A new dating method found that "Peking Man" is around 200,000 years older than previously thought.  So how did he adapt to the cold of even a mild glacial period?

The Zhoukoudian, China, site of the remains of Homo erectus, commonly known as "Peking Man", was found to be 680,000-780,000 years old. Earlier estimates put the age at 230,000-500,000 years old.

Homo erectus is considered to be the ancestor species to humans and the first species that left Africa and moved into Asia. The "Peking Man" site, discovered in the late 1920s, was among the first found for Homo erectus and shaped the thoughts on the age and behavior of the species.

Darryl Granger, the Purdue professor of earth and atmospheric sciences who developed the dating method and co-led the study with Guanjun Shen of China's Nanjing Normal University, analyzed four stone tools and six sediment samples from the site.

They used aluminum-26 and beryllium-10 radioisotopic dating, which is based on radioactive decay in the mineral quartz. As cosmic rays penetrate into rocks at the Earth's surface, chemical reactions produce these isotopes of aluminum and beryllium. If the rocks are then buried, the isotopes are no longer produced and those existing begin to decay. The rate of decay can tell researchers when the rocks were deposited in a site, he said.  Granger developed the method in 1997 and first used it for geomorphology work in caves in Virginia, but he recognized it could be used at hominid sites important to understanding human evolution.   A colleague in China contacted Granger and asked him to examine the Zhoukoudian site.

Uranium-based methods of dating had been used at the site, but it appears the results had underestimated the ages, probably due to uranium dissolved in groundwater, Granger said.

The Purdue Rare Isotope Measurement Laboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation, is one of only two laboratories in the nation with equipment capable of performing this kind of dating. The facility contains an accelerator mass spectrometer that can perform ultra-sensitive analyses to measure low levels of trace elements in a sample.

Susan C. Antón, associate professor in the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University said this discovery indicates "Peking Man" was somehow behaviorally able to cope with the cold environment.

"There is evidence that Homo erectus had physically adapted to the cold, but they probably also had to be doing something in terms of behavior to handle the cold of a glacial period in northern China," she said. "There isn't good evidence of fire or any kind of skins or clothing, but evidence of such things doesn't last long and wouldn't be recorded particularly well in the archeological record. It doesn't mean they didn't have them, but we don't have a definitive answer."

The research team had difficulties in separating quartz from the sediment samples, and Shen and Gao got their entire department in on the work, Granger said. The sediment contained about 1 percent quartz, and the dating method requires pure white quartz.

"They ended up hand separating these bits of quartz the size of grains of sand," he said. "It took about eight hours to separate 2 grams of the pure white quartz needed, and each sample required 40 to 60 grams. Luckily the stone tools we analyzed were made only of white quartz."

Granger and Shen next plan to work on other poorly dated hominid sites in China.

This project was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and Wenner-Gren Foundation. The Zhoukoudian Site Museum provided the stone tools used.


Article: Guanjun Shen, Xing Gao, Bin Gao&Darryl E. Granger,'Age of Zhoukoudian Homo erectus Determined with Al/Be Burial Dating',  Nature