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——'Peking Man' was found in a quarry and some caves near the village of Zhoukoudian, 30 miles southwest of Beijing. The first fossils found in the quarry were dug up by villagers who sold them as 'dragon bones' to a local folk medicine shop. In the 1920s, a Swedish geologist became fascinated with a human-like tooth believed to be two million years old in the collection of a German physician who hunted fossils in China. He began his own search for fossils, beginning in Beijing and was led by a local farmer to Zhoukoudian, which means Dragon Bone Hill. ——Foreign and Chinese archeologists launched a major excavation at Zhoukoudian. The digging intensified when a human molar was found. In December 1929 a complete skullcap was found imbedded in a rock face by a Chinese archeologist clinging to a rope. The skull was presented to the world as the 'missing link' between man and monkeys. —— Excavations continued through the 1930s and more bones were found along with stone tools and evidence of the use of fire. But before the bones had a chance to be carefully examined, the Japanese invaded China and World War II broke out. Disappearance of Peking Man —— The Peking Man bones were hidden after the Japanese invaded China in 1937 and disappeared in 1941 when Chinese and American scientists decided to ship them to the United States for safekeeping. ——Before they disappeared the fossils had been packed in crates at the Peking Union Medical College, an American Baptist teaching hospital, where research on the fossils was conducted by the Rockefeller Foundation. The plan was for the crates to be transferred by the Marine Corps to the port of Qinghuangdao, where they were to be loaded onto a ship called the President Harrison for the journey to America. The ship was scheduled to leave on December 8, 1941. But the day before it was to leave, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Marines in charge of watching over the two crates with the bones were taken prisoner by the Japanese. —— What happened to the bones remains a mystery. The Chinese have blamed the Americans for the disappearance and the Americans have blamed the Japanese. A Chinese professor told the New York Times, 'I think the Japanese opened the boxes thinking they would find weapons or food and when they saw that it was only bones, I think they just kicked it over and threw them away.' Fortunately casts were made of the bones. —— According to one American military report the crates with the Peking Man bones were delivered to a Swiss warehouse for shipment, but there is no evidence that the crates ever arrived at the warehouse. In the 1970s, a woman appeared who claimed to be the widow of one of the Marines in charge of guarding the fossils. She met a Chicago businessman---who was offering a reward for information on the bones---at top of the Empire State Building, showed him some picture which she said were of a box with the missing fossils and then disappeared and was never heard from again. Most think she was part of a hoax. |
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