Chinese and French scientists announced on October
25 in Wuhan City, Hubei
Province, that they had finally finished reconstructing the
half-million-year-old skulls of Yunxian Man. The French scientists
presented the restored No. 2 skull to the Hubei Provincial
Archeology Research Institute.
Li Tianyuan of the?institute in Wuhan
discovered the two fossilized human skulls at a site in Yunxian
County in 1989 and 1990. They were determined to be specimens of
Homo erectus, the predecessor of Homo sapiens and
who walked the earth 300,000 to 1.7 million years ago.
The No. 2 skull, although badly damaged and without
a jawbone, was the most complete human skull of its age ever found
in China. It was determined to be 350,000 to 500,000 years old.
For 13 years archeologists searched for the best
way to restore the skulls. Li said they were distorted from
pressure and the soft substances in the skull had become cemented
to the hard ones, hindering attempts to obtain measurements.
Specialists used model incising in areas that were broken or
cracked, but this method was not effective in the distorted
areas.
So the specialists turned to computer technology,
making a CT scan of the skull. In May 2002 they began working with
doctors at Wuhan
University's Zhongnan Hospital to scan the skull in 255
sectional images. This provided them with two- and
three-dimensional pictures.
Then they began working with paleoanthropologists
at the Museum of Natural History in France. They selected Java Man
and Peking Man -- other Asian members of H. erectus -- as
reference specimens to control the vertical and horizontal radian
of the No. 2 skull. The scientists spent more than a year
repositioning, reshaping and replicating distorted and missing
parts, finally finishing the restoration of the skull last
month.
Li Tianyuan said that the cranial capacity of
Yunxian Man was 1,065 cubic centimeters, not far off from the 1,075
cu.cm average of the Peking Man skulls and confirming the opinion
that Yunxian Man was in fact a member of H. erectus. The
average cranial capacity of modern humans is 1,400 cu.cm.
Homo erectus lived primarily in Asia and
Europe.
(China.org.cn by Chen Lin, November 1, 2004)
