Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis, originally "Sinanthropus pekinensis") is a subspecies of H. erectus which inhabited what is now northern China during the Middle Pleistocene. Its fossils have been found in a cave some southwest of Beijing (referred to in the West as Peking upon its first discovery), known as the Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site. The first fossil, a tooth, was discovered in 1921, and Zhoukoudian has since become the most productive H. erectus site in the world. Peking Man was instrumental in the foundation of Chinese anthropology, and fostered an important dialogue between Western and Eastern science. Peking Man became the centre of anthropological discussion, and was classified as a direct human ancestor, propping up the Out of Asia theory that humans evolved in Asia.
Peking Man also played a vital role in the restructuring of Chinese identity following the Chinese Communist Revolution, and it was used to introduce the general populace to Marxism and science. Early models of Peking Man society were compared to communist or nationalist ideals, leading to discussions on primitive communism and polygenism (that Peking Man was the direct ancestor of Chinese people). This produced a strong schism between Western and Eastern interpretations of the origin of modern humans, especially as the West adopted the Out of Africa theory in the late 20th century, which described Peking Man as an offshoot in human evolution. Though Out of Africa is now the consensus, Peking Man interbreeding with human ancestors is still discussed.
Peking Man characterises the classic H. erectus anatomy. The skull is long and heavily fortified, featuring an inflated bar of bone circumscribing the crown, crossing along the brow ridge, over the ears, and connecting at the back of the skull; as well as a sagittal keel running across the midline. The bone of the skull and the long bones is extremely thickened. The face is protrusive (midfacial prognathism), the eye sockets are wide, the jaws are robust and chinless, the teeth are large, and the incisors are shovel-shaped. Brain volume ranged from , for an average of just over —within the range of variation for modern humans. The limbs are broadly anatomically comparable to those of modern humans. H. erectus in such northerly latitudes may have averaged roughly in height, compared to for more tropical populations.
Peking Man lived in a cool, predominantly steppe, partially forested environment, alongside deer, rhinos, elephants, bison, buffalo, bears, wolves, big cats, and other animals. Peking Man fossils appear intermittently in Zhoukoudian deposits dating as far back as 800,000 years ago to as recently as 230,000 years ago, but the precise chronology is unclear. This spans several cold glacial and warm interglacial periods. The cultural complexity of Peking Man is fiercely debated. If Peking Man was capable of hunting (as opposed to predominantly scavenging), making clothes, and controlling fire, the population would have been well-equipped to survive frigid glacial periods. If not, the population would have had to retreat southward and return later. It is further disputed if Peking Man inhabited the cave, or was killed by giant hyenas (Pachycrocuta) and dumped there. Over 100,000 pieces of stone tools have been recovered from Zhoukoudian. Those pieces have been mainly debitage (wastage), but also include many simple choppers and flakes, and a few retouched tools such as scrapers and possibly burins.
Taxonomy
Research history
Discovery
thumb|left|Reconstruction of Skull XI with a hypothetical jawbone
To aid the China Geological Survey's efforts to map out economically relevant deposits, the Geological Survey of Sweden sent the Swedish economic geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson to China in 1914. Andersson soon also began collecting archaeological finds and "dragon bones", as well as documenting Chinese mythology. In 1918, while in Beijing (then referred to in the West as Peking), he was pointed towards a potentially interesting fossil deposit in the mining town of Zhoukoudian in the Fangshan District, about southwest, by the American chemistry teacher John McGregor Gibb. When Andersson visited a month later, he was directed towards an old limestone quarry which the locals called Chi Ku Shan ('Chicken Bone Hill'). They believed the many rodent fossils found there belonged to chickens stolen by a malevolent group of foxes that had turned into evil trickster spirits and drove a man insane.
Andersson left China to work on other projects, but returned in 1921 with the prominent American palaeontologist Walter W. Granger and the Austrian palaeontologist Otto Zdansky, a recent graduate of the Palaeontological Museum of Uppsala University. Andersson decided that the Chi Ku Shan locality would be an excellent training ground for Zdansky before the pair moved on to excavating Hipparion (horse) fossils in Henan. They were advised by a local that more interesting "dragon bones" could be found at a nearby fissure in a limestone cliff, later named Longgushan ('Dragon Bone Hill') locality. That same year, Zdansky found the first fossil (specimen PMU M3550)—a human tooth—in the site, but he did not report it to Andersson. While studying the Zhoukoudian material in Uppsala, Zdansky identified another human tooth, and reported his find (which he cautiously labelled as Homo sp.?) to his professor and mentor Carl Wiman, who informed Andersson in 1926.
As part of his world tour, the crown prince of Sweden (and the chairman of the Swedish China Research Committee, Andersson's benefactor) Gustaf VI Adolf visited Beijing on 22 October 1926. At a meeting planned for the prince, Andersson presented lantern slides of Zdansky's fossil teeth. He was able to convince his friend, the Canadian palaeanthropologist Davidson Black (who worked for the Peking Union Medical College, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), the Chinese geologist Weng Wenhao (the head of the China Geological Survey), and the prominent French palaeoanthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to jointly take over study of Zhoukoudian. Andersson returned to Sweden to become the founding director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm. In the press coverage immediately after the meeting, the German-American geologist Amadeus William Grabau for the first time publicly used the phrase "Peking Man" to refer to Zdansky's fossil teeth.
In 1927, Black was preoccupied with his duties to the college, so Andersson and Wiman sent one of Wiman's students, Anders Birger Bohlin, to oversee excavation beginning on 16 April. On 16 October, Bohlin extracted another fossil human tooth (specimen K11337), which Black made the holotype of a new genus and species called Sinanthropus pekinensis a few weeks later, accrediting the authority to both himself and Zdansky. This was the first anthropologically relevant find for nearly a year, and Teilhard questioned whether Peking Man was actually a human or some animal carnivore. According to the biological anthropologist Noel T. Boaz and the palaeoanthropologist Russell Ciochon, Black's decision to so quickly name a new genus may have been politically motivated—to secure further funding of the site. That year, Weng drafted an agreement with all Zhoukoudian scientists at the time that the Zhoukoudian remains would remain in China. In 1928, the Chinese government similarly clamped down on the exportation of Chinese artefacts and other archaeologically relevant materials to the West for study, viewing it as archaeological looting; foreign scientists were instead encouraged to research these materials within China. In 1929, Black persuaded the Peking Union Medical College, the China Geological Survey, and the Rockefeller Foundation to found and fund the Cenozoic Research Laboratory and ensure further study of Zhoukoudian.
Excavation of the Zhoukoudian was so well documented that the loss of the original specimens did not greatly impact their study. According to Teilhard: "The Sinanthrope has been dated, described, measured, x-rayed, drawn, photographed and cast in plaster down to the last fossa, crista and tubercle .... The loss is more a matter of sentiment than a true tragedy for science." Four of the teeth from the original excavation period are still in the possession of the Palaeontological Museum of Uppsala University.
Mao and post-Mao eras
Excavation of Zhoukoudian halted from 1941 until the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. In 2004, Boaz noted that—given the meticulousness of the dig teams, going so far as to sieve out unidentifiable fragments as small as long—excavation of Zhoukoudian is generally considered to be complete. though stone tools from the Shangchen site in Lantian, central China, could extend the occupation of the region as far back as 2.12 million years ago.
The common ancestor of Neanderthals and Denisovans in turn interbred with another archaic species even further removed from modern humans. Still, East Asian H. erectus from China and Indonesia are now usually characterised as relict populations which had little interaction with Western H. erectus or later Homo species. In general, subspecies names for H. erectus are now used for convenience to indicate time and region rather than specific anatomical trends. The name H. e. pekinensis may extend to all Chinese H. erectus but is usually used to refer only to Zhoukoudian.
thumb|Among other H. erectus, Peking Man is most similar to [[Nanjing Man (above) Some authors have suggested that the anatomical peculiarities of the Zhoukoudian specimens indicate speciation rather than a geographic cline, and consider Peking Man as a separate species, H. pekinensis.
H. erectus may have made multiple different dispersals out of Africa to the Far East, with the population represented by the Indonesian Sangiran site possibly being more closely related to Western H. erectus than to Peking Man. A population related to Peking Man may have later interbred with Southeast Asian H. erectus, since the younger teeth at Sangiran are much smaller than the older ones—more like those of Peking Man's—but tooth reduction could have happened for other reasons.
A 2026 dental proteome (tooth enamel protein) analysis identified a single amino acid polymorphism variant (a unique protein structure) in one of the Peking Man teeth preserved from the original dig (PA69). The variant, AMBN(A253G), was present in their H. erectus samples from the Hexian and Sunjiadong sites and has not been identified in any other primate, which suggests that these populations inherited it from a common ancestor. This sample also shared the AMBN(M273V) variant which has only been identified in Denisovans, and might suggest that Denisovans inherited this variant from interbreeding with local East Asian H. erectus populations like the Peking Man.
A 2021 phylogeny of H. erectus using tip dating: