Qualla: Peking Man

Peking Man: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yumeto, CC BY-SA 4.0. The locals called the place Chicken Bone Hill. They believed the small fossils littering an old limestone quarry in Zhoukoudian, about 50 kilometres southwest of Beijing, were the remains of chickens stolen by a gang of foxes that had transformed into evil trickster spirits and driven a man insane. In 1918, when Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson visited the quarry at the suggestion of an American chemistry teacher named John McGregor Gibb, he saw something different. Three years later, his Austrian colleague Otto Zdansky quietly extracted a human tooth from the site and did not tell anyone. That tooth -- and the ones that followed -- would anchor one of the most consequential and contested chapters in the story of human origins.

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Image: Yumeto | CC BY-SA 4.0

Peking Man: A Name Before a Face

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uppsala University, CC BY-SA 3.0. Zdansky found a second tooth while studying Zhoukoudian material at Uppsala University in Sweden. When he reported the find in 1926, Canadian paleoanthropologist Davidson Black -- working at the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Peking Union Medical College -- recognized the signific...

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Image: Uppsala University | CC BY-SA 3.0

Peking Man: The Skull in the Candlelight

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cicero Moraes, CC BY-SA 4.0. On a frigid December evening in 1929, Chinese paleontologist Pei Wenzhong worked alone in a 40-metre crevasse at Dragon Bone Hill, holding a hammer in one hand and a candle in the other. What he extracted was the first nearly complete skullcap of Homo erectus pekinensis -- a disc...

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Image: Cicero Moraes | CC BY-SA 4.0

Peking Man: Lost to War

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit José Manuel Benito Álvarez, Public domain. Davidson Black died at his desk one night in 1934, a Peking Man skullcap sitting before him. German Jewish anthropologist Franz Weidenreich replaced him and continued work until the Japanese invasion of China halted excavation in 1937. In 1941, with war engulfing the Pacific, the...

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Image: José Manuel Benito Álvarez | Public domain

Peking Man: Ancestor or Offshoot

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Emőke Dénes, CC BY-SA 4.0. After the Chinese Communist Revolution, Peking Man became more than a scientific subject. The government used the fossils to introduce Marxism and science to the general populace, and early models of Peking Man society were compared to communist ideals of primitive communism. Chi...

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Image: Emőke Dénes | CC BY-SA 4.0