Study: Early 'Peking Man' survived in icy climate
WASHINGTON – A famous early ancestor of humans was able to thrive in glacial weather that would send icy shivers up the spines of most modern people, new research shows.
New dating techniques suggest the remains of so-called Peking Man — a batch of Homo erectus fossils found in the 1920s — are 200,000 years older than previously calculated.
What's important about that date, about 770,000 years ago, is that this was a glacial period on Earth, and Peking Man was found in far northern China.
That suggests he was probably the oldest cold weather inhabitant in human ancestry, said study co-author Darryl Granger, an atmospheric scientist at Purdue University whose research appears in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature. The average yearly temperature at the time in that part of China — at Zhoukoudian near Beijing — hovered around the freezing mark, but it was too dry for an ice sheet, he said.
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New dating techniques suggest the remains of so-called Peking Man — a batch of Homo erectus fossils found in the 1920s — are 200,000 years older than previously calculated.
What's important about that date, about 770,000 years ago, is that this was a glacial period on Earth, and Peking Man was found in far northern China.
That suggests he was probably the oldest cold weather inhabitant in human ancestry, said study co-author Darryl Granger, an atmospheric scientist at Purdue University whose research appears in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature. The average yearly temperature at the time in that part of China — at Zhoukoudian near Beijing — hovered around the freezing mark, but it was too dry for an ice sheet, he said.