The Cave Home Of Peking Man

Once a forlorn village fifty kilometers south of Beijing, Zhoukoudian (formerly Choukoutien) is today a virtual shrine to archaeology, a bustling community with its own highway extension, a major exhibit hall which attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists annually, and one of the world's most famous fossil sites. Still active today, this site in seven decades has contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of prehistoric life. It boasts one of the richest fossil deposits found anywhere, ranging from the Early Pliocene to the Late Pleistocene, a span of three million years. It has provided some of the earliest evidence of fire usage ever uncovered. And most important, it is the home of Peking Man, whose discovery ranks as one of the great events in modern archaeology. Now, in The Story of Peking Man, one of China's foremost archaeologists, Jia Lanpo, offers a profusely illustrated history of Zhoukoudian, tracing its earliest discoveries and greatest moments, recounting the tragic events of World War II (Japanese soldiers murdered three archaeologists and the Peking Man fossils vanished under mysterious circumstances), and evaluating its overall importance. Lanpo spent over half a century at Zhoukoudian and he provides many fascinating, first-hand accounts of scientists at work, including such figures as Davidson Black, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Yang Zhongjian, Pei Wenzhong, and of course Lanpo himself. He describes how the abundance of "dragon bones"(fossils sold in herbal medicine shops) in Zhoukoudian first attracted Johan Gunnar Andersson, who began excavations there in 1918; the first major discovery, a human skullcap, found by Pei Wenzhong while digging by candlelight in a tiny cave; and Jia Lanpo's own discovery of a beautifully preserved skullcap in 1936. He vividly conveys the great excitement of an important find as well as the pressure to make major discoveries as funding runs low. And he reviews many of the theories and controversies surrounding Peking Man--Were they cannibals? Did they use bones as tools? Did humanity originate in Asia or Africa? Based on numerous unpublished sources, including field reports, personal letters and photographs, and Lanpo's own remembrances, The Story of Peking Man provides an inside look at a major archaeological site, one that will fascinate anyone interested in the origins of humanity.

At the end of the nineteenth century in China, amateur fossil huntersknew that a ready supply of fossils could be found in backstreetChinese apothecaries. They were sold as 'dragon bones', to be grounddown and made into powerful medicines. When the sources of thesefossils were tracked down they revealed sites rich with the remains ofhorses, rhinoceroses, elephants ... and the ancestors of mankind. Setagainst a background of squabbling Chinese warlords and the Japaneseoccupation.

The Human Fossil Record series is the most authoritative and comprehensive documentation of the fossil evidence relevant to the study of our evolutionary past. This second volume covers the craniodental remains from Africa and Asia attributed to the genus Homo. In this monumental and groundbreaking new series, the authors use clearly defined terminology and descriptive protocols that are applied uniformly throughout. Organized alphabetically by site name with detailed morphological descriptions and original, expertly taken photographs, each entry features: Location information History of discovery Previous systematic assessments of the fossils Geological, archaeological, and faunal contexts Dating References to the primary literature

"Peking Man," a cave man once thought a great hunter who had first tamed fire, actually was a composite of the gnawed remains of some fifty women, children, and men unfortunate enough to have been the prey of the giant cave hyena. Researching the famous fossil site of Dragon Bone Hill in China, scientists Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon retell the story of the cave's unique species of early human, Homo erectus. Boaz and Ciochon take readers on a gripping scientific odyssey. New evidence shows that Homo erectus was an opportunist who rode a tide of environmental change out Africa and into Eurasia, puddle-jumping from one gene pool to the next. Armed with a shaky hold on fire and some sharp rocks, Homo erectus incredibly survived for over 1.5 million years, much longer than our own species Homo sapiens has been on Earth. Tell-tale marks on fossil bones show that the lives of these early humans were brutal, ruled by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow, yet there are fleeting glimpses of human compassion as well. The small brain of Homo erectus and its strangely unchanging culture indicate that the species could not talk. Part of that primitive culture included ritualized aggression, to which the extremely thick skulls of Homo erectus bear mute witness. Both a vivid recreation of the unimagined way of life of a prehistoric species, so similar yet so unlike us, and a fascinating exposition of how modern multidisciplinary research can test hypotheses in human evolution, Dragon Bone Hill is science writing at its best.

An account of the search for the onehalf-million-year-old fossil remains of Peking Man, which were discovered in China in 1926 and lost in 1941 when the Japanese invaded China.

The Encyclopedia of Prehistory represents also defined bya somewhatdifferent set of an attempt to provide basic information sociocultural characteristics than are eth on all archaeologically known cultures, nological cultures. Major traditions are covering the entire globe and the entire defined based on common subsistence prehistory ofhumankind. It is designed as practices, sociopolitical organization, and a tool to assist in doing comparative materialindustries,butlanguage,ideology, research on the peoples of the past. Most and kinship ties play little or no part in of the entries are written by the world's their definition because they are virtually foremost experts on the particular areas unrecoverable from archaeological con and time periods. texts. In contrast, language, ideology, and The Encyclopedia is organized accord kinship ties are central to defining ethno ing to major traditions. A major tradition logical cultures. is defined as a group ofpopulations sharing There are three types ofentries in the similar subsistence practices, technology, Encyclopedia: the major tradition entry, and forms of sociopolitical organization, the regional subtradition entry, and the which are spatially contiguous over a rela site entry. Each contains different types of tively large area and which endure tempo information, and each is intended to be rally for a relatively long period. Minimal used in a different way.