Dinosaurs in the Attic (36 page)

Yours very sincerely,
Edward Jackson

The Copper Man apparently bounced around New York for a time, and was finally bought by J. P. Morgan in 1905, who gave it to the Museum. How much Morgan paid for the mummy is a mystery, but records show that the owner was asking $100,000 for it. (He probably got only a small fraction of that amount.) The proud Director of the Museum put the Copper Man on display almost immediately. A good deal of publicity surrounded the opening, and the mistaken notion arose that the mummy was female, probably because of the braided hair. One 1905 newspaper headline shouted, "Aged 3,000, But She Has Traces of Beauty," (In the years that followed, scholarly opinion held that the mummy dated from around 1200
A.D.
)

In 1923 the first complete X-ray photograph was made of the body, and it was discovered that no bones were broken. Junius Bird theorized that the weight of the ceiling pinned the miner and forced blood into the extremities, accounting for the remarkably lifelike preservation of the body. If the skin had dried and hardened while in a distended condition, the normal shrinkage that takes place during mummification would not have occurred. ("When an entomologist wishes to preserve certain larvae," Bird wrote by way of comparison, "he will inflate the skin and dry it quickly in a heated oven.") The Atacama Desert of Chile, where the miner was found, is one of the driest and hottest places on earth.

In 1953 two scientists drilled out cores from the body for study, and discovered that the copper oxides, which gave the body its greenish cast, hadn't penetrated any deeper than the skin. The mummy itself was hollow, apparently another result of rapid dessication.

In the late 1970s, various parts of the body were carbon-dated to determine its age, and to everyone's surprise the Copper Man turned out to be much older than had been thought—having died around 484
A.D.
, about the time of the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Copper Man was removed from public view in 1967, when the old South American Hall closed. There is sure to be a spirited debate about whether or not he should go back on display when the new hall opens. But perhaps this author's views on the matter are best mirrored by a statement Bird himself made, just before he died. "Mining," he said, "has always been a hazardous occupation. This poor fellow was killed while working with the most primitive tools under extremely difficult conditions. I feel that if he had anything to say about it he would prefer that people see him as he is so they may better understand what was involved in the making of tools, weapons, ornaments, and other metal products before Europeans came to the Americas."

SIXTEEN

Harry Shapiro and Peking Man

Not all that goes on in the Anthropology Department is straight anthropology. As in many of the scientific departments, the dozen curators of anthropology often find themselves answering unusual questions and helping various people solve very unusual problems.

One of the "invisible" services the Museum performs is answering all these questions. Robert Carneiro, for example—an expert on South American peoples—finds himself examining a half-dozen "shrunken heads" every year, brought in by hopeful collectors. "They're all fakes," he says. An assistant in the Invertebrates Department helped the police solve a major theft by identifying the source of rocks that had been used to fill crates that were supposed to hold electronic equipment. (He helped solve a similar case by identifying where a load of sand came from.) The insect department, as we've seen, routinely assists people (and restaurants) in eradicating cockroach infestations. And, of course, there is an endless stream of other requests to identify one thing or another—so many, in fact, that the Museum hosts an annual "Identification Day" on which people bring in all sorts of items for Museum curators to identify. The Museum has a policy of answering every letter it receives, no matter how offbeat. (Rest assured that some are indeed
quite
strange.)

One Museum curator has spent much of his sixty-year career at the Museum doing just such
pro bono
work. Some, in fact, credit his early work with laying the foundation of forensic anthropology, which has since become a highly refined science studied by medical examiners all over the country.

This curator, Harry Shapiro, joined the Museum's staff as a physical anthropologist in 1926. He had previously studied physical anthropology under Earnest Hooton at Harvard, where he learned how to extract a great deal of information from human bones. By examining a skeleton, Shapiro is able to deduce such things as height, weight, sex, age, and race, as well as certain kinds of diseases that affect the bones. His research at the Museum focuses on the genetics of various groups and the physical differences between races. (His lifelong research project involves the European mutineers of the
Bounty,
who took Tahitian wives and settled on Pitcairn Island, where their descendants live today. It presented Shapiro with what almost amounted to a laboratory for studying the mixing of races.)

Shapiro had been at the Museum only a few years when he received his first fateful call from a desperate medical examiner. The case involved a complete skeleton, and Shapiro identified the individual's characteristics with ease.

"That started it," Shapiro recalls. "Whenever they ran into human material, they would call me up." In this way, almost by accident, Shapiro became involved in the practice of forensic anthropology. During World War II, the U.S. government asked him to draw up guidelines for the identification of the unknown dead. The government had recently passed a law that all U.S. servicemen who had been buried overseas must be brought home. Many of the bodies were unidentified, and Shapiro devised a set of procedures for identifying these remains. They asked Shapiro himself to examine particularly difficult cases. For these, the body would be shipped to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and a limousine would be dispatched to Shapiro's house early in the morning. He would then spend the pre-noon hours examining the remains, looking for telltale clues that might aid in identification. "It was a hideous, hideous job," Shapiro says. "But I feel strongly that a scientist should be available to help people with his expertise."

Perhaps Shapiro's most famous case occurred in a highly publicized murder of the early 1950S. One day he received a telephone call from the New York City medical examiner's office. They were working on a difficult missing-person case, and needed the benefit of his skill. This particular case, however, turned out to be one of the most difficult he had ever worked on. It concerned the disappearance and suspected murder of a little girl in the Bronx. The police had very little to go on, since no body had been found, but they had reason to suspect the apartment building's janitor of having raped and murdered her. The police had one clue: for three days after the girl's disappearance, residents in the building had noticed and complained about excessive heat coming from the coal-burning furnace in the basement. So the police shut down the furnace and sifted through the ashes for bones—human bones. Because all of the building's garbage was burned in the furnace, they came up with five large ashcans full of tiny, charred hone fragments—but bones of
what?

The medical examiner's office was called in. They in turn contacted Shapiro, and asked him to go through the garbage cans and identify any human bones that might be there. Shapiro spent days and days examining bone fragments, and finally discovered three unmistakably human bones: a fragment of eye socket, a finger bone, and a tiny piece of pelvis. From those he was able to deduce that the bones were from a girl perhaps ten years of age. It was enough to convict the janitor of murder.

Shapiro has been called upon for help in another area as well—the so-called ashcan babies. This work began over thirty years ago, when he received a call from a lawyer representing a black woman who had had several children by a Chinese man. The man had abandoned her, claiming the children weren't his, and she was suing him for child support. The lawyer wanted to know if Shapiro could provide legal evidence of paternity. Shapiro testified on behalf of the woman, and she won her case. The lawyer asked Shapiro to testify in a second, similar case, which also concluded successfully. Since two cases established this new type of testimony as a legal precedent, the lawyer published the procedure in a law journal. Immediately afterwards, Shapiro was deluged with calls about paternity problems all over the country, and he was forced to restrict such work to New York City alone.

One of his most striking cases occurred in the early 1960s. He was approached by a Jewish couple who had lived with their small son in Poland in the years before World War II. When the Nazis came to power, the couple fled Poland, but because of their fear of capture they left their baby with a nurse who took him to the country, where they hoped the child would be safe. When the war ended the parents could find no trace of the nurse or their child, and they eventually settled in the United States. After the war they had a second child, this one horn in the United States. This boy was about sixteen years old when Shapiro saw the family for the first time.

The couple explained their problem to Shapiro. A close relative of theirs had gone to Poland and had seen a young man on the street who bore an uncanny resemblance to the couple's second son. The relative stopped the man on the street and asked him who he was. The man explained that he had been one of the "forest children" who were found wandering in the Polish woods at the end of the war, many of whom were children of Jews who had been sent to concentration camps. The young man was about the same age as the couple's missing older son. They gave Shapiro a picture of the man, and the only picture they had of their young baby, and asked if he could tell whether they were one and the same person.

"I told them if would be very difficult to make a judgment from the picture because of the age differences involved," says Shapiro. "But the wife was so emotional that I said I would try."

He looked at the pictures for several days, and at last—just when he was about to give up hope of solving the mystery—he noticed the ears of both individuals. "Some people have attached earlobes and some don't," Shapiro explains, "a characteristic that does not change from birth to death." In one picture the earlobe was detached, and in the other it was clearly attached. There could be no question—these could only be two different people.

"I told the wife and she was devastated," he recalls. "She refused to believe it. So she sent money to the young man and brought him to the States, and all three of them came to the Museum. We had a long emotional meeting in my office where I explained that the man could not be their son, and they finally accepted it.

"'But,' I said to the woman, 'since you care so much about this young man, and since he has no family, why
don't
you adopt him as your son?' Which is exactly what they did."

Shapiro's detective work is not confined to solving murder, paternity, and missing-persons cases. Since 1971 he has been on the track of the greatest missing person of all—the lost fossil remains of Peking Man
(Sinanthropus pekinensis),
which disappeared during the Japanese invasion of China at the beginning of World War II. The bones (actually those of about forty individuals, not just one) provided rare evidence of an early stage of human evolution, and their loss was an unparalleled disaster in the study of hominid fossils; even though the Chinese have discovered new
Sinanthropus
bones, they are not nearly as complete as the original ones.

Peking Man belongs to the extinct hominid species
Homo erectus.
While
Homo erectus
fossils have also been discovered in Java, Africa, and Germany, the Peking Man fossils represent a variant in the species, the study of which is critical to our understanding of this stage of human evolution, intermediate between the Australopithecines and our species,
Homo sapiens.

Shapiro was a graduate student when the fossils were unearthed in the 1920s. The discovery made quite a sensation, as early hominid fossils have always been extremely rare. Later, in 1931, Shapiro traveled to China and became friendly with Davidson Black, who was the custodian of the fossils at the Peking Union Medical College. Shapiro spent several hours examining the fossils himself.

Black died in 1933, and was succeeded by the famous Gennan anatomist, Franz Weidenreich. By the summer of 1941 the situation in China had become very bad, and, unable to continue his research, Weidenreich left Peking and came to New York, leaving the Peking Man fossils behind. W eidenreich joined the staff of the American Museum, where he and Shapiro became close friends. "I remember one day," Shapiro says, "he came into my office in great despair. The fossils had disappeared."

Aside from a number of unreliable stories, an almost complete lack of information surrounded the disappearance until 1971, when Shapiro was contacted by William T. Foley, a prominent New York heart specialist. Foley had been a doctor in the Marine Corps and was stationed in Tientsin in 1941, and he was able to give Shapiro some new information about the fossils. In November 1971, Shapiro recounted the story in an article in
Natural History
magazine, which made front-page news across the country and reopened the search for the fossils. Six months later, Shapiro got a call from Christopher Janus, a man who had just returned from China. The director of a new museum at Zhou Goudian (Chou Kou Tien) in China, where the fossils had been discovered, had heard about the
Natural History
article, and had entreated Janus to do all he could to recover the fossils.