The Abundance (22 page)

It was in 1928, when Teilhard was forty-seven, that his team discovered a bone from Peking Man. His partner, a Chinese archaeologist, found a man's skull. Years before, Teilhard had unearthed the first tools, and the first hearth; now here were the first bones—the first to be found in all of Asia. Time had stuffed the skull down a red fissure in a blue cave wall at Zhoukoudian, near Peking. It was then that the team named this “Peking Man.”

They found the cave by questioning a big-city pharmacist. Many old folk in China, even today, drink
suspended-fossil-bone powders as elixirs—so-called dragon's teeth elixirs. Consequently, paleontologists for many generations have checked Chinese pharmacies and asked, “Where exactly did these bones come from?” In this way, one such specialist, shopping for fossils, recognized a human tooth, and his inquiry led to the caves at Zhoukoudian—Dragon Bone Hill.

Hauling his camp cot from Peking, Teilhard lived with villagers as he directed the dig. Over the years he sorted and eventually named the fissures' many other animal bones. He discovered bones from saber-toothed tigers, ostriches, horses, a large camel, buffalo, wild sheep, rhinos, hyenas, and “a large and small bear.”

Ultimately he was able to date Peking Man in the Pleistocene. He established the date by various methods, one of which was interesting: Among the bits of debris under, around, and above various layers of the hominid's bones and tolls were skulls, whole or in fragments, of mole rats. He undertook his own study of the mole rats' evolving skulls, dated them, and so helped confirm Peking Man's dates.

The team dug further into the immensities of the Zhoukoudian caves; for ten years they excavated, for eight months a year. Teilhard retrieved five more human skulls, twelve lower jaws, and scattered teeth. It was his major life's work.

During those ten years, squinting and laughing furrowed his face. His temples dipped as his narrow skull bones emerged. When he could not get Gauloises, he smoked Jobs. Daily he said the Divine Office—the liturgy, mostly psalms, that is the prayer of the Catholic (and Anglican, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Lutheran, for that matter) Church. A British historian who knew him described his “kindly and ironic grace,” his “sharp and yet benevolent refinement.”

In all those years, he found no skeletons. When colleagues worldwide praised him for his discoveries, Teilhard spoke with modesty, and even exasperation: “Heads,” he said, “practically nothing but heads.”

A hundred years later, after several decades' chaos halted the work, paleontologists from all over the world are again finding hominid bones in the Zhoukoudian caves, along with choppers and stone flakes.

Peking Man and his people walked upright; with limbs like ours they made fire and stone tools. The land was jungly then. They ate mostly venison and hackberries. They hunted elephants, tigers, and boars. They lived before water filled the Great Lakes, before the Florida peninsula rose from the sea, while camels and mastodons grazed across North America. They lived before
the two great ages when ice covered Scandinavia and Canada, as well as the British Isles, northern Germany, and the northern United States. They lived before the Atlantic Ocean drowned eastern North America between glaciations. Their human species is now extinct.

Most paleontologists believe that we—we humans in the form of
Homo erectus
—left Africa 90,000 years ago by walking up the Great Rift Valley, generation after generation, to the valley's end at the Sea of Galilee. Recent, much older
erectus
finds in Java, China, and the Republic of Georgia seem to show, however, that our generations started leaving Africa about a million years earlier—unless, that is, modern humans arose in Asia. These newer, more ancient dates jolt paleontologists, who one might expect to be accustomed to this sort of thing by now—this repeated knocking out of the back wall, this eerie old light cast on the long-peopled landscape.

Whenever we made our move, we did not rush to Corfu like sensible people. Instead we carried our cupped fires into the lands we now call the Levant, and then, seriatim, into China, Japan, and Indonesia, whence we hopped islands clear to Australia. There, on a rock shelter, we engraved animals twice as long ago as we painted cave walls in France. In other words, people—
erectus
included—plied the Asian islands thousands of years before Europe saw any humans who could think of such a thing as a raft.

“However far back we look into the past,” Teilhard said, “we see the waves of the multiple breaking into foam.”

During the violence and famine caused by the Japanese invasion of China, that first Peking Man skull disappeared from the Chinese museum in which it was housed. Scientists suspect starving locals pulverized and drank it. Remaining, however, was a plaster cast of this skull, as there were casts of every bit of bone and tooth—forty people's remains—that the team found by working the site for all those years. Those plaster casts have proved handy, since every single one of the actual Peking Man bones, crate after crate, disappeared in World War II. Scientists cached the crates with a U.S. Marine physician who tried to carry them back as luggage. The Japanese caught him, though before he went to prison camp, he was able to entrust the crates to European officials and Chinese friends. Unfortunately, when he left prison four years later, after the war had ended, the crates had disappeared. Recent searches draw only blanks.

The man of the red earths, Teilhard called Peking Man. And of Christianity he said, “We have had too much talk of sheep. I want to see the lions come out.”

Early spring 1930: Father Teilhard, wearing his clerical collar, was having afternoon tea in the Peking courtyard garden of his new friend, an American woman named Lucile Swan. He sat erect and relaxed on a bamboo chair at a rattan table, laughing and talking. We have a snapshot. In the other bamboo chair Lucile Swan turned his way; she looked mightily amused. A headband held her short, curly hair from her firm and wide-boned face. She wore an open parka and pants: It was perhaps chilly for taking tea outdoors. Her small dog, white and brown, sat at her knee watching the merriment, all ears.

He was forty-nine then; she was forty, a sculptor, divorced. It was more than a year since the Peking Man discovery. Teilhard was living in a village near the Zhoukoudian cave and coming into Peking once a week. The two had met at a dinner party and liked each other at once. “For the first time in years I felt young and full of hope again,” she recalled. She had attended an Episcopal boarding school in Iowa and, later, the Art Insti
tute of Chicago. In Peking, she made portrait sculptures in clay and bronze, and groups of semi-abstract figures; throughout her life she exhibited widely.

Soon the two established a daily routine in Peking: They walked, took tea at five, and he returned across the city to the Jesuit house at six. Those first several years, they laughed a great deal—about, among many other things, the American comic
The Little King,
which Lucile found in her
New Yorkers
and translated for him. Their laughter carried over courtyard walls.

“Lucile was fine-featured, amply bosomed,” a friend who joined them at tea would later remember, “beloved by all who knew her, for she glowed with warmth and honest sentiment.” And Father Teilhard was “a lean, patrician priest . . . the jagged aristocrat. He radiated outward, gravely, merrily, inquiringly. And always with a delicate consideration for the other and no concern for self.”

June 1930: “Our blue tents are pitched at the edge of a fossil-bearing cliff looking out over the immense flat surface of Mongolia,” he wrote. “We work in solitude.” He knew he could not post this letter for several months, for he was tracing the wild bounds of Outer Mongolia. “Cut off from any correspondence, I feel that my Paris
hopes are dormant.” He was not yet writing letters to Lucile Swan.

He had interrupted his Zhoukoudian caves dig to join an American expedition: the 1930 Roy Chapman Andrews expedition. Most of his past five years he had already spent traveling with mules to dig the great Gobi marches; this new adventure would take him even farther afield. To fix Peking Man in context, he hoped to discover the geological history of the Quaternary through all of Asia. In the course of the expedition's wild and crawling journey, which lasted most of a year, he would, in fact, find the evidence necessary to link and date Chinese and Mongolian strata.

The Andrews expedition was a step up for the
monsieur
accustomed to mules. They drove Dodge trucks. Strings of camels carried gas. Digging, they encountered between five and ten poisonous brown pit vipers every day. The vipers kept them alert, one team member reported. Characteristically, Teilhard never mentioned them in his letters. He liked Roy Chapman Andrews, who made his name finding dinosaur eggs. “A wonderful talker,” Teilhard described the expedition's leader, and a hunter who, when the team lacked food, drove off into the bright expanses and returned “with a couple of gazelles on the running boards.” Teilhard's own vitality still battened on apparent paradox. The man who said
that his thirty months on the front in the Great War had made him “very mystical and very realistic,” now wrote from his blue tent in Mongolia that “rain, storms and dust and icy winds have only whipped up my blood and brought me rest.” They called the place Wolf Camp, for the wolves that, along with eagles, hunted there.