The skull of "Peking Man" once shook the whole world, but these precious fossils disappeared during the Second World War. Due to this, China announced on Saturday it has formed an official unit to search to recover the skull of Peking Man.

This official search team will be coordinated by the district government of Bejing's Fangshan suburbs where the skull was found. The team will follow every lead ever forwarded and will conduct full-scale traces for the possibility that the skull might have be on the mainland, in the U.S., Japan or Korea and will not give up on any lead of value. The team will use the weight of the government to trace all these leads and announce to society the results of these traces.

The discovery of Peking Man's skull pushed human history forward by 500,000 years. This discovery elated the entire world, but five sets of relatively intact "skulls" that were of most scientific value disappeared mysteriously around 1941.

After half a century, people kept searching for them. Some places even published books, shot films and television programs on this subject. Chinese and American scientists, agents of America's Federal Bureau of Investigation, Japanese intelligence officers all tried to recover the Peking Man's skulls, refusing to give up on any lead whatsoever, tracing leads from Tianjin, Beijing all the way to Taipei, but all to no avail.

Prior to this current official collection of leads of the Peking Man by the government, Beijing's Zhoukoudian Ruins Museum has collected 21 leads from the entire country. The government will co-operate with various departments to begin investigating the more valuable of these leads.

(CRI.com July 5, 2005)