, Grace Yen, Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Furth, Charlotte, Ting Wen-Chiang: Science and China's New Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970Google Scholar.

39 Andersson's career is best examined through his own books, particularly The Dragon and the Foreign Devils, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1928; and op. cit. (6). Also Fiskesjö, M. and Xingcan, Chen, China before China: Johan Gunnar Andersson, Ding Wenjiang, and the Discovery of China's Prehistory, Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 2004Google Scholar; and Kjærgaard, op. cit. (10).

40 Grabau is examined in Mazur, Allan: A Romance in Natural History: The Lives and Works of Amadeus Grabau and Mary Antin, Syracuse, NY: Garret, 2004Google Scholar.

41 See Bullock, Mary Brown, The Oil Prince's Legacy: Rockefeller Philanthropy in China, Washington, DC: Stanford University Press, 2011CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bullock, Brown, An American Transplant: Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992Google Scholar.

42 See Hood, Dora, Davidson Black: A Biography, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964Google Scholar. He is the subject of a forthcoming biography by Julie Cormack.

43 Black, Davidson, ‘Asia and the dispersal of primates’, Bulletin of the Geological Society of China (1925) 4, pp. 133–184Google Scholar. This notion of Asiatic origins was quite conventional in this period: see Robin Dennell, ‘From Sangiran to Olduvai, 1937–1960: the quest for “centre” of hominid origins in Asia and Africa’, in Corbey and Roebroeks, op. cit. (2), pp. 45–66.

44 Davidson Black to Henry Houghton, 12 December 1922, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York (hereafter RAC), CMB, IV2B9, Box 11, Folder 72.

45 For British stereotypes of China see Bickers, Robert, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900–49, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 22–66Google Scholar; and Phoebe Chow, ‘British opinion and policy towards China, 1922–1927’, LSE PhD thesis, 2011, Ethesis: 228.

46 See Schmalzer, op. cit. (7), pp. 34–37; Kjærgaard, op. cit. (4), p. 342; and Andersson, op. cit. (6).

47 Bulletin of the Geological Society of China (1926) 5, pp. 197–200; it was reported in Nature, 20 November 1926 and 31 December 1927.

48 Keith, Arthur, New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man, London: Williams and Norgate, 1931, p. 258Google Scholar.

49 Illustrated London News, 22 June 1922.

50 The Times, 21 February 1928. For the Hesperopithecus episode see Regal, op. cit. (2), pp. 61–62; and Clark, op. cit. (2), pp. 120–124.

51 Wong, W.H. ‘The search for early Man in China’, Bulletin of the Geological Society of China (1927) 6, pp. 335–336Google Scholar.

52 Hood, op. cit. (42), p. 90.

53 Davidson Black to Roger Greene, 17 February 1929, RAC, CMB, IV2B9, Box 58, Folder 406.

54 The Guardian, 10 September 1929.

55 Illustrated London News, 19 October 1929.

56 The Guardian, 16 December 1929.

57 Nature, 30 December 1929.

58 The Times, 30 December 1929.

59 The Guardian, 20 February 1930.

60 The Guardian, 20 February 1930.

61 Daily Express, 15 August 1930.

62 Davidson Black to Margery Egglestone, 30 June 1930, RAC, CMB, IV2B9, Box 11, Folder 72.

63 Smith, Grafton Elliot, The Significance of the Peking Man, Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1931, pp. 5–7Google Scholar.

64 The Guardian, 17 March 1934.

65 Landau, op. cit. (2); Stoczkowski, op. cit. (2).

66 Black, Davidson, ‘Preliminary notice of the discovery of an adult Sinanthropus skull at Chou Kou Tien’, Bulletin of the Geological Society of China (1929) 8, pp. 207–211, 211Google Scholar.

67 Black to Agnes Pearce, 11 January 1930, RAC, CMB, IV2B9, Box 11, Folder 72.

68 Nature, 16 December 1933.

69 Smith, Grafton Elliot, The Search for Man's Ancestors, London: Watts & Co., 1931Google Scholar, Prefunctory Note.

70 Keith, op. cit. (48), p. 294.

71 Keith, op. cit. (48), p. 274.

72 The Guardian, 3 February 1929.

73 Daily Express, 28 February 1930.

74 The Guardian, 16 November 1929.

75 Keith, op. cit. (48), p. 274.

76 Kjærgaard, Peter, ‘“Hurrah for the missing link!” A history of apes, ancestors and a crucial piece of evidence’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society (2011) 65, pp. 83–98Google Scholar; and Clark, op. cit. (33).

77 The Guardian, 16 November 1929.

78 The Times, 30 December 1929.

79 See Anna-K. Mayer, ‘“A combative sense of duty”: Englishness and the scientists’, in Lawrence and Mayer, op. cit. (12), pp. 67–106.

80 Baker, John, ‘Missing links’, in Adams, Mary (ed.), Science in the Changing World, London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1933, pp. 149–150Google Scholar.

81 Adams, op. cit. (80), pp. 148–149.

82 The Times, 3 March 1930.

83 Black, op. cit. (66), p. 208; also Elliot Smith, op. cit. (57), p. 20.

84 Landau, op. cit. (2), pp. 6–8; and Stoczkowski, op. cit. (2), p. 20, discuss mastery of nature through culture as a key trope in human evolutionary narratives.

85 For Breuil see the recent biography by Hurel, Arnaud, L'abbé Henri Breuil: Un préhistorien dans le siècle, Paris: CNRS, 2011Google Scholar. His interactions with British prehistorians are discussed in O'Connor, Anne, Finding Time for the Old Stone Age: A History of Palaeolithic Archaeology and Quaternary Geology in Britain, 1860–1960, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007Google Scholar, particularly pp. 277–306.

86 The Times, 4 November 1931.

87 Black, Davidson, ‘On the discovery, morphology, and environment of Sinanthropus pekinensis’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B (1934) 223, pp. 57–120, 115–116Google Scholar.

88 Black, op. cit. (87), p. 113.

89 The Times, 11 December 1931.

90 Nature, 28 May 1932.

91 The Times, 3 May 1932; for Moir see O'Connor, op. cit. (85), pp. 169–201; and Sommer, op. cit. (2), pp. 200–203.

92 The Guardian, 17 March 1934.

93 The Guardian, 9 December 1932.

94 The Times, 23 August 1937.

95 Daily Mail, 29 December 1930.

96 The Times, 17 March 1934.

97 Warren Weaver to Roger Greene, 7 June 1934, RAC, CMB, IV2B9, Box 57, Folder 403.

98 These were finally described in Weidenreich, Franz, The Skull of Sinanthropus pekinensis: A Comparative Study on a Primitive Hominid Skull, Lancaster, PA: Geological Society of China, 1943, pp. 4–19Google Scholar.

99 The Times, 25 November 1936; and Nature, 12 December 1936.

100 For German liberal anthropology see Evans, Andrew, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 21–96Google Scholar. For Jewish race scientists see Lipphardt, Veronika, Biologie der Juden: Jüdische Wissenschaftler über ‘Rasse’ und Vererbung 1900–1935, Berlin: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008Google Scholar, with a section on Weidenreich on pp. 259–277.

101 Daily Mail, 2 January 1937; Daily Express, 2 January 1937; and Daily Mirror, 3 January 1937.

102 Hurel, Arnaud and Lumley, M., ‘La formation des élites scientifiques chinoises en Europe dans la première moitié du XXe siècle: L'exemple du préhistorien Pei Wen Chung’, L'anthropologie (2005) 109, pp. 195–213Google Scholar.

103 The Times, 2 March 1938.

104 Daily Mirror, 12 April 1938.

105 Traced in Schaffer, op. cit. (24), pp. 15–62. See also Barkan, op. cit. (29).

106 The Times, 21 March 1939.

107 For more on this see Weidenreich, Franz, Apes, Giants and Man, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1946Google Scholar.

108 These were expounded in Keith, Arthur, ‘History from caves: a new theory of the origin of modern races of mankind’, Caves and Caving (1937) 1, pp. 1–6Google Scholar; reported in The Times, 27 July 1936.

109 Keith, Arthur, A New Theory of Human Evolution, London: Watts & Co., 1949, p. 257Google Scholar.

110 Keith, op. cit. (109), p. 258.

111 Daily Mirror, 10 September 1935.

112 Illustrated London News, 4 March 1939.

113 Daily Express, 26 August 1937.