Dragon Bone Medicine

Nineteenth-century Chinese pharmacists had known for generations that a cave-studded limestone hill outside the village of Zhoukoudian near Beijing was a rich source of fossil bones, which they ground up to make medicine for their patients. What they did not know was that some of the bones were those of their own ancestors, and about half a million years old. The bones were recognized as human or near-human in 1903, and in the 1920s archaeologists began excavating the site. In 1927, Davidson Black of the Peking Union Medical College discovered two hominid teeth, and he announced that a new species of primitive man had been discovered: Peking Man. His discovery was confirmed in 1929 with the unearthing of part of a skull. Peking Man is now classified as Homo erectus, a man like species which came immediately before Homo sapiens in the evolutionary chain.