They wonder whether the descendants of Peking Man and fellow members of the species Homo erectus died out or evolved into a more modern species, and whether they contributed to the gene pool of China today.
“It's a story without an ending,” says Wu Xinzhi, a palaeontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing. Such finds have cemented Africa's status as the cradle of humanity - the place from which modern humans and their predecessors spread around the globe - and relegated Asia to a kind of evolutionary cul-de-sac.īut the tale of Peking Man has haunted generations of Chinese researchers, who have struggled to understand its relationship to modern humans. Although modern dating methods put the fossil even earlier - at up to 780,000 years old - the specimen has been eclipsed by discoveries in Africa that have yielded much older remains of ancient human relatives. Since then, the central importance of Peking Man has faded. Dubbed Peking Man, it was among the earliest human remains ever uncovered, and it helped to convince many researchers that humanity first evolved in Asia. It was here, in 1929, that researchers discovered a nearly complete ancient skull that they determined was roughly half a million years old. Along the northern side, a path leads up to some fenced-off caves that draw 150,000 visitors each year, from schoolchildren to grey-haired pensioners.
On the outskirts of Beijing, a small limestone mountain named Dragon Bone Hill rises above the surrounding sprawl.
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