The Cave Home of Peking Man PDF Download

Author: Chia Lan-Po
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780835100243
Category : Antiquities, Prehistoric
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Author: Lanpo Jia
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antiquities, Prehistoric
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Author: Lan-pʻo Chia
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antiquities, Prehistoric
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Chia Lan-po
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antiquities, Prehistoric
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Author: Chia, Lan-pʻo
Publisher: Peking : Foreign Languages Press
ISBN:
Category : Antiquities, Prehistoric
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Author: Lanpo Jia
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Antiquities, Prehistoric
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Author: Lanpo Jia
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Once a forlorn village fifty kilometers south of Beijing, Zhoukoudian (formerly Choukoutien) is today a virtual shrine to archaeology, a bustling community with its own highway extension, a major exhibit hall which attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists annually, and one of the world's most famous fossil sites. Still active today, this site in seven decades has contributed immeasurably to our knowledge of prehistoric life. It boasts one of the richest fossil deposits found anywhere, ranging from the Early Pliocene to the Late Pleistocene, a span of three million years. It has provided some of the earliest evidence of fire usage ever uncovered. And most important, it is the home of Peking Man, whose discovery ranks as one of the great events in modern archaeology. Now, in The Story of Peking Man, one of China's foremost archaeologists, Jia Lanpo, offers a profusely illustrated history of Zhoukoudian, tracing its earliest discoveries and greatest moments, recounting the tragic events of World War II (Japanese soldiers murdered three archaeologists and the Peking Man fossils vanished under mysterious circumstances), and evaluating its overall importance. Lanpo spent over half a century at Zhoukoudian and he provides many fascinating, first-hand accounts of scientists at work, including such figures as Davidson Black, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Yang Zhongjian, Pei Wenzhong, and of course Lanpo himself. He describes how the abundance of "dragon bones"(fossils sold in herbal medicine shops) in Zhoukoudian first attracted Johan Gunnar Andersson, who began excavations there in 1918; the first major discovery, a human skullcap, found by Pei Wenzhong while digging by candlelight in a tiny cave; and Jia Lanpo's own discovery of a beautifully preserved skullcap in 1936. He vividly conveys the great excitement of an important find as well as the pressure to make major discoveries as funding runs low. And he reviews many of the theories and controversies surrounding Peking Man--Were they cannibals? Did they use bones as tools? Did humanity originate in Asia or Africa? Based on numerous unpublished sources, including field reports, personal letters and photographs, and Lanpo's own remembrances, The Story of Peking Man provides an inside look at a major archaeological site, one that will fascinate anyone interested in the origins of humanity.

Author: Noel T. Boaz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198034881
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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"Peking Man," a cave man once thought a great hunter who had first tamed fire, actually was a composite of the gnawed remains of some fifty women, children, and men unfortunate enough to have been the prey of the giant cave hyena. Researching the famous fossil site of Dragon Bone Hill in China, scientists Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon retell the story of the cave's unique species of early human, Homo erectus. Boaz and Ciochon take readers on a gripping scientific odyssey. New evidence shows that Homo erectus was an opportunist who rode a tide of environmental change out Africa and into Eurasia, puddle-jumping from one gene pool to the next. Armed with a shaky hold on fire and some sharp rocks, Homo erectus incredibly survived for over 1.5 million years, much longer than our own species Homo sapiens has been on Earth. Tell-tale marks on fossil bones show that the lives of these early humans were brutal, ruled by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow, yet there are fleeting glimpses of human compassion as well. The small brain of Homo erectus and its strangely unchanging culture indicate that the species could not talk. Part of that primitive culture included ritualized aggression, to which the extremely thick skulls of Homo erectus bear mute witness. Both a vivid recreation of the unimagined way of life of a prehistoric species, so similar yet so unlike us, and a fascinating exposition of how modern multidisciplinary research can test hypotheses in human evolution, Dragon Bone Hill is science writing at its best.

Author: Penny Van Oosterzee
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1741154146
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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At the end of the nineteenth century in China, amateur fossil huntersknew that a ready supply of fossils could be found in backstreetChinese apothecaries. They were sold as 'dragon bones', to be grounddown and made into powerful medicines. When the sources of thesefossils were tracked down they revealed sites rich with the remains ofhorses, rhinoceroses, elephants ... and the ancestors of mankind. Setagainst a background of squabbling Chinese warlords and the Japaneseoccupation.

Author: Sigrid Schmalzer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226738612
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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In the 1920s an international team of scientists and miners unearthed the richest evidence of human evolution the world had ever seen: Peking Man. After the communist revolution of 1949, Peking Man became a prominent figure in the movement to bring science to the people. In a new state with twin goals of crushing “superstition” and establishing a socialist society, the story of human evolution was the first lesson in Marxist philosophy offered to the masses. At the same time, even Mao’s populist commitment to mass participation in science failed to account for the power of popular culture—represented most strikingly in legends about the Bigfoot-like Wild Man—to reshape ideas about human nature. The People’s Peking Man is a skilled social history of twentieth-century Chinese paleoanthropology and a compelling cultural—and at times comparative—history of assumptions and debates about what it means to be human. By focusing on issues that push against the boundaries of science and politics, The People’s Peking Man offers an innovative approach to modern Chinese history and the history of science.