What Is the Second Greatest Mystery in Anthropology?
What Is the Second Greatest Mystery in Anthropology?
The story of the disappearance of the Peking Man fossils.
Posted Dec 13, 2019
The second greatest mystery in anthropology (the first was why Neandertals disappeared) was the disappearance of a box of ancient skulls in China during the start of World War II.
The story begins on a limestone bluff near Beijing (then Peking), which the local people called Dragon Bone Hill (now called Zhoukoudian, then Chou Kou Tien) because old bones were so frequently found there. In 1929, the first human-like skull was found in a cave on the hill by Chinese anthropologist Pei Wen-Chung and others working for the Cenozoic Research Laboratory at Peking Union Medical College. It was called the Peking Man, and it was recognized to be at least 500,000 years old.
A large number of other fossils were also discovered, including animals and many broken skulls, but few whole skeletons. This led University of Chicago professor Franz Weidenreich, who also worked at the Cenozoic Laboratory, to posit that the Peking Man might have cannibalized other hominins. Also on that dig was Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who had been banished from France by his order for his views on evolution and was sent to Peking, where he became familiar to those at the Cenozoic Laboratory.
The only previous known older fossil in the world at that time was named Java Man, found by a Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugène DuBois in 1891 on the isle of Java. The Java Man fossils were thought to date to about 700,000 to 1,000,000 years ago, so the Peking Man fossils were further helping to establish Darwin’s claims of the early evolution of humans.
The Peking Man fossils were also unique because they were found among many stone tools that were more sophisticated than the 2.5 million-year-old stone tools, but less sophisticated than the later Neandertal stone tools or those of Homo sapiens. Another fascinating find in the cave was the evidence for managed fire, which meant that the Peking hominins had been cooking vegetable-like foodstuffs, seeds, and animals.
More:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/how-think-neandertal/201912/what-is-the-second-greatest-mystery-in-anthropology
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In 1912 Charles Dawson, an amateur archaeologist claimed to have discovered the ‘missing link’ between ape and man. He had found part of a human-like skull in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown village in Sussex, England.
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Smith Woodward made a reconstruction of the skull fragments, and the archaeologists hypothesised that the find indicated evidence of a human ancestor living 500,000 years ago. They announced their discovery at a Geological Society meeting in 1912. For the most part, their story was accepted in good faith.
However, in 1949 new dating technology arrived that changed scientific opinion on the age of the remains Using fluorine tests, Dr Kenneth Oakley, a geologist at the Natural History Museum, discovered that the Piltdown remains were only 50,000 years old. This eliminated the possibility of the Piltdown Man being the missing link between humans and apes as at this point in time humans had already developed into their Homo sapiens form.
Following this, biological anthropologist Dr Joseph Weiner and human anatomist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, both from Oxford University, worked with Dr Oakley to further test the age of the Piltdown findings. Their results showed that the skull and jaw fragments actually came from two different species, a human and an ape, probably an orangutan.
More from the Museum of Natural History in London: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/departments-and-staff/library-and-archives/collections/piltdown-man.html