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New dig to start at Peking Man site
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-05 07:40
Chinese scientists will excavate at a cave where the first Peking Man skull was found to try and find more relics of men believed to have lived 770,000 years ago. The project on the western slope of the Peking Man site will start mid-May and last two months, Gao Xing, deputy director of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Palaeoanthropology, said. "The discovery of a skull is like a lottery but it is very likely we will find animal fossils, stoneware and other artifacts," Gao said. Chinese archaeologist Pei Wenzhong found the first complete skull at the Peking Man site in Zhoukoudian, about 50 km southwest of the center of Beijing, in December 1929. Peking Man was previously believed to have lived 400,000 to 500,000 years ago, but Chinese scientists, using a new radioactive dating method, said this year that they could have lived as far back as 770,000 years ago. The finding was published in London-based science journal Nature in March. Excavations at the Peking Man site have yielded more than 200 human fossils, 100,000 pieces of stoneware and fossils of 98 mammal species and 62 bird species, according to Gao. Xinhua
(China Daily 05/05/2009 page5) Related
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