A crate containing some the world’s most important hominin fossils vanished amid war in 1941 – along with secrets about the origins of language
In September 1941, Hu Chengzhi placed several skulls into two wooden crates. Around him, China was at war with Japan, so he was sending the skulls to the US for safekeeping. They never arrived. Hu was among the last people to see one of the most important palaeontological finds in history.
These lost skulls belonged to Homo erectus pekinensis, known as Peking Man. More than half a century later, evolutionary biologists would still love to get their hands on these fossils: not only would they help answer questions about early cannibalism among our ancestors, they could even shed light on the origins of spoken language.
The owners of the skulls died at least half a million years ago, and their remains were preserved in Zhoukoudian cave near Beijing, before being unearthed in the 1920s. At the time, they were the oldest hominid fossils ever found, and silenced sceptics who claimed that other similar Javanese fossils belonged to deformed apes. These bones clearly represented an early stage of human evolution. Their owners used tools, and were the earliest known wielders of fire.
A few years into the war in 1941, the keepers of the skulls decided to ship them abroad to avoid theft. The crates left Peking, but never made it to the port.
Noel Boaz, who co-authored a book about the lost fossils, Dragon Bone Hill, believes that the crates were taken onto a train, but discarded after the vehicle was captured by Japanese soldiers. "They would probably have been collected by locals, sold to apothecary shops, and ground up for traditional medicine as 'dragon bones'," says Boaz.
Despite this gloomy prediction, many people hold out hope that the fossils will be found. Some believe they are buried in the grounds of Beijing's American Embassy, while others think they may be hidden somewhere in the US, Japan or Taiwan, or resting on the ocean floor in the wreck of the Japanese steamer Awa Maru. An American woman claimed to have a box full of skulls that her husband brought home after the war. She met with a US broker on top of the Empire State Building in New York to demand $500,000, showed him a photo of the box, and disappeared.
In July 2005, the government of Beijing's Fangshan District announced a renewed attempt to find the bones, led by Yan Li from the Peking Man Museum. Li's committee set up a hotline, gathered 63 tips from the public, and pursued four of them. "To my knowledge, no leads uncovered by this group have panned out," says Boaz.
Fortunately, cast copies were taken but the original fossils contain extra details that could settle long-standing debates. For example, was Zhoukoudian fraught with cannibalism? "In later years, the consensus shifted toward the idea that hyenas formed the site, with the humans as victims," says John Hawks from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "The original fossils would allow a forensic investigation."
CT scans would also allow us to peer inside the skulls. The middle ear's shape could tell us about Peking Man's ability to discriminate between frequencies relevant for spoken language. While this doesn't prove they had language, it would suggest they had one of the right adaptations, and help to pinpoint when human language emerged. The Peking Man, then, remains one of science's most important missing persons.
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