For the first time in 50 years! The Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian Newly Discovered Ancient Human Vertex Fossil Human | Zhoukoudian | Ancient Human
Recently, the scientific research team of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences applied a series of new technologies such as CT scanning and 3D reconstruction to identify a piece of human parietal bone from the mammal fossils at the 15th site of Zhoukoudian. It is the first Pleistocene human fossil found in the Zhoukoudian site area in the past 50 years after the discovery of a tooth stone at the 4th site of Zhoukoudian in 1973.
In the past 100 years, the discovery of a fossil of Homo erectus at the first location in Zhoukoudian has attracted high attention from scholars both domestically and internationally, becoming the most important research material for exploring human evolution. Unfortunately, this batch of important Homo erectus fossils, along with the human fossils discovered in the mountaintop cave, were lost during World War II, leaving only four teeth obtained from the 1921 and 1923 excavations at the Evolutionary Museum of Uppsala University in Sweden, as well as a few teeth, two limb bone fragments, one frontal bone, and one occipital bone fragment discovered after the founding of New China.
The fossil specimen discovered this time is yellow brown in color, completely petrified, and its bone wall thickness, curvature, and size can roughly overlap with the right parietal bone of the upright human skull in Zhoukoudian. The discovery of this fossil has led to the addition of a human fossil site at the Zhoukoudian site. The 15th location of Zhoukoudian is 70 meters away from the 1st location. This location was discovered in 1932, and a systematic excavation was carried out from 1934 to 1937. A large number of stone tools and mammalian fossils were unearthed, dating back to the late Middle Pleistocene, approximately 200000 years ago.
![For the first time in 50 years! The Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian Newly Discovered Ancient Human Vertex Fossil Human | Zhoukoudian | Ancient Human](https://a5qu.com/upload/images/5f2804a44b77603b4a0c00d379748a32.jpg)
The human fossil discovered at the first location in Zhoukoudian dates back approximately 500000 years and has been classified as Homo erectus. In addition, human fossils dating back 30000 to 40000 years ago were found in the mountaintop cave and nearby pastoral caves, belonging to early modern humans. The human fossil in the intermediate stage only has one tooth from the fourth site.
The discovery of human fossils at the 15th location in Zhoukoudian will contribute to the in-depth study of human evolution in this region through comparative anatomy and molecular biology, providing extremely important and crucial specimen materials for exploring the evolutionary patterns of ancient Chinese humans, and demonstrating the million year history of human evolution in China.