Historians have written before about the excavations that led to the discovery of Peking Man – a species of hominid found in China in the late 1920s. Often the focus has been the contribution made to twentieth-century conceptions of human evolution. Additional interest has come from the fact that all the fossils collected before the Second World War were lost during the attempt to take them out of the country to prevent their possible capture by the invading Japanese. Most accounts concentrate on the early years of excavation and highlight the roles of a small number of Western and Chinese scientists. In The People's Peking Man, Sigrid Schmalzer takes a different tack, offering a novel analysis of the social and political context that informed scientific and popular understanding of Peking Man in China during the Republican and Communist periods.

Schmalzer devotes most of her attention to the period following the founding of the People's Republic of China, when Chinese scientists conducted excavations and research into palaeoanthropology in institutions such as the Institute for Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology, often having little interaction with Western scientists. Rather than restricting her attention to palaeoanthropological research, she also investigates issues relating to the social and political status of Peking Man in modern Chinese culture, making use of a broad range of science-studies scholarship to examine topics such as nationalism versus internationalism in the conduct of Chinese science. Especially noteworthy is her attention to conceptions of the proper relationship between scientific and social elites. As she shows, the idea that some people possess the technical knowledge needed for the correct interpretation and examination of such rare hominid fossils was at odds with a communist ideology that emphasized the value of the knowledge and skills of ordinary workers.

A major theme of this book is the resulting tension, played out in the strenuous efforts of the Chinese government to modernize China by eradicating popular superstition. On the one hand, lecturers and museums sought to educate people about human evolution and the significance of the Peking Man fossils. On the other hand, there was an official rejection of bourgeois forms of elite knowledge in favour of the useful knowledge of the labouring segments of society. Schmalzer traces the tension and the impact it had on Chinese palaeoanthropologists, who needed to balance specialized scientific research with politically acceptable forms of popular science education of the masses. A related complication was the question of the relative status of tradition versus the push to modernize China. Schmalzer uses the example of the Chinese tradition of the Wild Man, or yeren – a humanoid primate (similar to the yeti) that people have claimed to see in remote parts of China – to suggest the ways in which ape-like humans have had a place not only in modern palaeoanthropological thought in China but also in popular culture, where the notion expresses long-held views about humankind's place in nature and society.

Throughout, Schmalzer pays rather more attention to questions relating to the communication of science and the ideological uses of Peking Man than to the research conducted by Chinese palaeoanthropologists. Central to this account is the Communist government's incorporation of evolutionary theory into political doctrine, notably via Engels's assertion that labour was a major factor in the process of apes evolving into humans. Schmalzer shows how the popular-science accounts of Peking Man were designed to draw lessons that supported the Communist government's social ideology. As such, her analysis offers a fruitful model whereby historians can examine the social and political uses to which particular theories of human origins have been put at different times by European and American palaeoanthropologists. It also demonstrates the value of analysing popular-science accounts of human origins rather than simply discussing the history of major fossil discoveries or differing scientific theories of human evolution.

That said, such coverage as Schmalzer does provide of the major scientific discoveries and debates surrounding Peking Man in China and the West is inadequate. The question of what relationship existed between professional scientific debates over the meaning of Peking Man and the broader popular meaning of this human ancestor demands much more thorough exploration. The important recent scientific controversies over the place of Peking Man in palaeoanthropological accounts of human evolution are discussed only in the last chapter. Furthermore, the scientific knowledge that was being disseminated to the public, represented in museum exhibits and utilized by politicians, is frequently presented as possessing only a social reality, rather than as knowledge that, while rooted in a social and political context, also derived a significant part of its meaning from actual specimens found in specific geological deposits and interpreted in terms of particular theories of human evolution. Too much of the professional palaeoanthropology of this period in China is absent from Schmalzer's account. Despite this shortcoming, her book is a very useful and interesting contribution to the history of palaeoanthropology, the history of science and the history of China.