Inside caves at Beijing's Fangshan district's Taiping Village discovery was made of vast quantities of fossils of cow, sheep and rabbits. Initial tests put these fossils as far back as 100,000 years, earlier than cavemen, but later than "Peking ape-man".
During the excavation, further discovery was made of layers of ashes as long as two meters and what looked like fossils of human teeth. The location of the find was within 35 kilometers of Zhoukoudian where "Peking Man" used to roam. This shows that the range of Beijing's ancient humans was not confined to Zhoukoudian.
On April 8th, personnel from the Fangshan district's department of cultural relics arrived at the scene of the find and removed the layers of ashes plus two plastic bags of fossils dug up by Bi Fengxiang, a travel consultant, for further analysis. On April 14th, specialists in ancient humans and ancient vertebrates from the Chinese Academy of Sciences also took away some fossils. On June 9th, Peking University used carbon 14 to initially date these fossils at more than 100,000 years old partly due to the heavy loss of calcium. They further determined that these fossils were older than cavemen, but not as old as "Peking man".
(Chinanews.com June 22, 2005)
