China exclusive: new clues loom on missing Peking Man skulls
6/9/2005 12:02
The Peking Man Skulls Searching Committee on Monday declared the latest
clues on searching for the lost fossil treasures.
The committee was set up in
Fangshan District of Beijing, home to the Peking Man skulls, in July this year
by the local government and consists of many famous paleontologists in
China.
FOUR KEY CLUES AMONG 63 PIECES OF INFORMATION
The committee has
received 63 pieces of information from areas like Beijing, Jilin Province,
Fujian Province and Taiwan Province in the past two months. Experts with the
committee screened the information and found four might be important:
A
citizen surnamed Wu in Beijing claimed a professor surnamed Gu in Gansu Province
once was invited to write autobiography for Jia Lanpo, one of the finders of the
Peking Man skulls and also a guru on Peking Man studies. Gu once "recorded an
American major's testimony at the Far East Military Court when researching at a
Japanese archive, and the testimony mentioned the skulls."
A citizen surnamed
Ren in Beijing claimed he knew one person whose father was a doctor in Peking
Union Medical College Hospital, where the skulls were kept, and the doctor "took
one skull home and the skull now is buried in a house."
A citizen surnamed
Liu said he could help contact a wartime revolutionist who "has a Peking Man
scull at hand."
A citizen surnamed Wu from Jiangxi Province said a
121-year-old man in Jiangxi once served as a high-ranking official under Dr. Sun
Yat-sen, the forerunner of China's democratic revolution. The old man claimed
that "the skulls are still in China" and he knows the whereabouts.
The
searching committee will trace the valuable clues and publicize any important
development, said Liu Yajun, deputy-director of the Peking Man Skulls Searching
Committee and also director of the Culture Committee in Fangshan District, the
birthplace of the skulls.
LAST WITNESS SPECIFIES ON MISSING BOXES
"I
packed up the fossils found in Zhoukoudian in Fangshan District, including the
Peking Man Skulls, and sent them to the office of Bo Wen, the Chief of General
Affairs of Peking Union Medical College Hospital," said Hu Chengzhi, a retired
paleontologist with China Geological Museum.
Hu worked at the Cenozoic Era
Research Center, China's first paleoanthropological institution, set up by the
Chinese Geological Survey Institute in Peking Union Medical College
Hospital.
It was done about three weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack on
Dec. 8, 1941. The fossils were put inside two white boxes, the larger one 48
inches long, 22 inches wide and 11 inches high, and the smaller one 45 inches
long and 22 inches wide and high, Hu said.
Some experts argued the fossils
might have been intercepted and smashed by Japanese soldiers as trash, but Hu
disagrees.
The fossils were packed with six layers of special paper and
clothes and carefully locked in boxes marked with "CASE 1" and "CASE 2", Hu
said.
Wang Xizhi, then head of the hospital, once told Hu the boxes were
transferred to other places after staying at the hospital for one night, but no
one knew where they were sent to.
Perhaps no Chinese knows where they are
now, Hu said.
WHY SEARCH FOR THEM
In the past 64 years after the skulls
were lost, generations of experts and non-governmental organizations have been
searching for them.
"Mankind can give up many things, but there is one thing
that we can never abandon -- that is our ancestors," said Gao Xing, an expert of
ancient vertebrates, with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
"Most clues
seemed not authoritative enough. I am not optimistic about the results," said
Jia Yuzhang, son of Jia Lanpo. "But the searching could help the nation remember
the loss as a pain China experienced during the war."
The first Peking Man
skull was discovered about 76 years ago and lost 64 years ago.
The missing
fossils involve five intact skulls, together with 147
teeth, broken skulls, a
thighbone, a lower jaw bone and collar bone.
The discovery of the Peking Man,
who lived about 400,000 to 500,000 years ago, was one of the most decisive steps
in the scientific quest to trace man's prehistoric development from the
apes.
The ape-man already possessed the basic human characteristics -- he
could walk erect and make use of simple tools, and knew how to use fire.
Xinhua News
|
