Читать книгу Embryogeny and Phylogeny of the Human Posture 2 - Anne Dambricourt Malasse - Страница 26

The degree of straightening of the pyramids and the clivus, which form the anterior wall of the lower cranial fossa, would simply be the consequence of a development of a brain and cerebellum that became more complex very gradually, passing from a hypothetical archaic stage Homo sapiens to modern Homo sapiens, or Cro-Magnon Man (Figure 2.3). Since this first comparison, paleoanthropologists and anatomists interested in the neurocranium of fossilized Hominids have taken this speculation for granted, as Grover (1962) reminds us. Telencephalization became the new paradigm of hominization.

Figure 2.3. Comparison of the straightening of the right petrous pyramid between Sinanthropus III (Homo erectus pekinensis) and Homo sapiens (white line on the internal auditory meatus) (photo: A. Dambricourt Malassé). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/dambricourt/embryogeny.zip

However, the comparison of Neanderthal skulls that were sufficiently well preserved at different stages of growth already invalidated this speculation, because their encephalization with a cranial capacity higher than Homo sapiens did not change the inclination of the pyramids. The cerebellum did not develop forward and downward, but backward, forming the famous “occipital bun” (see section 7.4). In other words, the sphenoid, the clivus and the pyramids did not change their degree of verticality compared to the 800,000-year-old Sinanthropus, while its brain was clearly less developed. With neandertalization, the brain and cerebellum extended their territory at the vault level, since the ossification of membranes took place from the lobes. On the other hand, the center of the base of the skull has no contact with the cerebral hemispheres and forms a block that precedes the telencephalization in the chronology of cerebral development. Its morphogenesis preceded the formation of the hemispheres.

To realize this, it would have been enough to look at the work of embryologists at the beginning of the 20th century who had already demonstrated this. For a reason that the history of science will certainly explain, embryologists and zoologists no longer cross-referenced their observations, and paleoanthropology had never heard of the work on the embryogenesis of the primordial cranium of Man, or the chondrocranium, published in 1900 by Giuseppe Levi (1872–1965) (Levi 1900). Levi had studied medicine and surgery at the Institute of Higher Studies of the University of Florence in 1889. In 1899, he pursued research at the University of Berlin with the embryologist Oscar Hertwig (1849–1922), a former medical student of Ernest Haeckel. Three former researchers from his laboratory at the University of Turin were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, including Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012) in 1986 for the discovery of the Nerve Growth Factors. We will come back later to Levi’s work which is of primary importance.

Excavations at Zhoukoudian were suspended in 1937 following the conflict between Japan and China. In 1939, the United Kingdom, France, Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany. In 1941, fearing the escalation in the Pacific between the Japanese army, allied to Germany, and the United States, American nationals had to leave China. The director of the Peking Union Medical College asked Franz Weidenreich, who was Jewish, to travel to the United States to stay there for good. Weidenreich had planned to retreat to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he had stayed in 1940. The Rockefeller Foundation and the US Embassy in Beijing respected the agreement made with the Chinese: human fossils had to remain on the territory.

Teilhard was opposed to the idea of sending the collections to the United States. Weidenreich feared losing them. He convinced Wong to send the fossils to New York, where they would be safe, and Wong managed to persuade Chiang Kai-shek. The agreement was made with Colonel William Ashurst (1893–1952), commander of the detachment of the North China Marine Corps and of the guard unit at the US Embassy in Beijing. Weidenreich returned to New York with the original casts, photos and drawings, which are now preserved in the American Museum of Natural History, and sent his instructions to his deputy, Claire Taschdjian, who had remained in Beijing with Teilhard. They were carried out by two Chinese laboratory technicians (Lenz 1998). Two crates were prepared, and then transported to the port of Tien-Tsin by train. The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese army ordered all American property to be seized and captured marines and US Navy personnel. The crates were never recovered despite immediate Japanese and Chinese investigations. Since then, various hypotheses and contradictory testimonies have fueled hopes of finding them.

In 1942, the French Embassy in Beijing accepted the creation of the Geobiology Laboratory. Teilhard de Chardin had part of the Licent Museum of Tien-Tsin, which had been financed by French government funds, transferred to this small Institute, thus allowing the study of fossils and their publications in his new journal Geobiologia printed in Beijing. Japan surrendered on August 17, 1945, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Teilhard awaited instructions. The collections of his small institute joined those of the Cenozoic Laboratory of the Peking Union Medical College, which resumed its activities. They would be used for the progressive creation of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP). The embassy informed Teilhard in March 1946 that he could finally prepare to leave Beijing from Shanghai on the next flight to England. He returned to France determined to deepen his reflection on the “human phenomenon”, after having survived the hell of the 1914–1918 trench warfare and witnessed the power of technical intelligence with the mastery of atomic energy. From the oldest stone tools to the nuclear bomb, the stakes of the amplitude of cosmogenic phenomena are woven into the Earth’s crust throughout the hominization of consciousness, or a globalizing telencephalization which he called the “noosphere”. According to him, the 20th century appeared to be the culmination of a meta-physical reality perceptible through cosmo-bio-anthropogenesis in a struggle against annihilation.

Marcellin Boule died on July 4, 1942. The IPH was directed by the paleoanthropologist Henri-Victor Vallois (1889–1981), who inherited both the chair from Armand de Quatrefages and the direction of the Musée de l’homme built in 1937 in a wing of the Palais de Chaillot, facing the Eiffel Tower. The succession of the chair of Paleontology caused a stir because Boule’s objective was to pass on his position to a former student of Teilhard de Chardin, the paleontologist Jean Piveteau (1899–1991). The professors of the Muséum voted for Camille Arambourg (1885–1969), an Africanist field paleontologist (Hadjouis 2015). The African continent was becoming the new El Dorado for prehistorians and paleontologists in search of the oldest Hominidae. After 5 years of absence and following the death of Marcellin Boule, Teilhard de Chardin’s spacious office at the IPH, or the “Laboratory of continental geology applied to the origins of Man”, was “liquidated”, to use his term, by Raymond Vaufrey (1890–1967), a geologist who had been attached to the IPH since 1930 (letter to Henri Breuil in January 1955 from New York). The cradle of Man’s origins had migrated to Africa; Teilhard would never again return to Asia. South Africa awaited him.

1 1 Singes supérieurs in French.

2 2 Catholic review founded by the Jesuits in 1857.

3 3 Leader of the Republic of China between 1928 and 1949.