ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two years – 1937 and 1948 – as major watersheds for those studying human origins, and for the societies to which they belonged in both ‘the West’ and in China. It shows the worlds they inhabited in 1937 and 1948, and how the world that emerged in 1948 would have been unimaginable to those who studied human origins in 1937. The chapter explains how and why the views on the early Palaeolithic and human origins in East Asia were frozen in time for around 50 years after 1948 as consequences of decolonisation and post-World War II (WWII)political developments. Decolonisation in South, Southeast and East Asia after WWII had a profound impact on the study of human origins in that it ended Western palaeoanthropological fieldwork in what had been British India, the Dutch East Indies, and French Indo-China for at least a generation.
