In November 1964, after the news of the discovery of the ape skull in Lantian, Shaanxi Province, was published in the newspaper, it received widespread attention from all sides at home and abroad; some foreign newspapers and periodicals also reprinted the news. Many readers have asked for more detailed information about the discovery and its significance, as well as the progress of current research on ape-man skulls. Now, I would like to give a brief introduction to the recent situation.
Man evolved from apes. Human fossils are conclusive evidence of the materialist theory of human origin.
That is a matter of concern to all. Therefore, whenever there are human fossils anywhere in the world, especially when early human fossils are found, they will attract widespread attention. Ape-men were the first true humans to live hundreds of thousands of years ago, and the chances of their remains being preserved were very rare, and even if they were, they were mostly just sporadic teeth or broken bone pieces. The skull can reflect the physical characteristics of apes more than other bones, and the size and shape of the ape brain can be estimated, so the discovery of skulls is of greater significance than other bones.
Worldwide, the earliest was the discovery of the more complete first skull of the Javan ape in Java, Indonesia, in 1891, and after years of excavations, two children's skulls were found between 1936 and 1939, one of which was fragmented and bottom, as well as broken mandibles and scattered teeth, which is the earliest ape fossil found so far. These efforts were carried out during the Dutch colonial rule, and it is no longer owned by Indonesia. In 1929, the first skull of the Beijing Chinese ape man was discovered in Zhoukoudian, Beijing, China, and continued to excavate until the outbreak of the Japanese war of aggression against China in 197, when five relatively complete skulls and many broken bone pieces were excavated, but these precious materials fell into the hands of the Americans during the War of Resistance Against Japan, and all of them were unaccounted for. Between 1954 and 1955 the French discovered a right parietal bone and three mandibles in Algeria, but due to the later age, the material is now preserved in Paris.
Excavations in Zhoukoudian resumed immediately after the liberation of Beijing in 1949, and for more than a decade an ape man's mandible, five teeth and two limb bones were found, but no skull was found.
In the summer of 1963, scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences were conducting geological paleontological surveys in Lantian County, Shaanxi Province, and a perfect ape man's mandible was found near the village of Chenjiawo in The town of Qihu in the county. This is another place outside of Zhoukoudian in China where ape-man fossils have been found. This discovery has attracted the attention and attention of relevant parties at home and abroad.
The relevant departments of the Chinese Academy of Sciences immediately seized the signs of this new discovery in Lantian. Considering that Lantian County has a complete Cenozoic strata, from the beginning of the Cenozoic era 60 to 70 million years ago, until now, there are almost all layers of various periods, and in most strata can be found various paleontological fossils, which can be used to help identify the age of the strata. If such a complete stratum is clarified and a standard profile is made, it can be used as a model for the study of Cenozoic strata in China, which is both economic and academic work. In 1964, the leadership of the Chinese Academy of Sciences decided to closely combine the search for the fossils of The Lantian ape and the investigation of the Cenozoic strata, and on the basis of the work in 1963, a large-scale investigation and excavation team was organized, and more than ten units inside and outside the Academy of Sciences participated in the comprehensive investigation of the Cenozoic strata in Lantian.
The expedition team from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology went to Lantian in early March 1963.
At the northern foothills of the Qinling Mountains, at the Gongwangling fossil site on a hillside about eighty meters above the ground, a team of excavations excavated a fossil of an ape-man's tooth in late May after more than a month of excavation. In later excavations, because the fossils at this site were very dense, the large piles containing fossils were dug out of the formation and packed into several boxes and transported back to Beijing for repair. In early October, an ape-man's molars were first revealed in the returned pile, and on October 12, part of the ape-man skull was revealed. Now, the earth and stones around the ape-man skull have been basically cleaned up. The preserved parts include the frontal bone, the parietal bone, the temporal bone on the right side, most of the orbit, and part of the nasal bone. Recently, another supermolar was revealed during the continued repair of the above-mentioned exposed teeth, and most of the right maxilla and part of the left maxilla attached to the two teeth were later discovered. The skull, maxilla, and a left upper molar found in the wild in late May last year all appear to be the same ape-man.
The skull has some obvious primitive properties, such as a low skull, a thick brow crest, a thick skull wall, etc., which may be earlier than the Beijing ape-man era in Zhoukoudian, so the ape-man in Lantian may be the earliest ape-man type. However, the exact age has yet to be studied further, and a decision can only be made in the context of stratigraphic and paleontological evidence.
The stratigraphy and sediment properties of the skull of the Lantian ape man are clearly documented, and there are detailed stratigraphic and fossil data at this fossil site and the fossil sites in the neighboring area that can be compared with each other. The fossils of associated animals found at the same time as the skull of the ape man are quite numerous and diverse. These materials are of great value for determining the age in which apes lived and for understanding the conditions in which apes lived.
The material of the Lantian ape fossils has a large part of the skull, but also a part of the facial bone and teeth, and it can be expected that the results of the research based on these fossils will enrich our knowledge of paleoanthropology and increase our understanding of the earliest humans.
Few people now believe that the physical form of human beings is fixed, but the details of how humans transformed from apes and how ancient humans evolved into the various races of the world today are not fully understood. Areas where scientific facts are not yet fully elucidated are often used by idealism to attack materialism. Around the question of human origin and evolution, materialism and idealism have been engaged in a fierce struggle. Human science developed in a constant struggle, and the triumph of materialism in each struggle brought a great step forward in the history of human development. The result of the discovery and controversy of Neanderthal fossils is so, the results of the discovery and controversy of Javan ape fossils are so, and the controversy of the transitional type of predecessors represented by australopithecus in recent decades seems to be the same now. And the factor that plays an important role in each debate is the discovery of new human fossils, which is the physical basis for the materialist theory of human origin. Ape humans are the earliest real people, especially the blue field ape man may be the earliest type of ape man, so the discovery of these fossils will help to understand the problem of how humans entered the real world from the previous human stage in the process of human evolution.
The period of human emergence is also used as a symbol of the demarcation between the most recent period in the history of the development of the earth, that is, the Quaternary and the Tertiary Period before it, and some people call the Quaternary the Quaternary the Age of Life. The determination of the stratigraphic age of the Lam Tin Ape Man will help to resolve the debate over the demarcation of the Quaternary and Tertiary ages. As for the domestic debate in recent years about whether the Beijing Chinese ape man in Zhoukoudian is the earliest man, it will be easier to obtain a consistent understanding due to the discovery of the skull of the Lantian ape man.
The ape fossils in Zhoukoudian were found in the cave, while the ape fossils in Lantian were found in the accumulation outside the cave, which provided an extremely broad field for the discovery of more ape fossils in the future. Javanese ape fossils were found in piles outside the cave, but Java's climate is hotter. In the past, it was thought that in areas with relatively cold climates, such as the north of China, it was unlikely that ancient human apes would live outside the cave, so most of them focused on looking for ape fossils in the accumulation of caves. The fact that the fossils of the Lantian ape man were found in the accumulation outside the cave shows that in the accumulation outside the cave in the vast area of northern China, it is also possible to find the fossil of the ape man. Since ape fossils have been found not only in the north, but also in the south of China, and even in Indonesia further south, the possibility of discovering ape fossils in the southern provinces of our country, especially in the provinces of Liangguang and Yunnan-Guizhou, between the north and south where ape fossils have been found, also exists.
The great significance of the discovery of the skull of the Blue Field Ape Man / Wu Rukang