Monday, September 23, 2013 | BY: YUAN REN
While waves were sent thrashing through the intellectual world in 1987 as DNA evidence hailed a woman living 200,000 years ago in Africa as the earliest common ancestor to all modern humans, China’s leading scientists fervently waved the red flag and rejected the findings in Nature as being little more than preposterous. They held up the theory that an archaic form of human, the “Peking man” (北京猿人 Běijīng yuánrén), was the true ancestor of the modern Chinese, with radicals going so far as to claim that China was the cradle of humanity.
Over the next thirty 30 years, as the model of a common African origin gained momentum with growing genetic and archaeological evidence, the theory evolved into a well-tread narrative of human evolution, depicting an early form of modern humans emerging out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. The scientific community rejected the competing theory that supported independent evolution in different parts of the world. But in China, the revelation barely rippled with a defiant nation that continued to teach in its history and text books that the Peking man was the real deal, and the prevailing theory of evolution failed to permeate the realm of public conscience.
The Peking man in question— a Homo erectus or upright man that lived 750,000 years ago— was discovered in Zhoukoudian (周口店, now a UNESCO World Heritage site), southwest Beijing in 1929. At the time they were the oldest fossils of man known, fanning flames for theories that all humans originated in China.
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