Peking Man: A Human Ancestor

About 50 km southwest of Beijing, China, there is a small village called Zhoukoudian. Amid the rolling hills surrounding the village, there is one called Dragon Bone Hill, where a remarkable find was made in 1921.

This is site of the cave where the Peking Man, or Homo erectus pekinensis, was found. An early relative of modern humans, these individuals lived between 600,000 to 300,000 years ago.

The Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson and American palaeontologist Walter W. Granger first came to the site in 1921 to look for prehistoric fossils. They unearthed two human molars. After hearing about this find, Canadian anatomist Davidson Black of Peking Union Medical College secured funding to dig at Zhoukoudian too.

In 1927 Black identified Peking Man as a new species of human ancestor based on a single tooth. His findings were published in the journal "Nature," but critics were skeptical of his claims based on only a tooth.

Later excavations under the supervision of Chinese archaeologists Yang Zhongjian, Pei Wenzhong and Jia Lanpo revealed the skeletal remains of about 40 individuals. These excavations were halted by the Japanese invasion in 1937.

These finds also helped confirm the first specimens of Homo erectus, discovered by Eugene Dubois in Java in 1891. At the time, the fossils were dismissed as those of a deformed ape, but the Homo erectus bones found at Zhoukoudian established Java Man and Peking Man as members of a separate species.

The original Peking Man bones disappeared during the war. The Peking Man fossils had been kept at the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Peking Union Medical College. In November 1941, it was decided that the fossils would be sent to the USA for safekeeping until the war ended. But the Peking Man bones disappeared during transport to the port city of Qinghuangdao. Various groups have tried to find the fossils over the years, to no result. The disappearance remains a mystery.

Excavation renewed following the war and a number of other partial fossils have been discovered. The caves have also yielded animal remains and chopping tools. New excavations began in May 2009.

UNESCO named the site a World Heritage Site in 1987.

A new study in March 2009 placed Peking Man as 200,000 years older than the previously accepted range of 400,000 to 500,000 years old. The researcher, Guanjun Shen from the Nanjing Normal University, said this places Peking Man in a colder climate than previously believed.

Sources:
Xinhua News
Wikipedia