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.
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