Was the Asian man descendant of Peking man The Peking man was found in about 1920 and for some reason vanished , was it because he did not fit into the western theory ? Yet, He is older than modern man from Africa on Asian continent.
During WWII, most of the fossils were shipped out of China prior to the Japanese occupation and evidently the ship sank. Also, all humans are related, it's not like Asians are a separate species.
if memory serves (anthro classes circa 1970s) Peking man was then estimated to be 500 thousand years old and had a shovel shaped incisor which was said to be much more common among Chinese than among the rest of us. So the Chinese were claiming descent from Peking man which put them in China before evolution of "modern" humans. Back then the Chinese did not accept the "out of Africa" hypothesis, instead, favoring the multiregional hypothesis. I ain't kept up with more recent studies of Peking man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_Man Above is a good description. Peking man seems to be a variety of homo erectus.
The hypothesis that Peking Man is the ancestor of Homo sapiens seems more than a little difficult to support. Evidence consistently shows that Homo sapiens arose in Africa, not in Asia. A community of Asians would have to have walked all the way to Africa in order to be the ancestors of sapiens. Of course this is not impossible, but it's quite a stretch. We know that a community of sapiens walked (and boated) all the way from Africa to Australia about 60KYA, becoming the ancestors of the Native Australians. But that community left evidence of their trek. There are people in southern India who have the genetic markers of the San tribe, which is the community whose explorers first emigrated out of Africa. (The San sent out another group of explorers about 10K years later. The climate in Asia was now much less hostile, so they stayed there. It was that community's ancestors who slowly spread out in every direction and populated the entire globe. -- For more on this, review the work of Dr. Cavalli-Sforza.)
Do you really buy the story of sinking ship ? http://www.livescience.com/3379-ancient-peking-man-older-thought.html Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Homo erectus fossil from Zhoukoudian caves. Credit: Copyright Russell L. Ciochon, Univ. of Iowa The famous fossils of an early relative of modern humans commonly called Peking Man may be 200,000 years older than previously thought, a new study finds. The revised date could change the timeline and number of migrations of the Homo erectus species out of Africa and into Asia. It also suggests that Peking Man endured glacial climates. Previous studies estimated that H. erectus fossils found nearly a century ago in China were from about 500,000 years ago. The authors of the new study sought to re-date the fossils using a relatively new method that looks at the radioactive decay of aluminum and beryllium in quartz exposed to cosmic radiation. With this method, they pinned the date closer to 780,000 years ago. Report this Advertisement Understanding the history of H. erectus is of interest to scientists because the populations of the species that lived in Africa are "implicated in the ancestry of modern humans," said paleoanthropologist Russell L. Ciochon of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who was not involved in the new study. Fossils found H. erectus was a type of hominin, the group to which early and modern humans belong. H. erectus walked upright, had a thick skull with a brain a little smaller than our own and used stone tools. The first fossils of the species were found on Java, Indonesia, in 1892 by Eugène Dubois. Nearly 30 years later, more H. erectus fossils were found thousands of miles away during excavations of the Zhoukoudian cave system just outside of Beijing. These caves turned out to be "one of the most important Paleolithic sites in the world," the authors of the new study wrote. After the first fossil was found, anthropologists eventually turned up skulls and bones representing at least 40 H. erectus individuals, other mammal fossils and tens of thousands of stone artifacts. The latest research on the fossils, funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, is detailed in the March 12 issue of the journal Nature. Guanjun Shen at Nanjing Normal University, China, headed up the study. Hold on to the old theory, As China and India will advance their exploration. I would not be surprised if by the time you reach 75 years old it will change
