What time did Sinanthropus live. Not so far from modern people
Hence the name. He lived about 600-400 thousand years ago, during the glaciation period.
Homo erectus pekinensis (Sinathropus pekinensis) |
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AnatomyThe volume of his brain reached 950-1150 cm³; the left lobe of the brain, where the motor centers of the right side of the body are located, was somewhat larger than the right lobe. Therefore, the right hand was more developed than the left. Height - 1.55-1.6 m. LifeIn addition to plant foods, he ate animal meat. Perhaps he mined and knew how to maintain a fire. Used animal skins as clothing. They found: a thick layer of ash, about 6-7 m, tubular bones and skulls of large animals, tools made of stones, bones, horns. Scientists believe that the Sinanthropes were cannibals and hunted representatives of their own species. archaeological cultureDiscovery historyThe first Sinanthropus skull was discovered in the grottoes of Zhoukoudian near Beijing in 1927 by the Chinese anthropologist Pei Wenzhong (1904-1982). Over the years, an international team of scientists has worked here: Johann Gunnar Anderson, Birger Bolin (Sweden), Davidson Black (Canada), Pei Wenzhong (China), Otto Stansky (Austria), Walter Grainger (USA) and others. the excavations were attended by the French geologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who, together with Henri Breuil, made discoveries in 1931, indicating that Sinanthropus used primitive tools and fire. In 1927, Davidson Black succeeded in persuading the Rockefeller Foundation to allocate money to fund a major excavation at Zhoukoudian. Excavations led by Chinese archaeologists Yang Zhongjian, Pei Wenzhong and Jia Lanpo in 1930 unearthed a second skullcap, followed by three skullcaps in 1936. Mostly skulls and their fragments were found; and isolated postcranial clasts. In total, the remains of forty individuals and more than 200 human fossils were announced (including six skulls or skullcaps, 19 large and many small skull fragments, 15 jaws, 157 teeth, three parts of the humerus, one collarbone, one lunate and one tibia bones). Excavations were halted in 1937 due to the Japanese invasion of China. The discovered material disappeared during World War II while being shipped to the United States. After the victory of the Communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, excavations were resumed for a short time. New excavations were carried out in 1951, 1958-1960 and 1978-1980. In the 1959 season, another jaw was found belonging to an elderly woman. In June 2009, excavations were resumed. A number of Western scientists were skeptical about the Chinese finds of fossil hominid. However, Zhoukoudian was nevertheless declared by UNESCO one of the World Heritage Sites. The study of sand from the grotto where the finds were made made it possible to establish the age of the Sinanthropus from Zhoukoudian - 770 thousand years (± 80 thousand years). |
The "Peking Man" has little to do with Beijing - it was only found 45 km southwest of Beijing. He lived there about 700,000 years ago during the period of glaciation, when there was no modern humanity yet, he looked a bit like Pithecanthropus, but he was more developed. Its Latin name Sinanthropus pekinensis is "Peking man", or simply Sinanthropus, and in the modern classification it is Homo erectus pekinensis. Some scientists even believe that he is the missing link between the ape and the man, the ape man, but this is not indisputable. Other scientists consider it a dead end branch of human development.
This remarkable discovery was made, in general, by accident. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Swedish scientist I. G. Andersson worked as an archaeologist in China at the invitation of the Chinese government. Once he was brought skeletal fossils found in the suburbs of Beiping (Beijing), and he immediately realized that something unusual had fallen into his hands. The find was made in Zhoukoudian, and in the spring of 1918 Andersson began to excavate there, inviting the Austrian paleontologist Otto Zhdansky to work with him.
Zhoukoudan then was a small village of several houses, to which a railway line was connected for the extraction of coal and limestone. Fossil bones have been found in its vicinity for a long time. They called them "lungu" - dragon bones, and sold them as raw materials for medicines, hence the name of the mountain in which they found a cave with an unusual find - Mount Longgushan (Mountain of Dragon Bones), in the Xishan (Western Mountains) mountain range.
The mountains around Zhoukoudan are composed of various limestones and slates, they contain many karst caves, in one of which a large bone-bearing layer was discovered. But first, Andersson and Zhdansky found quartz with sharp edges, on which traces of manual processing were clearly visible, on the basis of which he made the assumption that the remains of an ancient person were somewhere nearby. In the summer of 1926, Zhdansky found the left lower front molar, which he identified as the tooth of an ape-man.
This discovery immediately excited the world scientific community, the discovery attracted many scientists, and the Rockefeller Foundation allocated money to finance major excavations from Zhoukoudian. Canadian anatomist Davidson Black founded a physical anthropology research organization, and an agreement was signed with the China Geological Research Institute for a joint Sino-US study of the Zhoukoudian site. The purpose of the search is the ancient settlements of human ancestors in Zhoukoudian.
In October 1927, archaeologists discovered a very interesting human tooth, after which Davidson Black announced a new species of primitive man, a Chinese ape-man from near Beijing, shortly - "Peking". Its age was determined - 500 thousand years ago (at present, based on a study of sand from the grotto where the finds were found, the age of Sinanthropus is determined at 770 thousand years).
In 1929, Pei Wenzhong, an employee of the Cenozoic Laboratory of the Geological Survey of China, was appointed head of the excavation. On December 2, workers discovered something unusual in the excavation, and Pei decided to inspect the find himself. He went down to the Kotsetang cave and found the skull of Sinanthropus in a karst cavity in the corner. In addition to the skull of Sinanthropus, a whole skull of a rhinoceros with a lower jaw was found in the cave. Skulls of such preservation had not been found before, and the layer underlying the upper one was so saturated with fossils that there was almost no rock filling the gaps between them.
The skull of Sinanthropus is approximately the same length as that of the Pithecanthropus, it also has massive superciliary arches, but it differs in strongly developed frontal tubercles, distinct parietal tubercles and a higher skull height, which indicates that Sinanthropus has a large brain volume (its brain volume reached 950 -1150 cm3). His height reached 1.55 - 1.6 meters.
Some scientists consider Sinanthropus as the main participant in the formation of the Mongoloid race. It is presumably believed that it arose in equatorial Africa in the Middle Pleistocene era (about 2 million years ago), after which it migrated to Europe (Heidelberg man), China (Peking man), Java (the ancestor of the notorious hobbits), and then forced it out Neanderthal about 300 thousand years ago, but these are just assumptions.
The Kotzetang Karst Cave is possibly an ancient habitation cave that was later filled with sedimentary rocks. Paleontological evidence shows that the ape-man lived here much earlier than the Neanderthals in Europe. This ancient man did not know fire, how could he live here during the ice age? (Scientists during excavations did not find traces of fire, then thick dark layers found in the section of the Zhoukoudian cave were interpreted as the results of many years of use of fire, but at present it is believed that evidence of the use of fire has not been found, and dark layers are of a sedimentogenic nature).
Despite the fact that in 1931 Japanese troops attacked northeast China, excavations continued. From 1927 to 1937, 5 skulls, 9 broken skulls and a huge amount of fossilized bones from about 40 people - men, women, children, which made up a whole population, as well as almost 10,000 stone products and fossils of animals and plants.
July 7, 1937 Japan attacked central China, Beijing was taken by Japanese troops, excavations stopped, but the excavated rare artifacts were still under Chinese control, as they were locked in the basement of the Concorde Joint Hospital in Beijing. Since America was not at war with Japan, the Japanese did not dare to enter American territory.
The German-American anatomist F. Weidenreich, who was working on the skulls at the time, insisted on sending them to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but on the basis of the Sino-American agreement, everything excavated at Zhoukoudian belongs to China and cannot be taken out of it. So, there were three options for saving unique skulls: the first was to transport the skulls through the occupied territories to the temporary capital of China, Chongqing, the second was to secretly bury them in Beijing, and the third was to take them to the United States through the city of Qinhuangdao.
In 1941, the skulls were packed and delivered to a special US Marines train from Beijing to Qinhuangdao with a stop in Tianjin, and which arrived on December 8, but on December 7, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and America entered the war with Japan. The Japanese landed in the Shanghai area and captured an American Marine train and an American military camp.
Who got the skulls? Chinese, Americans or Japanese? The traces of the skulls were lost in the chaos of the war. But unexpectedly, the military council under the Japanese emperor in Beijing issued an order to search for fossils of the “Peking Man”. An investigator from the Japanese Higher Military Headquarters in Beijing interviewed all Chinese scientists related to Sinanthropus, visited Taijing and Qinhuangdao, but to no avail.
The fossils of the "Peking Man" finally disappeared and have not been found so far. Will they ever be found? The site of the Beijing Ape-Man in Zhoukoudang currently houses the Museum of Evolution, but its most valuable exhibits are missing. Excavations at the sites of Zhoukoudan are still ongoing, but no more whole skulls have been found, although the total number of finds is 17,000 stone artifacts and the remains of 50 people. In 1987, the primeval site of Sinanthropus was included in the Register of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Sinanthropus (北京猿人, Běijīng Yuánrén, Beijing Yuanren), (Homo erectus pekinensis) is a subspecies of Homo Erectus. The first few fossil specimens were discovered in 1923-1927 during excavations at Zhoukoudian, near Beijing. Findings, judging by the studies, are from 680 to 780 thousand years old.
Between 1929 and 1937, 15 incomplete skulls, 11 jaws, many teeth, some skeletal bones and many stone tools were found in the lower cave at the first site. Their age is estimated from 500 to 300 thousand years. In the upper cave on the same site in 1933, the remains of modern humans were also found.
Most of the research on these remains was done by the Canadian Davidson Black until his death in 1934. Until 1941, the remains were examined by Franz Weidenreich. In 1941, the original fossils were lost during World War II, but numerous casts and descriptions survive.
Detection and identification
Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Anderson and American paleontologist Walter W. Granger came to Zhoukoudian in 1921 in search of fossils. Anderson was then Mineral Affairs Advisor to the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Trade. The local stone diggers directed them to a place called Dragonbone Hill. Anderson identified a scattering of quartz there that did not originate there. Immediately realizing the importance of his find, he turned to his colleague: "This is a primitive man, now we need to find him!"
Sinanthropus skull Anderson's assistant, the Austrian Otto Zhdansky, began earthworks. He found a fossilized human molar. In 1923, Otto Zhdansky returned to Zhoukoudian, and then sent the results of two excavations to the Swedish University of Uppsala for analysis. In 1926, Anderson announced the discovery of two molars in a submission, and Zhdansky published his findings. The news excited the scientific world, since at that time no fossil people were known either in China or in Asia in general.
Canadian anatomist Davidson Black of the Peking United Medical College, impressed by the findings of Anderson and Zhdansky, obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 1927 continued the excavations, in which Western and Chinese scientists participated. Swedish paleontologist Anders Birger Bolin discovered another tooth, Black put it in his gold locket.
Sinanthropus skull Black published an article in the journal Nature, he assigned the finds to a new species and genus, which he named Sinanthropus pekinensis. However, many scientists were skeptical about such conclusions drawn from the study of teeth alone. The Rockefeller Foundation also demanded that more samples be found for the next grant.
In 1928, a lower jaw, several more teeth, and skull fragments were found. Black provided them to the foundation and received a grant of $80,000, which he used to found the Cenozoic Research Laboratory.
Excavations at the site were led by Chinese archaeologists Yang Zhongjian, Pei Wenzhong, and Jia Lanpo. In 1930, a second skullcap was discovered, in 1932 the scope of work expanded: up to a hundred people were employed daily at the excavations. In 1935, after the death of Davidson Black, Jia Lanpo took over the leadership, and the following year, 1936, was the most fruitful: three skull covers were found. In total, more than 200 human fossils were discovered during the excavations (including six skulls or skullcaps, 19 large and many small fragments of skulls, 15 jaws, 157 teeth, three parts of the humerus, one collarbone, one lunate and one tibia), belonging to more than 40 individuals. Excavations were stopped in 1937 due to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War.
Sinanthropus skull The fossil remains of Sinanthropus were placed in a safe at the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Beijing Unified Medical College. In November 1941, Secretary Hu Chengzi packed them for shipment to the United States for safekeeping until the end of the war. The fossils disappeared on their way to the port city of Qinhuangdao in northern China.
Since then, attempts have been repeatedly made to find the bones, but all of them have so far been unsuccessful. In 1972, American financier Christopher Janus promised a $5,000 reward for finding the missing skulls. And in June 2005, in connection with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, the PRC authorities organized a committee to search for fossils. Despite the loss of the originals, many casts, drawings and descriptions survive, and three of the original fossilized teeth are kept at the University of Uppsala.
Follow-up research
After the end of the civil war in China, in 1949, excavations were resumed for a short time. Excavations continued in 1951, 1958-1960 and 1978-1980. In the 1959 season, another jaw was found belonging to an elderly woman.
paleontological findings
Skull and brain cast of Sinanthropus In 1891, the Dutch doctor Eugene Dubois discovered the remains of Pithecanthropus on the island of Java: a skullcap, two molars and a femur. The bones combined both monkey and human features, the femur spoke of upright posture. Dubois considered Pithecanthropus to be a human ancestor, half-ape-half-human, and the missing link in the evolution of modern humans. Since at the time these were the only known remains of Pithecanthropus, the scientific community was skeptical about such far-reaching conclusions from such a small number of bones, moreover, belonging to a single individual. Some attributed the remains to an ordinary monkey, others to a person with developmental disabilities.
Sinanthropus became the second open transitional form between ape and man. Moreover, the fossil material was much richer than in the case of the Javanese Pithecanthropus. Sinanthropus had a structure that was clearly different from that of a monkey, a larger brain volume, knew how to use stone tools and owned fire. Until today, the remains of synatropes are of great scientific value. Zhoukoudian is the most comprehensively and systematically studied burial site of Homo Erectus.
Anatomy
In general, the skeleton of Sinanthropus, with the exception of the skull, resembled the skeleton of a modern person. The difference is that in Sinanthropus, the perichondrium of the bones of the additional skeleton is thicker and the endochondral cavities are smaller. According to the study of the femur, the growth of Sinanthropus is 156 cm for men and 144 cm for women. The skull is sturdier, lower and flatter than that of a modern human. The brow ridges are pushed forward. The volume of the brain on average is 1059 ml (A reasonable person has 1425, and a Chimpanzee has 400), more than a skilled person from Africa. The teeth are larger and stronger than those of a reasonable person. A distinctive feature of early humans is the ring of enamel on the crowns of their teeth.
Cranial covers of Sinanthropus Lifestyle
Sinanthropes were hunters and gatherers. Many remains of plants and animals have been found in the cave. From the flora there are spruce, pine, willow, birch, alder, linden, grasses, sedges and wormwood. Animals identified 96 species of mammals, of which half are modern species, and half are extinct. There are bones of wolves, bears, hyenas, saber-toothed tigers, tigers, ancient elephants, rhinos, giant camels, horses, wild boars, rams, etc. 70% of the bones belong to two extinct species of deer (2-3 thousand individuals), which, judging by therefore, they were the basis of the diet of synanthropes.
Four of the skulls are damaged, which F. Weidenreich interpreted as life-time impacts from heavy stone tools. In combination with blackening, which some researchers consider charring, this suggests the presence of cannibalism in Sinanthropes. A lot of disputes are caused by dark layers in the cave, the largest of which reaches a thickness of 4-6 meters. Some scientists consider these layers to be ash, which indicates the ability of Sinanthropus to use fire. However, recent studies show that the dark layers are deposits of silt flowing into the cave from the surrounding area. Traces of ash are still present, as are burnt bones, so that the Sinanthropes, apparently, still owned fire, albeit in smaller volumes than previously thought.
A huge number of stone tools were found in the cave - more than a hundred thousand. The tools are choppers (pointed pebbles), disc-shaped nucleos and flakes. Material - quartz, sandstone and hornfels. The tools are primitive, but improved from the lower (more ancient) layers to the upper ones. The size of tools is decreasing, more and more of them are made of quartz and flint, and less and less of sandstone.
Sinanthropus wikipedia, Sinanthropus
Systematics
on Wikispecies
Images
at Wikimedia Commons
Sinanthrope, otherwise - Peking man, one of the varieties Homo erectus, is mainly considered to be a dead end branch of primitive fossil people. But is everything in this matter so simple?
NOT SO FAR FROM MODERN PEOPLE
The first Sinanthropus skull was discovered in the grottoes of the Zhoukoudian Cave, located approximately 50-60 km from Beijing, by the Chinese anthropologist Pai Wen Zhong in 1927. Excavations in the cave were carried out from 1927 to 1937, then were interrupted by World War II and resumed in 1949. They were conducted according to all the prescribed rules, and in their course the skeletons of 40 individuals were described.
It was clear from the start that a new breed of fossil humans had been found. Where was Sinanthropus placed on the historical tree? It, according to the dating made, was attributed to the middle Pleistocene, approximately between 900 thousand and 130 thousand years ago. Thus, the upper limit of his existence approached and, perhaps, even intersected with the existence of people of the modern type.
Upon closer examination, as the famous sinologist and writer Alexei Maslov writes, it turned out that Sinanthropus is not so far from modern people in its development. Outwardly, of course, in our opinion, he was not very attractive: he had very heavy brow ridges, a strongly sloping forehead, that is, he was terribly primitive in appearance.
But it was also strikingly modern. The volume of his brain approached the volume of the brain of modern Homo sapiens. If the average brain volume of Sinanthropus was 1,075 cm3, then there were individual individuals in which this figure reached 1,300 cm3, which is close to modern man, who on average has a brain of 1,350 cm3.
That is, Sinanthropus combined a completely modern brain and a primitive appearance. The growth of these hominids mainly varied within 150-160 cm, the weight due to the dense physique could reach 80-90 kg. The synanthropes did not live long and rarely crossed the 35-year mark.
Their teeth were also quite modern, although the molars and incisors were somewhat wider than those of today's people, and besides, the bones of the limbs practically did not differ from ours. The left lobe of the Beijing people's brain, where the motor centers of the right side of the body are located, was slightly larger compared to the right lobe.
Consequently, the right hand of Sinanthropus was more developed than the left. In addition to plant foods, they ate animal meat. Sinanthropes had a relatively developed culture of the hostel, made tools and were actively engaged in gathering.
In their large Zhoukoudian cave, a fire burned, which they kept unquenchable, as far as sediments can tell, for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
DIRECT ANCESTOR OF THE CHINESE
It is curious that along with the Soviet and European reconstructions of the appearance of Sinanthropus, drawing him, if not a half-monkey, then a sort of degenerate, there are reconstructions made by Chinese specialists.
Sinanthropus is very similar to them ... to the modern Chinese. Unless with a strongly sloping forehead, slightly protruding jaws and sharply protruding superciliary arches. Most anthropologists of the Celestial Empire, in fact, believe that Sinanthropus was "quite Chinese."
Thus, the patriarch of Chinese anthropology, the man who, along with Pei Wenzhong, directly discovered Sinanthropus, Jia Lanpo does not doubt at all that not the remains of some kind of primitive man homo erectus were found near Beijing, who lived 500-400 thousand years ago, but a ready-made ancestor of the Chinese.
“Peking man is already beginning to embody all the characteristics of the “yellow race”: the concave inside of the incisors, the characteristic base of the nose and wide cheekbones. Thus Peking Man was the ancestor of the modern Chinese."
The American anthropologist of German origin Franz Weidenreich at one time drew attention to the fact that the incisors of Sinanthropus had a spatulate shape characteristic of the Mongoloids. This allowed him at the international congress of anthropologists, held in 1938 in Copenhagen, to declare that the Mongoloids and American Indians descend directly from Sinanthropus.
The Sinanthropus, like the Mongoloids, has spade-shaped incisors, as well as nut-like swellings on the lingual surface of the lower jaw. Thus, according to Weidenreich, the Mongoloids lead their genus independently of other people directly from Sinanthropus himself, who lived in Asia, that is, where the Mongoloids live today.
Then many anthropologists, including Soviet ones, joined the Weidenreich point of view. Among them were K. Kuhn, A. Toma, G. F. Debets, G. P. Grigoriev and others. They significantly supplemented the argumentation of the so-called polycentrism, now also known as the theory of multiregional anthropogenesis, or accepted it, albeit with many reservations.
Over time, scientists have paid close attention to the fact that in modern Mongoloids, the long bones of the limbs do not differ from the long bones in Caucasians, as you know, descended from Cro-Magnons. In synanthropes, the long bones of the limbs were very thick and had a narrow brain canal.
Thus, all people had a single ancestor - the Cro-Magnon, and in the long-standing scientific dispute about the origin of mankind, the monocentrists are still right. However, more and more researchers are now inclined to believe that Asian finds generally destroy the usual idea of racial formation.
In fact, we are faced not with different races that have a single source (for example, in Africa), but representatives of different groups of people who developed in parallel in different places and never intersected!
Sinanthropus was distinguished by another feature - along its skull from the forehead to the back of the head there was a powerful sagittal crest, which could be found in some species of Australopithecus or in modern gorillas. Developed chewing muscles were attached to this crest. In monkeys, they are usually covered by skin folds, but as soon as the creature rises to its hind legs, the crest begins to stand out clearly on the head.
As the same Maslov notes, is this why many ancient Chinese images show great wise ancestors and predecessors in the form of strange creatures with horns or a comb on their heads?
Sinanthropes, due to their development, could well be perceived as ancestors and wise men by subsequent Chinese. In addition, the obvious extinction of synanthropes is somehow not traced - they seem to dissolve in a new generation of mankind.
Perhaps this happened against the backdrop of a series of geological disasters in China, after which the old generation of synanthropes passed into the category of ancestors - now they were remembered and worshiped.
CHINA - HOMELAND OF EUROPEANS?
In general, many interesting anthropological discoveries are being made in China. So, in the province of Hubei, in Yongxian County, in 1989-1990, two skulls were discovered. This find further confused the ideas about the settlement of ancient people.
Specialists from the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, under the leadership of Li Tianyuan, identified them as homo erectus and determined their age at 600,000 years. It would seem that there was nothing surprising in the find, but the most interesting, as often happens, was hidden in the details.
Strikingly, the skulls from Yongxian, with their even more developed brow ridges, repeat the finds in Java, that is, they turned out to be closer to Pithecanthropus, and not to Peking Man.
But this was not the only surprise: although in terms of the structure of the cheekbones of the skull, these are close to most Chinese skulls, however, fascial measurements showed their striking closeness to much later skulls found in ... Europe.
Their striking closeness to homo heidelbergensis, the Heidelberg man, was established, which allegedly gave rise to two varieties of homo sapiens at once: modern humans and Neanderthals, which became extinct about 30-40 thousand years ago.
At present, anthropologists are also aware of such predecessors of Peking man as the Langtian synanthrope from Central China (1.15-1.13 million years) and even more ancient synanthropus from Danau (Southwestern China), who lived 1.8-1 .6 million years ago. So Chinese experts sometimes make assumptions that the Chinese nation is already about a million years old, or even more.
And if we take into account the existence of the skull of the Heidelberg man from Yongxian, then it may even turn out that China is the oldest homeland not only of the Mongoloid, but also of the Caucasoid race. Not a fact, of course, but not excluded.
Viktor BUMAGIN
