Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian

Prologue · The Evening of December 1929

On an evening in December 1929, deep inside the caves of Longgushan at Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, the cold bit hard.

The young scholar Pei Wenzhong had been crouching all day in a cave ten metres deep. Just as the light was failing, he cupped in his hands a complete skullcap — a low, flat skull with heavy brow ridges. It had slept for seven hundred thousand years, and now, for the first time, it stood whole before the modern world.

Firelight Seven Hundred Thousand Years Ago

Seven hundred thousand years ago, a band of Homo erectus made their home in the caves of Longgushan.

They flaked stone tools and hunted thick-jawed deer, and the thick layers of ash in the caves show that they were among the earliest users of fire. The face the firelight revealed had a low flat skull and heavy brow ridges, with a brain capacity of about 1,000 millilitres — midway between ape and man. Later researchers gave them a name: “Peking Man” — a crucial link in the chain of human evolution.

The Hammer on Dragon Bone Hill

In 1921, the Swedish scholar Johan Gunnar Andersson and the Austrian palaeontologist Otto Zdansky surveyed Zhoukoudian and found fossil clues at Longgushan — planting the first suspicion that ancient humans might have lived here.

For eight years the excavations went on, season after season. In December 1929, the handful cupped by Pei Wenzhong turned “Peking Man” from fossils into a world headline. Later finds of Upper Cave Man (about 30,000 years ago) and great quantities of stone and bone tools made Zhoukoudian one of the world’s most important palaeoanthropological sites.

The Skulls That Vanished

In 1941, on the eve of the Pacific War, the Peking Man fossils disappeared mysteriously while being moved — five skullcaps, lost forever.

It is the greatest unsolved case in the history of world archaeology. Soldiers, scholars and institutions have offered no answer; only legends circulate — some say they lie buried beneath a station platform, some say they rest at the bottom of the sea. The ancestors of seven hundred thousand years ago vanished into time once more.

Today · A Sanctuary of Human Evolution

In 1987, the Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian was inscribed on the World Heritage List under criteria (iii) and (vi), among China’s first World Heritage properties.

Today the caves of Longgushan and the reconstructed busts of Peking Man stand in quiet witness to the first steps of humanity out of ignorance — and the vanished skullcaps still remind the world that this shared history deserves to be searched for, always.

Epilogue · The Skulls Still to Come Home

When Pei Wenzhong cupped that skullcap out of the cave on that December evening in 1929, he cannot have imagined that twelve years later it would vanish again.

But memory does not vanish. As long as anyone stands before Longgushan, the firelight of seven hundred thousand years ago will keep burning — waiting for the five skullcaps to come home.

Outstanding Universal Value (OUV)

• Criterion (iii): The Zhoukoudian site provides direct and unique physical evidence for the study of human evolution, bearing exceptional testimony to the history of early humans in China.
• Criterion (vi): The discoveries of Peking Man and Upper Cave Man are directly associated with the great scientific events of human origins.

Facts at a Glance

• Peking Man of c. 700,000–200,000 years ago, coexisting with Upper Cave Man of c. 30,000 years ago
• First complete skullcap unearthed in 1929; inscribed in 1987