Dragon Bone Hill
An Ice-Age Saga of Homo erectus
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
"Peking Man," a cave man once thought a great hunter who had first tamed fire, actually was a composite of the gnawed remains of some fifty women, children, and men unfortunate enough to have been the prey of the giant cave hyena. Researching the famous fossil site of Dragon Bone Hill in China, scientists Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon retell the story of the cave's unique species of early human, Homo erectus.
Boaz and Ciochon take readers on a gripping scientific odyssey. New evidence shows that Homo erectus was an opportunist who rode a tide of environmental change out Africa and into Eurasia, puddle-jumping from one gene pool to the next. Armed with a shaky hold on fire and some sharp rocks, Homo erectus incredibly survived for over 1.5 million years, much longer than our own species Homo sapiens has been on Earth. Tell-tale marks on fossil bones show that the lives of these early humans were brutal, ruled by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow, yet there are fleeting glimpses of human compassion as well. The small brain of Homo erectus and its strangely unchanging culture indicate that the species could not talk. Part of that primitive culture included ritualized aggression, to which the extremely thick skulls of Homo erectus bear mute witness.
Both a vivid recreation of the unimagined way of life of a prehistoric species, so similar yet so unlike us, and a fascinating exposition of how modern multidisciplinary research can test hypotheses in human evolution, Dragon Bone Hill is science writing at its best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dragon Bone Hill is the name of the archeological site in China where Peking Man was found in the 1920s. Although all of the original Peking Man fossils were lost during the Japanese occupation of China, casts remain and have shown that Peking Man should be classified as Homo erectus, an early ancestor of humans. Ross University anatomist Boaz (Evolving Health) and University of Iowa anthropologist Ciochon (The Human Evolution Source Book) tell two entertaining tales as they explore many facets of the Homo erectus story. The first deals with the discovery of Peking Man and provides much insight into the politics of early paleoanthropology. As part of this story, the authors also attempt to resolve the oft-examined question of what happened to the original fossils. They don't present a great deal of new information and come to the same conclusion as many others (notably Nicole Mones in her novel Lost in Translation), suggesting that, after being discarded by Japanese troops, the fossils were ground up and turned into medicinal products by Chinese locals. Their second story addresses the evolutionary place of Peking Man and presents "hypotheses on the origins of the use of fire, the beginnings of human language, the evolution of the brain, hunting, cannibalism, stone and bone tool use and ancient human diet." They conclude that Homo erectus was primarily a scavenger incapable of speech who had learned to tame but not fully control fire. Accessible to the general reader, this volume provides a nice overview of the subject. B&w illus.
