Peking Man tooth reveals details of ancient humans

UNEXPECTED FIND

For a long time after World War II, the only specimens of Peking Man fossils that survived the original excavation were three teeth at Uppsala University's collection. It was not until 2011 that Kundrat and Jan Ove R. Ebbestad, curator of the Museum of Evolution at the university, found the fourth tooth.

Kundrat discovered the tooth while looking through almost-forgotten expedition crates. About 40 crates shipped from China to Uppsala almost a century ago held vertebrate fossils.

Swiss paleontologist Carl Wiman had been in charge of identifying and describing the fossils but after his death in 1944, the direction of research changed, leaving the 40 crates unopened and forgotten.

On March 21, 2011, Kundrat and Ebbestad opened a crate that bore the letters ZKD, the acronym for Zhoukoudian, the Peking Man fossil site to find tooth fragments.

He sensed the importance of the discovery and contacted Liu Wu and Tong Haowen, also from the Chinese institute, to help them identify the tooth.

IMMEASURABLE LOSS

In the middle of 19th century, Western archeologists scoured the globe for evidence of our ancestors. In the early 20th century, they arrived in China.

In 1910s, when visiting a hill near the village of Zhoukoudian in southwest Beijing, Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andresson noticed some peculiar quartz fragments, which were not native to the site and resembled primitive stone tools.

Otto Zdansky from Uppsala University unearthed the first dental remains of Peking Man in 1921.

The second tooth was found among other vertebrate fossils in the crates that were shipped to Uppsala for research.

After that, Weng Wenhao, then director of the Geological Survey of China; Davidson Black, a Canadian paleoanthropologist and Anders Birger Bohlin, a fresh Uppsala graduate; then took over the excavation.

On Oct. 16, 1927, Bohlin recovered another tooth of the Peking Man from the same layer where Zdansky found his first specimen. Bohlin's specimen was described by Black and became the holotype of the new extinct hominid.