At Chou-Kou-Tien

The year 1936 has been a boom year in fossil anthropology. A quarry blast in South Africa turned up an adult skull of the same genus as the immature fossil Australopithecus found in 1924. A brain case discovered in England appeared to be older than Piltdown Man. A cranial piece dug out of a California creek, though probably not much more than 30,000 years old, looked like the oldest human relic ever found in the U. S. (TIME, Oct. 12 et seq.). Few weeks ago from the cave at Chou-Kou-Tien, whence the famed pair of skulls belonging to Pekin Man first came to light in 1929, came news that two more skulls had been found. Reported from China last week was a fifth skull of Pekin Man, with the nose and eye sockets better preserved than in any of the others.

Digging in the Chou-Kou-Tien limestone, 37 miles southwest of Peiping, has been going on for a decade. On the evidence of a single tooth, Dr. Davidson Black set up Pekin Man as a new genus and species which he called Sinanthropus pekinensis. Seven years ago a Chinese geologist found an immature female skull. Then another childish cranial piece and many more skeletal fragments were turned up, including twelve jaws and about 100 teeth, representing some 24 individuals. After Dr. Black died his work was continued through the Rockefeller-endowed Cenozoic Research Laboratory by Dr. Franz Weidenreich of Peiping Union Medical College.

Evidence indicated that Pekin Man was 500,000 to 1,000,000 years old, since he was found with remains of bear, deer, rhinoceros, hyenas and rodents of the early Glacial Age. He also appeared to be a cannibal especially fond of eating from the head, since the heads discovered seemed to have been severed from their trunks. No traces of tools or fire were discovered. The third and fourth skulls found this year were buried ten feet lower than the first two, were therefore considered to be more ancient. To Dr. Weidenreich's delight, they were both mature, as indicated by the closing of the cranial sutures. The fifth skull he last week pronounced the oldest human fossil ever found, older even than Pithecanthropus erectus, the brutish ape-man of Java.

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