China finds new evidence for use of fire by 'Peking Man'
New evidence has been found in an archeological site in Beijing suggesting that the ancestor of modern man was able to use fire more than 600,000 years ago. The findings were announced Friday, after archeologists spent three years excavating the Zhoukoudian fossil site in the western suburbs of Beijing. Read more
Peking Man, Homo erectus pekinensis, is an example of Homo erectus. A group of fossil specimens was discovered in 1923-27 during excavations at Zhoukoudian (Chou K'ou-tien) near Beijing (written 'Peking' before the adoption of the Pinyin romanisation system), China. Most of the study on these fossils was done by Davidson Black until his death in 1934. Franz Weidenreich replaced him and studied the fossils until leaving China in 1941. The original fossils disappeared in 1941 while being shipped to the United States for safety during World War II, but excellent casts and descriptions remain. Read more
A unique canine tooth from Peking Man has been found at the Museum of Evolution at Swedish Uppsala University, the university said Wednesday. Fossils from so-called Peking man are extremely rare, as most of the finds disappeared during World War II. Swedish paleontologists were the first group of scientists to go to China in the early 20th century to carry out a series of expeditions in collaboration with Chinese colleagues. Read more
Evidence for Use of Fire Found at Peking Man Site Archaeologists have discovered several vertebrate fossils, ashes, burned bones and charcoal remnants at the Zhoukoudian caves, also known as the "Peking Man" site, China News Service reported on Monday.
Footwear , it seems, has been fashionable for rather a long time. Toe bones from a cave in China suggest people were wearing shoes at least 40,000 years ago. Erik Trinkaus and Hong Shang, from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, measured the shape and density of toe bones from a 40,000-year-old skeleton found in Tianyuan cave near Beijing. They compared these bones with those from 20th century urban Americans, late-prehistoric Inuits and other late-prehistoric Native Americans.
The remains of one of the earliest modern humans to inhabit eastern Asia have been unearthed in a cave in China. The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonised the East, a movement that is only poorly understood by anthropologists. Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing.
Chinese and foreign scientists have recently confirmed that fossils of modern human beings found in Tianyuan Cave at Zhoukoudian near Beijing traced back to around 40,000 years ago. A joint research report on the discovery will be published on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States America (PNAS) Tuesday. Scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, including Shang Hong and Professor Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St. Louis, completed the research on the fossils. Beijing Evening News reported on Monday that the modern human fossils dated back 42,000 or 38,500 years, making them the oldest to be found in the eastern part of the Eurasian continent.
Zhoukoudian, just about an hour’s drive from the city centre, became world famous when Chinese paleoanthropologist Pei Wenzhong and his team discovered a complete human skull in the caves of the Dragon Bone Hill. They called him the Peking Man, and the find was carbon-dated to some 20,000 years ago. Later on, more than 40 other fossilised skeletons were discovered, comprising male, female, young and old, which convinced the scholars that this particular tribe of cavemen could have lived in that area intermittently as far back as 300,000 to half a million years ago. The amazing discovery has pushed back the history of Beijing – and thus China – to some 600,000 years.