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"Peking Man" is the name used for the bones of an extinct homonoid discovered near Beijing, China in 1927 inside
Zhoukoudian (pronounced Chou-k'ou-tien) Cave. A skull was identified from a single tooth as belonging to the species Homo
erectus by David Black, an anthropologist, during the same year that it was found. After the skull was unearthed, other bones
were excavated from the site, which was studied and searched over numerous times over a span of many years and is still to
this day under extensive research. The fossils found have been determined to be approximately 130,000 years old, which would
make the pre-humans to be from the Middle Pleistocene era. From the fossilized skull, we now know that the pre-humans from
that era possessed a much smaller brain (the skull's cranial capacity is 1,075 cubic cm, while the average capacity of a modern
man is 1,350 cubic cm). The teeth and arm bones are indistinguishable from the bones of modern man. In 1941, the fossils
were still under study and were kept at Peking Union Medical College. However, when the Japanese were invading China, there
was an attempt to smuggle all of the fossils to the United States for safe and unrestricted study. During the mission, the
bones disappeared and have been missing since then. Today, we only have the plaster casts for those fossils and the originals,
found during a 1958 excavation.
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