Abstract
Sinanthropus VI SOME important inferences are drawn by Prof. Franz Weidenreich (Bull. Geol. Soc. China, 16; 1936-37) from fragments of a skull of Peking man designated as Sinanthropus VI, which have, been brought together in the laboratory from material collected in the Choukoutien cave from 1934 onward. These consist of a fragment of a right temporal bone, comprising the ear aperture and adjacent parts (belonging apparently to the same skull as the left temporal bone and adjacent parts found in 1934 and already described), three teeth, two molars and a premolar, as well as two fragments of a skull, of which one is the greater part of a left parietal, while in material from the same level as the three teeth were the right side of a frontal bone and the anterior part of the squama of a right temporal bone. It is considered certain that all these pieces belong to one and the same skull-an adult (old) female. From these fragments it has been possible to form a general idea of the contour of the frontal portion of the skull, which on comparison with Sinanthropus I and Pithecanthropus, shows much less curvature than Skull I in the saggital planes and approaches very closely to the frontal bone of Pithecanthropus. In a frontal direction between the inferior temporal lines of both sides, it is less curved than Skull I and indeed is even natter than Pithecanthropus. On a profile view, Skull VI coincides practically in all its lines with those of Pithecanthropus. A further discovery is a very small fragment, in certain respects, however, of very great importance. This is the right moiety of the posterior arch of an atlas. There cannot be any doubt that this is a human first cervical vertebra, and that it belongs to Sinanthropus. It does not display any distinct fundamental difference when compared with that of recent man. Its interest lies in the fact that it adds support to the view put forward on the evidence of the absence of long bones from the cave, that the skulls were brought into the cave by man and were there broken at the base or split open in order to get at the brains.
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Research Items. Nature 140, 1067–1068 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/1401067a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1401067a0