Different human bones dug out of Zhoukoudian. Courtesy of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
On December 2, 1929, in Zhoukoudian on the outskirts of Beijing, the first ancient human skull was unearthed, which shook the world.
On December 2, 2019, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences held a general meeting for the 90th anniversary of its establishment. Over the past 90 years, the development of paleoanthropology has constantly renewed the face of ancient ancestors. Although Homo erectus in Zhoukoudian is the longest studied ancient human, the question remains unanswered: Is it a by-branch of human evolution? What is its relationship with ancient Homo sapiens and modern Chinese?
It is first thought to be the ancestor of East Asians
In the early winter of 1929, Pei Wenzhong, who had just graduated from the Geology Department of Peking University for two years, led an excavation team to find a skull fossil in Zhoukoudian, which was obviously a human bone, but the shape did not resemble any existing human race— the skull of the first ancient human "Peking Man" (also known as Beijing Ape Man). Today, when human fossils are often found around the world, the "Peking Man" is not outstanding, but it is the Beijing Ape Man that makes the world confirm for the first time that there are ancient races that are different from us.
The famous scholar Jia Lanpo believes that the reason why the excavation of the "Peking People" caused a sensation in the world is because a complete set of archaeological information was excavated here, including bone tools and stone tools, as well as traces and relics of the fire, which are very comprehensive. The ruins of Zhoukoudian show the unprecedented rich and complete life of primitive people in front of the world, and everything is clear and credible.
By the 1920s, The Darwin theory had become widely accepted. But the "missing link" between the ape and the man that plagued Darwin was never filled. Humans are derived from apes and were not conclusive until the discovery of the Zhoukoudian ape-man site. Although javanese fossils had been unearthed before the discovery of the Peking Man fossil, it was too primitive and scholars believed that it might be a large gibbon.
The first to analyze and study the fossils of "Peking Man" was the head of the Department of Anatomy of Union Medical College Hospital, the Canadian Bu Dasheng. Later, when Bu Dasheng died of overwork, Wei Dunrui, a paleoanthropologist and anatomist and Jew who had fled Germany, took the place of Bu Dasheng in China, and thus became the authority on the theory of early human origins.
When Wei Dunrui studied the fossils of "Peking Man", he found that "Peking Man" had some similarities with modern Chinese, such as the sagittal bulge that appeared in the center of the skull, the round pillow of the lower jaw, and the shovel-shaped incisors. Based on this, he put forward the view that "Peking man" is closely related to the evolution of modern Chinese, believing that "Peking man" is the ancestor of modern Chinese and the core role of human origin, such as shovel-shaped incisors, which refers to the two edges of the front teeth rolled into edges, with a low depression in the middle, like a shovel. Anthropologists are familiar with it, and it is a common feature in East Asia and rare in Europe and Africa. The shovel-shaped incisors were found in the Beijing ape man, and it is difficult not to think that it is the Beijing ape man who has inherited this trait to this day.
The Peking Ape Man of 1929 is still being studied today. In fact, "ape-man" implies that they are a species between apes and humans, which is an outdated concept. In the current theoretical system, Beijingers are people, to be precise, a kind of "Homo erectus" who lived 300,000 to 800,000 years ago. Later studies believed that Beijingers were still very smart despite their low brain volume. They burned fires and built fires with stones. It is also possible to make complex tools and migrate to different environments. As for whether they are related to modern Chinese, it is difficult to draw conclusions.
There are four ancient humans in Zhoukoudian
After the excavation of the "Beijing Ape Man", Zhoukoudian has successively excavated the cave man on the top of the mountain, the tianyuan cave man and another ancient human being, and the four populations are very different in age and basically unrelated to each other.
Wu Xiujie, a researcher at the Institute of Paleovertebrates of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that since Pei Wenzhong discovered the first Fossil skull of Zhoukoudian Homo erectus (Peking Ape Man) on December 2, 1929, so far there have been 4 sites in Zhoukoudian where ancient human fossils have been found, namely: Zhoukoudian site 1 (500,000 years ago), site 4 (about 200,000 years ago), summit cave and Tianyuan cave (about 40,000 years ago). According to the morphological characteristics of human fossils and their geological age, the evolutionary status of ancient human fossils found in Zhoukoudian is summarized as Homo erectus, ancient Homo sapiens (or early Homo sapiens), and early modern humans, respectively.
Among these 4 sites, the largest number of human fossils found was the Zhoukoudian No. 1 site, which included 6 relatively complete skulls, 4 mandibles, more than 150 teeth, and skull and skull fragments, belonging to about 40 individuals. Unfortunately, these Homo erectus fossils were lost during the War of Resistance.
Only 4 of the early fossils of Peking Man officinalis, found earlier, are in the Paleontological Museum of upsala University in Switzerland. After the founding of New China, excavation work resumed at the Site of Zhoukoudian. A total of 11 Peking Ape Man fossils were discovered after 1949, which were preserved in the Institute of Ancient Spine. Among them, from 1949 to 1951, five fossilized Peking Ape teeth, a human humerus and a section of tibia were found at the first site; a female mandible was found in 1959; and a frontal bone, occipital bone and tooth were found in 1966.
The site of the Beijing Summit Cave was discovered by Pei Wenzhong in 1930 while exploring the upper part of the Keel Mountain, and was officially excavated in 1933-1934. A total of 3 complete skulls, 4 mandibles and some individual teeth, skull and hind skull fragments were excavated from the cave at the top of the mountain, representing 8-10 individuals. Unfortunately, these fossils were also lost during the War of Resistance, and only the model was preserved.
Zhoukoudian Site No. 4 was discovered in 1973 and unearthed here is a human maxillary first front molar.
The human fossils of Tianyuan Cave were discovered in 2003, a total of 34 pieces, from the same male individual, and the fossils are currently preserved in the Ancient Spine Institute. In 2013, Fu Qiaomei and others extracted and analyzed the fossil DNA of Tianyuandong people. Compared with modern Europeans, the pastoral cave people are more closely related to modern Asians and should be representatives of ancient East Asian populations. Later, it was found that the Tianyuandong people may have had genetic exchanges with a group of people who lived in Europe about 35,000 years ago. In addition, the similarity between the Tianyuandong people and the indigenous populations of South America suggests that the stability of the East Asian population continued until the human invasion of the American continent.
However, fossils that are older than the Tianyuandong people, because DNA cannot be preserved for that long, can not directly give the answer to "who he is".
There is no completely negated bloodline
The physical difference between Zhoukoudian Homo erectus and modern people is huge, but later some scholars speculated from some small characteristics that it may be related to modern East Asians, and scholars are still exploring the relationship between Zhoukoudian Homo erectus and China's ancient Homo sapiens and early modern people.
When Wei Dunrui studied the Peking Ape Man fossil, he noticed a series of features that resembled the Peking Ape and the race, and believed that there was morphological continuity between them. In 1946, Wei Dunrui proposed the "human evolution pluralism hypothesis", which held that there were four routes of human evolution, which existed in East Asia, Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia to Australia. On the east Asian human evolutionary line, Wei Dunrui clearly marked the ancestral descendant relationship between the Peking Ape Man-Mountain Cave Man and the Mongol race.
In the 1980s, Chinese paleoanthropologist Academician Wu Xinzhi and American and Australian scholars created the "multi-regional evolution theory" of the origin of modern humans based on the fossil evidence available at that time.
Wu Xinzhi believes that Chinese fossils have a series of common morphological characteristics, including the reduction of facial height, congenital loss of the third molars, flattening of the upper face, the frontal sphenoid process of the cheekbones facing forward, the small angle when viewed from the bottom at the junction of the maxilla and cheekbones, and the shovel-shaped upper teeth. Some features appear much less frequently in paleoanthrophin fossils in other regions. Therefore, he proposed the hypothesis of "continuous evolution with hybridization" of Chinese ancient humans, pointing out that the evolutionary model of ancient humans in China is mainly based on continuous evolution, with genetic exchanges with surrounding ancient humans.
Although the results of ancient gene sequencing since the 1990s have led scholars to believe that modern Chinese are entirely from Africa and have nothing to do with Homo erectus unearthed 90 years ago, researchers have not completely abandoned the possibility of Pekingese ancestry.
For example, Wu Xiujie believes that 100,000-300,000 years ago, there were "ancient Homo sapiens" or "early Homo sapiens" in China, who had the physical characteristics of East Asian Homo erectus, European archaic humans and late Pleistocene human mosaics.
In the past 20 years, new paleoanthropological fossils have been found in many parts of China, and the latest research shows that although Homo erectus in East Asia has common characteristics, the internal variation is very large, and there are different Groups of Homo erectus in the late Pleistocene in China.
Perhaps some of these groups contributed genes to Denisovans tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago; it has now been confirmed that Denisovans contributed a few percent of the genes to modern humans. (Reporter Gao Bo)
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