Comments on: Mysterious Peking Man Again

By: sschaper

sschaper — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:04:14 +0000

Homo erectus had fire. That is a proven way to stay warm. Fur not required.

From the records of the recovery of “Peking Man” it appears to have been a pastiche of human and monkey bones from a site where humans butchered and ate monkeys. Java Man was a composite of at least two individuals, from two rather different strata, separated in horizontal space along a river bank by a good distance. That isn’t science, that is either hoaxing like the Piltdown Man composite of human and orangutan bones, or at best, wishful thinking, as happens a lot with the Leakey and Johansson expeditions.

However, other Homo erectus skeletons have been found in various places, even though the more famous first two really don’t count.

How much do we know of the range of Gigantopithecus? Or where they lived? I don’t doubt that there was interaction, but how extensive it was would depend on the range of Gigantopithecus.

Homo erectus features are not absent from modern human physiognomy. I’ve seen with my own two eyes that this is the case. Below the neck, so far as I know, there is no difference.

By: dogu4

dogu4 — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:20:23 +0000

If you check out the Wikipedia entry for Zhoukoudian Caves you’ll find some excellent information about the site, including some very nice pics of how the actual sites and the general area looks and descriptions of the local geology, which looks to my eye, a lot like the cave country of Kentucky and the appalachians, not to suggest there’s H. erectus in them thar hills, but rather that the geological context is itself something of a selective force in the case of these few dozen individuals’ remains.

By: Alligator

Alligator — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:01:11 +0000

Everyone would be amazed at the stuff that gets lost in the museum world. Around 1968, a mastodon was found while excavating a road near Miami Missouri. The bones were packed in plaster and shipped to the University of Illinois and others sent to a lab for carbon date testing. No one in Missouri, Illinois or the lab knows what happened to all this stuff. All of it - Poof! Into thin air.
An incised tablet from the same area dating from the Oneota culture also disappeared. Probably one of the most striking pieces of artwork from that culture in our locality. Casts were made of all the images on the tablet. Poof! The original vanished into thin air. University records say it was returned to the family that found it, but no receipts and no one in the family knows about it.
So for the loss of bones in a place like China in a war time situation, it would have been highly unusual if they would have gotten out and made their way into a permanent collection. A good bet - the bottom of the sea or Japanese troops didn’t give a plugged nickel for them and simply tossed them aside when they captured the Marines.