13 Facts About Peking Man

Peking Man is a subspecies of H erectus which inhabited the Zhoukoudian Cave of northern China during the Middle Pleistocene.

Peking Man was instrumental in the foundation of Chinese anthropology, and fostered an important dialogue between Western and Eastern science for decades to come.

Peking Man played a vital role in the restructuring of the Chinese identity following the Chinese Communist Revolution, and was intensively communicated to working class and peasant communities to introduce them to Marxism and science .

Peking Man is characterised by a long and heavily fortified skull, featuring an inflated bar of bone circumscribing the crown, crossing along the brow ridge, over the ears, and connecting at the back of the skull, as well as a sagittal keel running across the midline.

Peking Man lived in a cool, predominantly steppe, partially forested environment, alongside deer, rhinos, elephants, bison, buffalo, bears, wolves, big cats, and a menagerie of other creatures.

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Peking Man was taught in educational books for all levels, pop science magazines and articles, museums, and lectures given in workspaces, including factories.

Human remains, tools, and evidence of fire were found in so many layers, it has often been assumed Peking Man lived in the cave for hundreds of thousands of years.

In 1937, French palaeoanthropologist Marcellin Boule believed the Peking Man brain was insufficiently developed for such behaviour, based on its small size, and suggested the skulls belonged to a primitive species and the limbs to a more evolved one, the latter manufacturing stone tools and cannibalising the former.

Peking Man is known from 13 skull and cranial fragments, 15 mandibles, 157 isolated and in situ teeth, an atlas, a clavicle, 3 humeri, potentially 2 iliac fragments, 7 femora, a tibia, and a lunate bone .

Peking Man lacks a true postglenoid process behind the jaw hinge, only a broad-based, triangular projection.

The prospect of "labour created humanity" created by prominent communist Friedrich Engels in his 1876 essay "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Peking Man" became central to Chinese anthropology, and was included in almost any discussion regarding human evolution — including educational media for laypersons.

Debate as to whether Peking Man was the first human species to manufacture tools fleshed out in the early 1960s in the period of relative stability between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

In 1985, Binford and Ho doubted Peking Man actually inhabited Zhoukoudian, and asserted the material was burned by naturally occurring fires fueled by guano; though, the next year, Binford interpreted burned horse teeth as evidence of horse-head roasting.