The abundant signs I witnessed of local fauna, particularly omnivores such as bears and wild pigs, indicate enough food resources for the presumably omnivorous hominoids the year round. The 93 percent of the Tajik Republic’s territory taken up by mountains is virtually devoid of permanent human population, so the latter poses no special danger to wild hominoids. The long and continuing record of purported hominoid sightings, supported by these new accounts, leads me to the conclusion that such creatures do exist there.
However, the whole idea of wildmen regressing from Neanderthal or any other prehistoric men is anathema to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Bayanov’s interest and the work of the Alma expeditions were heartily denounced in 1985 by Soviet explorer Vadim Ranov. This hypothesis is wrong and easily refuted,’ he told a meeting in Dushanbe, reminding his audience of the Marxist ideal of progress. ‘We must remember that Homo sapiens evolved in a constant process of social as well as biological evolution.’
Clearly there are political as well as scientific hazards in the path of the enthusiastic researchers of Moscow and Peking.
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2 – The Silence of the Past
The Nanjing Belt
The most puzzling archaeological mystery of ancient China came to light in the true tradition of buried treasure when a workman’s spade broke through the roof of a long-forgotten tomb.
It was 1 December 1952. The Jingyi Middle School of Yixing City in the Jiang-su Province of China was building a sports field. The first task was to level the ground, for the school authorities had chosen a patch of land dominated by an oblong hillock. Another feature of the site, four curiously shaped mounds, complicated the work. That day, a labourer’s shout brought everything to a halt. His spade had penetrated a thin layer of earth and rubble and a hole had appeared, releasing a rush of musty air. Peering into the darkness, the work gang could dimly make out a chamber stacked with dusty objects.
They called the police, who climbed down through the opening and soon announced that the workers had made a major archaeological find. The place was obviously a tomb. After taking into safekeeping a motley collection of grave goods, including five pieces of porcelain, eleven of pottery, some scraps of gold, two pottery stands and ‘four gold articles’, the police sealed the chamber and the Huadong Historical Relics Working Team was summoned to conduct a full-scale excavation.
The dig revealed that there were in fact two tombs, both built in an unusual style. Each had chambers with an arched roof constructed in wedge-shaped bricks, topped with a square slab. More bricks, laid in a herringbone pattern, covered the floor. The roof was adorned with carvings: circles, tigers or the faces of animals. Conveniently, the ‘Number 1 tomb’ contained an inscription which enabled the archaeologists to date their find precisely. On one side it read: ’20th September of the seventh year of Yuankang the late general Zhou …’; on the other, the tomb builders had left their official titles and signatures: ‘Yicao Zhu Xuan, jianggongli Yang Chun, workman Young Pu made.’ This, then, was the burial-place of a nobleman called Zhou Chu.
Zhou could be traced in the historical records. A renowned military man and scholar, he had lived during the Jin Dynasty (A.D. 265-420), and had died fighting the Tibetans in 297. There could be no doubt whatsoever about the dates, and this made one discovery all the more astonishing. Encircling what had once been the waist of a rotted skeleton found in the ‘Number 1 tomb’ were about twenty pieces of metal, obviously the remains of a belt. ‘The factor worth noting,’ wrote archaeologist Luo Zong-chen with what proved to be breathtaking understatement, ‘is the chemical composition of these ornaments.’
For analysis of one fragment by the Chemistry Department of nearby Nanjing University revealed that it was composed almost entirely of aluminium. Now, although aluminium is widely used in modern life, it was not isolated in the West until the early years of the nineteenth century, and a generation later was still so rare that it was a showpiece of the 1855 Paris Exposition. The production of aluminium requires something thought to have been quite unknown in ancient China: electricity. The discovery of the belt therefore raised a question which fascinated archaeologists, metallurgists and chemists both inside China and far beyond its boundaries: did the Chinese beat European scientists to the isolation of aluminium by a cool 1,500 years?
While it would be going too far to say that archaeologists have become used to pondering such problems – their working lives are usually devoted to the painstaking accumulation of more prosaic evidence of the daily lives of ancient peoples – a few objects like the Nanjing belt have presented them with an irresistible and potentially unsettling challenge. Did the scientists, artists and builders of the past know secrets that their successors have taken centuries to rediscover? Should our ideas about the level of technology achieved by the ancients be drastically revised?
How then did the experts set about finding the answer to the puzzle of the Nanjing belt? As so often happens, they first fell to arguing. In China itself the pages of the academic journals were full of the controversy. In the magazine Koagu, one expert, Shen Shi-ying of the North Eastern Engineering College, reported that he had carried out several methods of analysis on a small broken piece of the belt which he had obtained from the Nanjing Museum. ‘But,’ he announced, ‘the results of these various analyses all pointed to these alloys being silver-based rather than aluminium-based.’
Another piece gave similar results, but yet another fragment, originally sent to a different analyst, really did seem to contain aluminium. Yet Shen Shi-ying remained sceptical and concluded: ‘It is impossible to tell from its structure whether it was made in ancient times. At the same time, it was unlike the product of a 1960s factory.’ He suggested that the aluminium might have been made at the beginning of this century, but added cautiously, ‘This is only a supposition, and to know definitely, all round research in depth is called for.’
Stung by Shen’s reservations, and particularly by his suggestion that the piece of metal which analysis had proved to be aluminium had been introduced into the tomb at a much later date, perhaps by grave robbers (who had undoubtedly broken into the tomb at some time in the past), one of the original excavators, Luo Zong-chen, published a riposte.
The belt pieces, he wrote, were certainly of the Jin period, for most of them ‘were underneath the accumulated earth, showing that they had never been disturbed’. Luo also attacked Shen’s assertion that most of the fragments found had turned out to be silver. Four pieces, he conceded, had indeed been shown to be silver, but four others were made of aluminium.
The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s which so disrupted Chinese academic life, brought the controversy to an abrupt end with nothing resolved, but by then the story was out. One of the many experts in the West who learned of the Nanjing belt was Dr Joseph Needham of Cambridge University, author of the monumental Science and Civilization in China, and perhaps the greatest authority of all. He was intrigued and did not entirely dismiss the idea that the ancient Chinese had somehow found a way to isolate aluminium. ‘For the present it would be unwise to rule out the possibility,’ he wrote in 1974.
One group of Western scientists, however, did not stop at simply expressing interest in the Nanjing belt. In 1980, inspired by Joseph Needham, Dr Anthony R. Butler and his colleagues, Dr Christopher Glidewell and Sharee E. Pritchard, of the Chemistry Department of the University of St Andrews decided to continue the search for the truth, begun a quarter of a century earlier in China. In 1986 their report was published, and was eagerly consulted by scientists and lay people whose curiosity had been whetted by the Chinese controversy. Its title, ‘Aluminium Objects from a Jin Dynasty Tomb – Can They Be Authentic?’ held out the promise that the three investigators had found an answer to the mystery.
They began by acknowledging that modern research into Chinese science and technology has revealed many previously unsuspected scientific and technological achievements, some astonishingly advanced. ‘Consequently we believe that no report of a medieval Chinese chemical achievement, however remarkable, should be rejected without adequate modern re-assessment.’ Even so, they judged that the production of aluminium in the Jin Dynasty, an age without electricity, ‘would have been truly remarkable’.
The St Andrews researchers then went on to pose questions which many had asked but none had proved able to answer: ‘How reliable is the archaeological evidence? How reliable are the chemical analyses? What metallurgical techniques were available at that date? Is it possible to prepare an aluminium alloy by any of them? If an aluminium alloy was prepared, was it by design or by accident?’