inordinately old in its developments. It was first necessary to give up the idea of a regular, continuous, total evolution [...]. The horseshoe crabs of the Pacific are irremediably fixed beings, which did not deviate, in a single important feature, from the type they had in the Secondary, Carboniferous or even Cambrian. This is curious. Even more disturbing, the immobilized types were not species stuck in a kind of morphological impasse. The Malaysian Tarsier or the Lemurs of Madagascar (their morphotype) could have played the role of morphological intermediaries (between the most primitive mammals and the monkeys). We now know true monkeys in the Oligocene, everything is older than we thought, in the world of life. And everything is much more stable too... [...] On groups of ungulates and carnivores, we see it beyond doubt, there are precise, simple, constant rules that preside over the gradual and “directed” complication of organisms, the precious notion of oriented variation [...]. From the smallest detail to the largest sets, our living universe – like our material universe – has a structure, and this structure can only be due to a phenomenon of growth. This is the great proof of transformism, and the measure of what this theory has definitively acquired [...]. From many points of view, a radiolarian, a trilobite, a dinosaur are as differentiated, as complicated as a primate. On the other hand, their nervous system is much less perfect. Should not we look in this direction for the secret law of development? Should we not say that the main stem of the zoological tree has constantly moved in the direction of the largest brain? [...] What makes transformism is not to be a Darwinist or Lamarckist, a mechanic or vitalist, what today’s naturalists hold dear is the fact of a physical connection between the living. (Teilhard de Chardin, Comment se poser aujourd’hui la question du Transformisme, 1921b, author’s translation)
Teilhard had always thought like a geophysicist: for him the appearance of life was a planetary, and therefore a cosmic phenomenon of geophysical origin. For him, as for Buffon (within the limits of the diversity of his “internal mold”), the history of the Earth’s crust had thus shaped biological evolution, tectonics gave an account of the evolution of species on a planetary scale and he saw the spherical enclosure of the Earth as a constraining physical condition:
The continents are natural units of the Earth’s crust, so that the problems of the Biosphere can be studied there [...] paying attention to the organo-plastic action exerted on animal and plant forms by the Continental Environment (inorganic or living) in which they develop. (ibid., author’s translation)
The paleontologist was so convinced that he pushed for the creation of a laboratory of “Continental geology applied to the origins of Man” at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1938, housed at the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine (IPH) in Paris. He then created the term “geobiology” for the small Institute that he set up in 1942 in annexes of the French Embassy in Beijing.
For Teilhard, paleoanthropology was a discipline of terrestrial planetology, because the emergence of life and its complexification, whatever its rhythms, was a process of growth on an astrophysical scale which started with particles (quanta), then with atoms and, finally, molecules. Current and fossil species were thus the result of organizational plans which increased in complexity and which would not have been viable without the complexification of the nervous system to control their internal balance and their relationship with their environment. The last organizational plan with complexification of the nervous system is that of mammals. The lineage from the first primates to Homo sapiens was the extension of this growth channeled through the whole of the central nervous system. But Teilhard retained only the endocranial casts described by his contemporaries and did not take into consideration bipedal locomotion, because the skeleton was arbitrary, divided into cranial and postcranial territories. The bones were not seen as forming a system structured around the axial endoskeleton that protected the central nervous system carried by the appendicular skeleton. We thus understand better why the “sphenoid-cervical hinge” is unthinkable in paleoanthropology and how much the straightening of the dorsal cord constituted a huge gap in the map of the hominization process.
Thus, since Aristotle, the place of Man taken as the objective reference of a ruler has never been invalidated. The discovery of evolution has not contradicted this obvious statement, but it was not theologians who rejoiced in it, quite the contrary. The sovereignty of the naturalist had made it possible to link the gradations of the current horizontal rule, by showing that each one of them was the instant of a duration which sunk all the more deeply into the terrestrial strata the more it approached zero, or, here, the origins of life. No paleontologist has been opposed to this observation of increasing neural complexity since the first Chordates (which include Vertebrates).
2.5. China, the promise of very ancient mammalian and human species
Marcellin Boule counted on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to succeed him to the chair of Paleontology. Emile Licent maintained his correspondence with his Jesuit colleague in 1921, urging him to come to Tien Tsin. He was an unofficial advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in Beijing. When Teilhard did not return his letters, he turned to his Swedish geologist colleague, Johan Andersson (1874–1960), who was attached to the laboratory of Carl Wiman (1867–1944) at Uppsala University. Andersson was also an advisor to geologist Ding Wenjiang (1887–1936), director of the Mining Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing, and at the head of major paleontological prospecting programs organized with the Americans at the New York Museum.
A fossiliferous karst system had just been discovered under his direction, at Zhoukoudian (Choukoutien) not far from Beijing, by two paleontologists, the Austrian Otto Zdansky (1894–1988), attached to his laboratory, and the American Walter Granger (1872–1941) of the American “Andrews” expedition. They collected fauna from the Lower Pleistocene (more than 700,000 years old) and a stone tool in quartz. Zdansky found a human-looking molar, but, refraining from talking about it, he brought it back with other fossils to be cleaned in Carl Wiman’s laboratory, where he would find a second tooth in the collection. Licent persisted and wrote to Teilhard on August 13, 1922 from the Ordos, in the great loop of the Yellow River (Huang-Ho), south of the Gobi Desert. The letter was accompanied by fossils of an unknown genus of giraffe. At the same time, Teilhard was in Brussels for the 13th International Congress of Geology, during which he met Wong Wen Hao (1889–1971), a colleague of Ding Wenjiang. The two Chinese geologists had just created the Geological Survey of China. Wong spoke French and had obtained a doctorate in geology in 1912 after training at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). Particularly involved in the development of the new Republic of China founded in 1912, he was Vice-President in 1947 and Prime Minister of the government of Chiang Kai-shek in 19483. Wong described the research organization to Teilhard, explaining that the Geological Survey of China worked in close collaboration with paleontologists and geologists from Uppsala and the American Museum of Natural History. They were expecting good harvests of Tertiary mammals with the “Andrews” expeditions. Their programs also included the collection of old hominids from the Zhoukoudian karst. Edouard Licent was thus well integrated into the geologist-paleontologist community of Beijing with large-scale American projects. His letters sent to Marcellin Boule were the unexpected chance for France to engage in this new great exploratory phase of continental Asia where the British Empire had not extended its colonies.
When Teilhard received Licent’s letter a few months later, he realized the chance for the Muséum to collaborate with the biologist from the Jesuit Mission in China. The Professor of geology at the Catholic Institute of Paris could become the leader of the research on the evolution of mammals in continental Asia with the Muséum and the IPH. On November 20, 1922, he formalized the cooperation by publishing a note on giraffes at the Academy of Sciences and convinced Marcellin Boule to organize the first “French Paleontological 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.
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