The lid was attached to the wooden crate with eighteen nails. The return address, in blue ink on the blond wood, said, "Sender: Dept. of Anatomy, P.U.M.C., Peking, China." The destination address, in larger letters, was:
Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews
The American Museum of Natural History
Central Park West at 79th Street
New York, N.Y. U.S.A.
The case was marked "Fragile!" and "REGISTERED" and "Par Avion." A brand had burned the words "Via Hongkong and by U.S. Air Service" into the wood.
Andrews had waited anxiously for this arrival. Between 1922 and 1930, he himself had led the now-famous Gobi Desert expeditions, searching for the Asian cradle of humanity. Although he'd brought back untold scientific riches--including the first-ever dinosaur eggs--Andrews had failed to discover a single ancient human remain.
But now a German scientist, Franz Weidenreich, had shipped to him a treasure trove from the Orient: the complete fossil remains of Sinanthropus pekinensis. In this very crate were the bones of Peking Man.
Andrews was actually salivating as he used a crowbar to pry off the lid. He'd waited so long for these, terrified that they wouldn't survive the journey, desperate to see what humanity's forefathers had looked like, anxious--
The lid came off. The contents were carefully packed in smaller cardboard boxes. He picked one up and moved over to his cluttered desk. He swept the books and papers to the floor, laid down the box, and opened it. Inside was a ball of rice paper, wrapped around a large object. Andrews carefully unwrapped the sheets, and--
White.
White?
No--no, it couldn't be.
But it was. It was a skull, certainly--but not a fossil skull. The material was bright white.
And it didn't weigh nearly enough.
A plaster cast. Not the original at all.
Andrews opened every box inside the wooden crate, his heart sinking as each new one yielded its contents. In total, there were fourteen skulls and eleven jawbones. The skulls were subhuman, with low foreheads, prominent brow ridges, flat faces, and the most unlikely looking perfect square teeth. Amazingly, each of the skull casts also showed clear artificial damage to the foramen magnum.
Oh, some work could indeed be done on these casts, no doubt. But where were the original fossils? With the Japanese having invaded China, surely they were too precious to be left in the Far East. What was Weidenreich up to?
)
When the 130,000-year-old bones of Peking Man were discovered in 1927 near Beijing, they were believed to be proof of the Missing Link, but the attempt to smuggle them away from the advancing Japanese in WWII ended in disaster beneath the Atlantic in 1941. Now, from central Europe, comes the true story of Peking Man and his evil roots back to the dawn of human civilization.
