Abstract
RECENT excavation in the cave of Choukoutien, the home of Peking man, has proved fortunate beyond all expectation. No less than three new skulls of Sinanthropus have been added to the relics of this primitive type of early man. On October 22, Mr. L. P. Chia, of the National Geological Survey of China, brought to light a left mandible with teeth pronounced to be male in type, to which Sir Graft on Elliot Smith refers in a letter to The Times of December 5. This was followed by the discovery by the same excavator of two skulls (The Times, Nov. 20) and to this in turn has succeeded a further discovery of another skull, which, if the description given in the dispatch from the Peiping correspondent of The Times of December 8 be accepted as accurate, may well prove of even greater significance than the earlier finds of new material. With the two skulls previously known, of which the first was found by Mr. W. C. Pei in December 1929, there are now five skulls of Sinanthropus pekinensis in existence, while a sixth has been reconstructed from fragmentary finds by Prof. Franz Weidenreich, the director of the Csenozoie Research Laboratory of the Geological Survey. The new material is of outstanding importance in view of the fact that the skulls are those of fully developed adults, whereas the two skulls previously known were those of adolescents. Of the skulls recently discovered, the first two are of a male and a female, in age between forty and fifty years. Added evidential value attaches to the third skull owing to the fact that it is in a more complete state of preservation than any previous specimen. Certain parts of the base of the skull missing in the other skulls are her© present, as well as parts of the facial skeleton and nasal structure.
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Peking Man: Further Discoveries. Nature 138, 1004 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/1381004b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1381004b0