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| China to resume Peking Man site excavations |
| 2009-05-06 |
| [Iran Press TV Latest] Chinese archeologists are set to resume excavations at a cave where they believe human ancestors lived as early as 770,000 years ago. The two-month project will be conducted in Zhoukoudian, about 50 kilometers southwest of Beijing, where the first fossils of Homo erectus pekinensis, historically known as Peking Man, were found by Chinese archaeologist Pei Wenzhong in 1929. Peking Man refers to a human relative who walked upright and whose thick skull bone and beetling brow housed a brain three-quarters the size of Homo Sapiens'. "A skull is something like a lottery. However, it is very likely that we would find animal fossils, stoneware and ruins of fire use," Gao Xing, deputy director of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Palaeoanthropology told Xinhua on Monday. Peking Man was previously believed to be 400,000 to 500,000 years old, but new radioactive dating methods showed that he might have lived as far back as 770,000 years ago. Gao said the Peking Man Site has yielded over 200 human fossils, 100,000 pieces of stoneware and animal fossils of 98 mammal species and 62 bird species so far. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 I thought the PRC believed there were too many Peking men already. Why are they looking for even more? |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2009-05-06 16:50 |