Clues lead to lost Peking man fossils
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 26, 2012
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Artistic rendering of the head of Peking man. [File photo] |
According to a study published in this month's South African Journal of Science, the fossils may be under a parking lot in Qinhuangdao, a port city in north China.
The finding was based on the memories of a World War II-era US marine, Richard M. Bowen, who saw two crates of bones at the parking lot in 1947.
According to Bowen, the bones were dug up at Camp Holcomb in 1947 on a night shortly before his capture.
The researchers have investigated the claim and found it to be perhaps the most credible account of the last known sighting of the important fossils.
This may have been the last sighting of the fossils, said the study conducted by Professor Lee Berger at South African Witwatersrand University and two Chinese researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing.
The crates were believed to be reburied under the parking lot and the researchers think that they may still be there now.
Lost in 1939 as World War II broke out in the Pacific, the fossils were last seen being loaded in two crates onto trucks by US marines, destined for safekeeping in the US. They were then lost to history.
The loss of the Peking man fossils remains perhaps one of the greatest palaeoanthropological mysteries in the history of the science.
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