Abstract
SUPPLEMENTING our article entitled “Pleistocene Man in China” in NATURE of Dec. 28, 1929, p. 973, we are informed that Prof. Davidson Black has cabled from Peking (or, as the Chinese Government now calls the city, Peiping) on Dec. 28 as follows: “Recovered Chou Kou Tien uncrushed adult Sinan thropus skull entire except face letter follows”. This presumably is a correction of the unofficial cablegrams that appeared in the newspapers on Dec. 15 and 16 mentioning “a complete skull with both the cranial and facial bones perfectly preserved”. Prof. Davidson Black's promised statement was made at a meeting of the Geological Society of China held on Dec. 28. According to a message in the Times of Dec. 30 from its Peking correspondent, the credit for the actual discovery lies with a young Chinese geologist, Mr. W. C. Pei, who is in charge of the field work of the Geological Survey at Chou Kou Tien. Some four tons of fossils have been excavated, including parts of two lower jaws, several teeth, and cranial fragments of man. Among the mammalian remains is included the sabre-toothed tiger, which is contemporary with Peking Man. The evidence would appear to point to a very high antiquity indeed. Dr. Grabau, of the Chinese Geological Survey, is said to assign the skull to the beginning of the Quaternary Age, while that well-known authority on Chinese geology and archæology, Père Teilhard de Chardin, gives it an estimated antiquity of 400,000 to 500,000 years. If either of these estimates is confirmed, it would place this relic at comparatively little later than Pithecanthropus of Java. The skull is at present embedded in hard travertine, but the right side and vault have been freed by the removal of a relatively softer part of the matrix. It would appear that while the whole of the facial region is lacking, the brain case is almost complete and massive jaw sockets have been exposed. The brow ridges are also said to be massive. As compared with the Java skull, the length is approximately the same, but relatively there appears to be greater brain capacity.
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[News and Views]. Nature 125, 22–26 (1930). https://doi.org/10.1038/125022a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/125022a0