The Jesuit and the Skull by Amir D. Aczel

Author:Amir D. Aczel [Aczel, Amir D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594483356
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

A recent (2005) view of the cave at Zhoukoudian where the first Peking Man skull was found. Photograph by the author.

Once it was opened up by the excavators, the space he had just sighted would be named “Ape-Man Cave.” It was a narrow and deep hollow, and the researchers named it for what they now hoped would be uncovered here: the skull of a human ancestor. Pei and a worker were lowered by ropes through the fissure and found themselves inside the cave. They stood there in amazement, ropes tightly fastened to their waists. It was by now November, and fieldwork was supposed to stop for the winter. But Pei and his crew found many fossils within this newly opened cavity, and decided to continue to explore it.

Pei, who had been trained for his job on site, was inexperienced, but highly motivated and enthusiastic. Davidson Black once referred to him as “a corking field man.” Just when he was supposed to shut down the operation and go home for the winter, as the nearly frozen earth was extremely hard to excavate, Pei resolved to stay. He now had a new and promising cave to explore, and he would push forward at any cost. He gave the order to keep working at an increased pace.

And then, after so many months of hard and often frustrating work, they found their prize, at a little after four p.m. on Monday, December 2, 1929.Wang Cunyi, who later became a technical advisor to the Chinese Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, described the event to Jia Lanpo:

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