Chris Manias

When most people today hear of “palaeontology,” they immediately think of dinosaurs. However, for much of the 20th century, scientists and public audiences seeking dramatic demonstrations of the history of life focused on something else – the evolution of mammals. Assumptions that “the Age of Mammals” represented the pinnacle of development made it crucial for understanding the course of evolution and formation (and possibly future) of the natural world. Yet this combined with more troubling notions, that seemingly promising creatures had been mysteriously swept aside in the “struggle for life” or that modern biodiversity was “impoverished” compared to prior eras. This project will examine how scientists in Europe and North America reconstructed this problematic evolutionary history, and presented it to a wide public. It will show how palaeontology’s popular appeal and idiosyncratic evolutionary theories fed into public understandings of evolution, and how the processes it uncovered impinged on changing notions of the environment and animal world.

This research project is funded by a Mid-Career Fellowship from the British Academy (academic year 2014/2015).

Across the nineteenth century, scholars in Britain, France and the German lands sought to understand their earliest ancestors: the Germanic and Celtic tribes known from classical antiquity, and the newly discovered peoples of prehistory. New fields – philology, archeology and anthropology – interacted, breaking down languages, unearthing artifacts, measuring skulls and recording the customs of "savage" analogues. This was a decidedly national process: disciplines institutionalized on national levels, and their findings seen to have deep implications for the origins of the nation and its "racial composition." However, this operated within broader currents. The wide spread of material and novelty of the methods meant that these approaches formed connections across Europe and beyond, even while national rivalries threatened to tear these networks apart.

Race, Science and the Nation follows this tension, offering a simultaneously comparative, cross-national and multi-disciplinary history of the scholarly reconstruction of European prehistory. As well as showing how interaction between disciplines was key to their formation, it makes arguments of keen relevance to studies of racial thought and nationalism. It shows these researches often worked against attempts to present the chaotic multi-layered ancient eras as times of mythic origin. Instead, they argued that the modern nations of Europe were not only diverse, but were products of long processes of social development and "racial" fusion. This book therefore brings to light a formerly unstudied motif of nineteenth-century national consciousness, showing how intellectuals in the era of nation-building themselves drove an idea of their nations being "constructed" from a useable past.

This volume of British Envoys to Germany presents official reports sent from the British missions in Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover, Dresden, Stuttgart, Munich and Vienna. The diplomatic correspondence selected for volume IV provides strong evidence that the period between the Dresden Conferences of 1851 and the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 should be seen as more than just a time of transition between the revolution of 1848 and German unification. In addition to international affairs and Anglo-German relations, the dispatches cover the federal dimensions of German politics and the policies and societies of the federal states.

In 1924, the model-making company Messmore & Damon, Inc. of New York unleashed their masterpiece: the Amphibious Dinosaurus Brontosaurus, a moving, breathing, roaring animatronic dinosaur, based on displays in the American Museum of Natural History. Over the 1920s and 1930s, this became the focus of an ever-increasing publicity campaign, as Messmore & Damon exhibited prehistoric automata in department stores, the media, and the Chicago World Fair of 1933–34. These displays were hugely popular and widely discussed, drawing from the increasing public appeal of paleontology. Mixing commercial entertainment with invocations of scientific value, Messmore & Damon's prehistoric creations offer a window into the meaning and popularity of the deep time sciences in early-twentieth century America, and the links between science and spectacle in this period.

The growth of a prehistoric timescale was one of the most dramatic developments in nineteenth-century ideas of humanity, massively extending the assumed course of human development and placing it within the deep chronologies of geological time. A dominant motif linking prehistory with wider studies of humanity and notions of historical change was the ‘comparative method’ – the idea that modern ‘savages’ were analogous to prehistoric Europeans, and that the two sets of peoples could explain one another. The importance of this mode of reasoning has been well-studied, and shown to have had great significance for concepts of progress and social evolution. What has been less investigated are cases when the comparative method broke down, and instances where ‘modern savages’ and ‘prehistoric man’ seemed to be dissimilar and analogies hard to make. This paper examines how a series of authors engaged with problems in the comparative method when they attempted to place human development within this deep prehistoric past. In doing so, it highlights the changing interactions between the Victorian deep time sciences and the ‘sciences of man,’ and how notions of European prehistory and modern ‘primitives’ often rested on a notion of variability in the ‘savage’ condition.

Over the first decades of the twentieth century, the fragmentary remains of a huge prehistoric ungulate were unearthed in scientific expeditions in India, Turkestan and Mongolia. Following channels of formal and informal empire, these were transported to collections in Britain, Russia and the United States. While striking and of immense size, the bones proved extremely difficult to interpret. Alternately naming the creature Paraceratherium, Baluchitherium and Indricotherium, paleontologists Clive Forster-Cooper, Alexei Borissiak and Henry Fairfield Osborn struggled over the reconstruction of this gigantic fossil mammal. However, despite these problems, shared work on the creature served as a focus for collaboration and exchange rather than rivalry between these three scientific communities. Not only did the initial interpretation and analysis depend on pre-existing connections between British and American paleontological institutions, but the need for comparative material, recognition and contacts brought British and American scholars into communication and exchange with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. This article examines these processes. It first uses these excavations as a comparative case-study of different manifestations of colonial science in this period, examining how scholars in the Britain, the Russian Empire and the United States used formal and informal colonial links to Asia to pursue new research. It then moves to examine how the common problem of reconstructing this giant animal drew metropolitan scientific communities together, at least for a time. The construction of the Baluchitherium and Indricotherium illustrates the drives to expand research both imperially and internationally in the early-twentieth century, but also the continual problems in resources, institutionalization, transport and communication that could run up against scientific work.

The Peking Man fossils discovered at Zhoukoudian in north-east China in the 1920s and 1930s were some of the most extensive palaeoanthropological finds of the twentieth century. This article examines their publicization and discussion in Britain, where they were engaged with by some of the world's leading authorities in human evolution, and a media and public highly interested in human-origins research. This international link – simultaneously promoted by scientists in China and in Britain itself – reflected wider debates on international networks; the role of science in the modern world; and changing definitions of race, progress and human nature. This article illustrates how human-origins research was an important means of binding these areas together and presenting scientific work as simultaneously authoritative and credible, but also evoking mystery and adventurousness. Examining this illustrates important features of contemporary views of both science and human development, showing not only the complexities of contemporary regard for the international and public dynamics of scientific research, but wider concerns over human nature, which oscillated between optimistic notions of unity and progress and pessimistic ones of essential differences and misdirected development.

The German ethnologist Gustav Klemm (1802-1867) occupies a rather problematic position in the history of ideas, alternately hailed as a seminal figure in the development of concepts of race and culture, or belittled as a rather derivative marginal thinker.  This article seeks to clarify Klemm’s significance by rooting his theories in their contemporary intellectual and social context.  It argues that his system, a linear model of human development driven by the interworkings of race and culture, grew from an attempt to synthesize Enlightenment notions of universal progress with major shifts of the mid-nineteenth century, including experiences of dramatic social, political and technological change, commitments to constitutional liberalism, and changes in contemporary ethnology and museology. His works therefore illustrate the complex manners in which ideas of heredity, environment, civilization, development and gender could be blended in this often neglected period, and how their meanings and implications altered as syntheses were built.

This essay examines a dispute between the French and German anthropological communities in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. While the debate ostensibly revolved around the ethnological classification of the Prussian population presented in Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages’s La race prussienne, this overlay much deeper points of contention, presenting a case study of how commitments to nationalism and internationalism in late nineteenth-century science were not mutually exclusive but could operate in a highly synergistic manner, even during periods of intense international crisis. In the controversy, a group of scholars attempted to reconcile national rivalries with a commitment to scientific universalism and define how anthropological ideas of race and progress related to political developments. The French and German communities retained similar views that anthropology was an international science and that politically defined nationality was separate from scientifically discerned race. Yet they nevertheless regarded their work as strongly affected by processes of national consolidation and employed the language of scientific universalism to accuse their rivals of misusing science for political purposes.

In the nineteenth century, French scholars and institutions had been world leaders in the new fields of palaeontology and human prehistory. The nation of Cuvier, Lamarck and Boucher de Perthes drove forward some of the key discoveries of ancient human tool-forms and body parts in the “establishment of human antiquity,” and maintained some of the largest collections and displays of the remains of extinct prehistoric beasts in the world.  Not only this, but these fields gained strong social and political significance, with popular works gaining a high public profile, and with the research itself tied to secularizing projects and socially-charged narratives of evolution and development.  Yet, as in many other areas of intellectual and scientific life, the period following the First World War saw significant shifts and tensions.  Palaeontology and human prehistory retained important roles in French intellectual and popular debate, and they maintained strong internationalist and global orientations, conducting research in the French colonial sphere and further afield. However, they also faced greater uncertainties: major American museums massively surpassed their European counterparts in output and funding; the more dramatic new discoveries were made outside of France; and French began to decline as the international language of prehistoric study.  This chapter will examine how French scholars and scientists attempted to deal with these processes, studying the strategies they adopted to maintain French prestige in colonial, national and regional contexts around this potential “turning point.”  In particular, it examines how these changes presented threats to older styles of centralization and collection, but opportunities to expand the influence of French scholars in other ways.

A first-year undergraduate historical skills course (part of the "History in Practice" compulsory option), based around the theme of "the discovery of deep-time" in the mid-nineteenth century.  Taught at the Department of History, University of Manchester since 2012.

On 14-15 September, Dr. Chris Manias hosted an interdisciplinary workshop entitled ‘Popularizing Palaeontology: Historical and Current Perspectives.’  This was attended by historians, palaeontologists, artists, museum professionals and science communicators, and discussed how palaeontology and extinct organisms have been presented to and engaged with by public audiences, both historically and today.

Throughout the workshop, we engaged with questions like: what messages has palaeontological knowledge been used to promote?  What have been the motivations for palaeontological outreach, and what techniques have been used?  How has the public profile of the discipline interacted with its academic reputation and standing?  And why has palaeontological popularization become so focussed on dinosaurs, and how has this affected the public face of the discipline? 

Some papers discussed public engagement with particular organisms, such as Azhdarchid pterosaurs, Sauropod dinosaurs and Mesozoic mammals.  Others talked about how palaeontological ideas have been presented in art, film, the media and literature, and in settings ranging from museums to hospitals to the internet.  Across the two days, we talked about how palaeontological outreach can work across disciplinary boundaries, and in different contexts and time periods.

The talks have been uploaded to a workshop website as video and audio, and the participants are set to write reflective blogposts on the issues raised.  These can all be found at poppalaeo.com