E. Lecent and P. Teilhard de Chardin; excavations of Homo erectus remains at Zhoukoudian near Beijing by O. Zdansky, D. Black, and J.F. Weidenreich; and excavations of a Neolithic site at Yangshao in Henan by Swedish geologist johan gunnar andersson.

Zhoukoudian is located at a cluster of limestone hills in Fangshan county, forty-eight kilometers southwest of Beijing. It became world famous after some of the earliest human fossils were discovered there in limestone caves. The site and its abundant fossils remains—referred to as dragon bones (longgu) by the locals—was first discovered in 1918, and large-scale excavations followed in 1927 under the leadership of the Geological Survey of China. During the first year of excavation, an extremely well-preserved hominid lower molar was discovered and was named Sinanthropus pekinensis, or Peking Man (now classified as Homo erectus pekinensis), by the Canadian anatomist Davidson Black. In 1929, the Chinese scientist pei wenzhong (Pei Wen-chung) discovered a complete skullcap of Peking Man. In the following years, until the excavations were interrupted by the war in 1937, a large workforce essentially “mined” the deposits at the cave site, removing over half a million tons of material in the quest for fossils (Jia and Huang 1990; Wu and Lin 1983).

The hominid fossils found before the World War II, and subsequently lost in the confusion during the war, were studied by the German paleontologist J.F. Weidenreich. Based on twelve morphological features present in both Peking Man and modern peoples of East Asia, he concluded that some of the genes of the Peking Man had been transmitted to the modern Mongoloid populations who inhabit the same region of the world (Weidenreich 1943). This view, although controversial, was later adopted by many Chinese archaeologists to support the multiregional development theory of human evolution (Chen 1999b; Wu and Olsen 1985).

An equally important discovery around this time was the Yangshao culture found by Andersson. He was employed by the Chinese government in 1914 to conduct geological surveys, but his achievements in archaeology surpassed those in geology. Andersson first participated in the early expeditions at Zhoukoudian, but what made him famous was Yangshao village in Henan, where he found and undertook the first excavation of a Neolithic site in China. The name of this village was then used to designate the first recognized Neolithic material assemblage in the region: the Yangshao culture. Andersson asserted that the Yangshao material remains belonged to the ancestors of the Han Chinese, but he suggested that the Yangshao pottery was probably transmitted from the West, as the stylistic patterns of Yangshao painted pottery looked similar to those from the Anau culture in Turkey and the Tripolje Culture A in southern Russia (Andersson 1923). As a result, Andersson’s diffusion hypothesis initiated a decades-long debate on the origins of Chinese culture and civilization (Chen 1997, 1999c).

It should be noted that not all foreign expeditions in China were for scientific archaeological fieldwork. After the Opium War in 1840, China was forced to open its doors to the world and soon became an antiquities hunting ground for foreign imperial powers as well as for adventurers from Europe, North America, and Japan—such as aurel stein, Sven Hedin, D. Klementz, and P. Pelliot—who searched for exotic antiquities from the Far East, especially in the northwestern part of China (Chen 1997, 42–51). These activities began when the government was weak and local officials were corrupt, which meant that the treasure hunters were able to carry away large quantities of artifacts from China to their own countries without significant opposition.

The behavior of these treasure hunters in China was humiliating to the Chinese, who had a strong nationalist consciousness, especially historians and archaeologists (Brysac 1997). Such activities, which were later stopped by the Chinese government, have had a long-term impact on state policies regarding the handling of cultural relics and excavations in China, policies that include the prevention of the export of antiquities from China and prohibitions on foreigners unilaterally conducting archaeological work in China (Chang 1999b, 33–37, 176–180).