In the three decades since the discovery of the Beijingers, the Beijingers and the earlier Discovered Javanese in Indonesia have been regarded as the world's oldest representatives of ancient humans. However, Chinese archaeologists have kept a clear head on this, and Jia Lanpo is one of them.
Jia Lanpo is a self-taught archaeologist who has written all his life and has been awarded the Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Foreign Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, and the Third World Academy of Sciences.
In the early days of the excavation of the Zhoukoudian site, he was only a bookkeeper employed by the archaeological site, and in addition to bookkeeping, this studious young man often carried the bones of ancient animals in his pocket to repeatedly memorize its characteristics and recite its names in English, Greek and Latin, and painstakingly taught himself paleoanthropology. From 1935 to 1937, because Pei Wenzhong went to France for further study, Jia Lanpo succeeded Pei Wenzhong in presiding over the excavation of Zhoukoudian. In November 1936, under his auspices, three new Peking ape skulls and other rich human and mammal fossils were discovered at the Zhoukoudian site, as well as artificial stone products and fire relics and relics, and Zhoukoudian once again caused a sensation in the world. The bookkeeper at the archaeological site rose to prominence in the international paleoanthropology community for his major discoveries at the Zhoukoudian site.
However, Jia Lanpo does not think that the Peking Ape Man who brought him a reputation is the world's earliest human being. In 1957, he published an article titled "The Strata of the Nihe Bay Period Were the Foot of the Earliest Humans", pointing out that there must be more primitive people and their cultures than the Peking Ape Man.
In the same year that Jia Lanpo published his article, several Paleolithic sites were found in Kuihe Village, Fenglingdu Town, Ruicheng County, Shanxi Province, among which the tools excavated at the Xihoudu site excavated in 1961-1962 were more primitive than those of the Beijing Ape Man, and their beating techniques were relatively ancient. The types of stone products include stone cores, stone chips, choppers, scrapers, triangular pointed tools, etc., and there are twenty-two species of mammals with stone tools, of which extinct species account for 100%. Some burnt bones have also been found in the cultural layer, which may be evidence of human use of fire, and it is not excluded that it is caused by forest wildfires. The site of Xihoudu dates back more than 1.8 million years, much earlier than the Peking Ape Man.
In 1965, a fossil homo erectus skull, lantian man, was excavated at the Gongwangling site in Lantian County, Shaanxi Province, which dates back about 1.15 million years, before the Beijing ape man. The skull wall of the Gongwangling people is extremely thick, the brain is small, only 780 milliliters, the left and right eyebrow crests are connected, and the teeth are huge, these features are more primitive than the Beijing ape people.
In 1965, two Homo erectus teeth dating back about 1.7 million years were found near the village of Shangnabang, about five kilometers southeast of Yuanmou County, Yunnan, and the fossilized human was named Yuanmou man.
In the winter of 1973, examiners conducted large-scale excavations in and around the site of the Yuanmou human fossils, unearthing stone tools, mammal fossils, and charcoal chips.
The two teeth of the Yuanmou people are thick and shovel-shaped, with distinctly original features. There are only three stone products excavated in the formation where the fossils of the Yuanmou people were found, all of which are scrapers, and the stone pieces are made by hammering method, which is not large. Mammalian fossils include remnants of the Tertiary Period, representatives of the Early Pleistocene and members of the southern giant panda-saber-toothed elephant fauna, reflecting a warmer forest-grassland type. The age of the Yuanmou people, measured by ancient geomagnetism, is about 1.7 million years old, and some people believe that it is about 700,000 to 500,000 years old.
According to the research of paleoanthropologists, the development process of human beings can be roughly divided into several successive stages of Australopithecus - Homo sapiens - Homo erectus - early Homo sapiens - late Homo sapiens. So far, no human fossils of Australopithecus australopithecus and Homo sapiens have been found in China, and the Peking man, Yuanmou man, Wushan man, etc. that have been found belong to the Homo erectus stage. #Historical Headlines##Historical Super Talk ##我要上 Headlines #