Posted on 07/23/2009 9:11:55 PM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
Peking man—the group of early humans whose 1920s discovery gave a big boost to the theory of evolution—lived hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously believed, a new study says.
The new dates would also place Peking man in a more hospitable, cooler time period in China's Zhoukoudian region, which today is the world's foremost source of Homo erectus fossils.
Ciochon hypothesizes that a prolonged mass migration of Homo erectus from Africa, which began about two million years ago, eventually came to something like a fork in the road.
Reaching southern China, the early humans would have come upon a subtropical forest, which would have proved uninviting to Homo erectus, who were accustomed to savanna and open woodlands, Ciochon suggests.
One group probably turned southeast and settled in Southeast Asia, he said.
A second group likely turned northeast and moved into what is now China. Part of the group settled the Zhoukoudian region and eventually evolved into the Peking man subspecies, Homo erectus pekinensis.
Obtained by measuring the decay of isotopes in buried quartz grains, the data suggest Peking man lived at Zhoukoudian about 750,000 years ago—200,000 years earlier than prior estimates...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
I wonder what they mean by "world's foremost souce of Homo erectus fossils". As everyone knows, that supposed big fat mother-load of fossils was packed in a box and never heard from again, like we knew it would. As far as I know, what they have today are two pieces of skull-cap.
Peking ping
ping
Peking Man is a fraud...never existed!
Must’ve been the Kung Pow chicken. George likes his chicken spicy!
Peking man...hmmm...is he related to Peking Duck? I like Peking Duck.
750,000 years of human history, so how did all human knowledge and technology get developed over the last 5,000 years with most of it occurring in the last 500 years? That is astonishing.
I once had Peking Duck that tasted that old.
Somebody with Photoshop skills should do a Hawaii certificate of live birth for this.
Don’t know about that but I don’t wanna be arounds no erectus homos.
this is so bogus
the remains of Peking Man were LOST!!
Over 75 YEARS ago!!
Through trade and exchange.
“If I have seen further than other men, it is because I stood upon the shoulders of giants!” Issac Newton
Oh boy.
Rewrite the science books and dissertations all over again.
I don’t think he’s really very interested in scientific knowledge. Just an observation.
Typical idiotic remarks.
1. To get from Africa to China, they would have had to cross a huge variety of climates and vegetation zones. Just look at a map.
2. Such travel would likely have taken many generations, probably centuries or millenia, allowing them more than enough time to adapt to different ecosystems.
In fact, if they didn't adapt well to this variety, they would not have survived to reach China.
They determined that Peking Man, of which there are apparently no fossils left, lived 200,000 years earlier than previously estimated based on the decay of isotopes in buried quartz grains, when they don't even have the fragments of the fossils left?
And they call this science?
Gotta keep the $$$$’s flowing.
And why would they have migrated to begin with? And so far?
If conditions where they were were bad, they would have traveled far enough to find better ones and stopped there. Once they found adequate conditions, there would be no reason for them to continue.
If conditions continued to be bad, they wouldn’t have kept going; they likely would have died out.
So what brilliant reasons do archaeologists contrive to explain why humans would migrate for so many thousands of miles?
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