New Peking Man report

The South African Journal of Science has a new article by Lee Berger, Wu Liu and Wu Xiujie [1], reporting on the mystery of the "Peking Man" fossils. The remains from Zhoukoudian, China, were lost at the outset of the Second World War. There have been endless speculations about the ultimate fate of the fossils, from being lost at sea in a Japanese raid to being secreted away by rogue anthropologists.

Two years ago, Berger and colleagues received a report from the son of a former marine, Richard Bowen:

My father was a Marine in China after WWII and he thinks he discovered bones of the missing Peking Man at a Marine base in China in 1947. He knows where these are buried there having dug them up and reburied them while under siege in Chinwangtao. I showed him the site from Google earth and it appears untouched. They may still be there buried in the boxes …

That's where the story begins. The paper is open access and interesting to read the history. Berger and colleagues didn't locate the remains but took care to investigate the former area. They report that the remains were probably destroyed but hold out a "glimmer of hope" that impending construction at the location may yet turn up the bones that Richard Bowen reported seeing... Via john hawks weblog

Photo: Dr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, consulting Paleontologist of the National Geological Survey of China, is shown at a symposium of Early Man at the Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia, Pa., in this March 18, 1937 file photo. De Chardin holds a skull of a Peking man he found in China. (AP Photo/FILE).

Link 3: 26-03-12. ¿Hallan posible pista sobre restos del Hombre de Pekín? 


Actualización: The Earliest Grandpa We Lost in the War
The Peking Man’s bones changed everything we knew about the earliest humans—then vanished in the chaos of post-war China. Yet there’s a chance we soon might unearth them a second time... 

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” Joni Mitchell sang in 1970, decrying our modern frenzy of development. But perhaps no one feels this loss more acutely than one of our early ancestors. The Peking Man lived more than 400,000 years ago, he learned how to make fire and use tools, and he was widely fêted when his remains were found. Afterlife was good…until his ungrateful descendants lost the precious bones, that is. Today, many believe the Peking Man ingloriously resides beneath a concrete slab dotted with cars in Qinhuangdao, China...