Peking Man

Peking Man Fossil range: Pleistocene
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Subphylum: Vertebrata Class: Mammalia Order: Primates Family: Hominidae Genus: Homo Species: H. erectus Subspecies: H. e. pekinensis
Trinomial name
Homo erectus pekinensis (Black, 1927)

Peking Man (now sometimes called Beijing Man), also called Sinanthropus pekinensis (currently Homo erectus pekinensis), is an example of Homo erectus. The remains were first discovered in 1923-27 during excavations at Zhoukoudian (Choukoutien) near Beijing (Peking), China. The finds have been dated from roughly 250,000-400,000 years ago in the Pleistocene.

Original fossils

File:Zhoukoudian Museum July2004.jpg

Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site - the Museum (taken in July 2004). At the centre: what Peking Man looked like.

First studies began at Zhoukoudian in 1923 with an investigation of a number of caves in the limestone there. Otto Zdansky was working for geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson who described this event in Children of the Yellow Earth. According to Andersson, a local man led him, American paleontologist Walter Granger and Zdansky to what is today known as the Dragon Bone Hill, a place full of fossilized bones. The party immediately began an excavation. After Andersson and Granger left the site three days later, Zdansky found fossil teeth that resembled human molars. He did not, however, disclose his finds to Andersson and Granger. In 1926, he took them to the Peking Union Medical College, in Peking, where Canadian anatomist Davidson Black analyzed them. He later published his finds in the journal Nature.

The first specimens of Homo erectus had been found in Java in 1891 by Eugene Dubois, with the Java Man initially being named Pithecanthropus erectus but later transferred to the genus Homo.

The Rockefeller Foundation agreed to fund the work at Zhoukoudian. By 1929, Chinese archaeologists Yang Zhongjian and Pei Wenzhong, and later Jia Lanpo, had taken over the excavation. Over the next seven years, they uncovered fossils of more than 40 specimens including 6 nearly complete skullcaps. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Franz Weidenreich were also involved.

Excavation ended in July 1937 when the Japanese occupied Beijing. Fossils of the Peking Man were placed in the safe at the Cenozoic Laboratory of the Peking Union Medical College. Eventually, in November 1941, secretary Hu Chengzi packed up the fossils so they could be sent to USA for safekeeping until the end of the war. They vanished en route to the port city of Qinghuangdao. They were probably in possession of a group of US marines who the Japanese captured when the war began between Japan and USA.

Various parties have tried to locate the fossils but, so far, without result. In 1972, a US financier Christopher Janus promised a $5,000 (U.S.) reward for the missing skulls; one woman contacted him, asking for $500,000 (U.S.) but she later vanished. In July 2005, the Chinese government founded a committee to find the bones to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

There are also various theories of what might have happened, including a theory that the bones had sunk with a Japanese ship Awa Maru in 1945.

Subsequent Research

Excavations at Zhoukoudian resumed after the war, and parts of another skull were found in 1966. To date a number of other partial fossil remains have been found. The Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1987.

Paleontological conclusions

Because all the pre-war findings at Zhoukoudian were lost during transit to the USA, subsequent researchers have had to rely on casts and existing writings from the original discoverers.

Contiguous findings of animal remains and evidence of fire and tool usage, as well as the manufacturing of tools, were used to support H. erectus being the first "faber" or tool-worker. The analysis of the remains of "Peking Man" led to the claim that the Zhoukoudian and Java fossils were examples of the same broad stage of human evolution. This is also the official view of the Chinese Communist Party.

This interpretation was challenged in 1985 by Lewis Binford, who claimed that the Peking Man was a scavenger, not a hunter. The 1998 team of Steve Weiner of the Weizmann Institute of Science concluded that they had not found evidence that the Peking Man had used fire.

Relation to modern Chinese people

Some Chinese paleoanthropologists have asserted in the past that the modern Chinese are descendants of the Peking Man. However, modern genetic research does not support this hypothesis. A recent study undertaken by Chinese geneticist Jin Li showed that there was no inter-breeding between modern human immigrants to East Asia and Homo erectus, contradicting the Peking Man-hypothesis and affirming that the Chinese descended from Africans in accordance with the Recent single-origin hypothesis. However, some paleontologists see continuity in skeletal remains.

Popular culture

• The disappearance of Peking Man's remains, and speculation of where they ended up, is the plot of January 7, 1975 episode Season 7, Episode 160 of Hawaii Five-O, "Bones of Contention". [1]

• Canadian science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer won an Aurora Award for his 1996 short story "Peking Man," which connects the lost bones to the Dracula legend; the story first appeared in the anthology Dark Destiny III: Children of Dracula edited by Edward E. Kramer, and is reprinted in Sawyer's collection Iterations.
• The discovery of Peking Man is referred to in the book The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan.

• Peking Man is part of the central plot in the mystery Sleeping Bones by Katherine V. Forrest.

• A Peking Man fossil is among those which can be found in the Nintendo DS video game Animal Crossing: Wild World.

• Peking Man is part of the central plot of Philip K. Dick's The Crack In Space.

• Peking Man's bones is the subject of an episode of the Japanese Anime "Lupin the 3rd" titled: Jumping the Bones

• Peking Man is part of the plot of Clive Cussler's Flood Tide

• Peking Man is the main part of the central plot of Carolyn G. Hart's mystery novel Skulduggery, set in San Francisco's Chinatown in the early 1980s. ISBN 0-7862-2672-2

• The mystery of the missing Peking Man fossils is central to the 1999 novel Lost in Translation, by Nicole Mones.

• Sega and Vivarium's "Seaman 2 Peking Genjin no Ikusei Kit" (Peking Man Growth Kit) for the PlayStation 2 will let players interact with a 20 centimeter tall Peking Man clone.

See also

• List of fossil sites (with link directory)