Peking Man
On Shelf #5: On this shelf we have the fossil known as Peking Man (Homo erectus [reconstructed from several fossil skulls and jaws found between 1923 and 1927, in Zhoukoudian or Chou K’ou-Tien near Beijing; ~750 kya]). Also displayed is another example of Homo erectus, Sangiran 17 [found in the site of Sangiran in Java, Indonesia; ~700 kya] and a replica of a specimen that some assign to a new species Homo georgicus and others more conservatively assign to Homo erectus D2700 [found in Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus; ~1.8 Mya].
These skulls are grouped together to draw attention to the fact that with the emergence of the genus Homo, members of the human family began to populate the world outside of Africa.
• If you look at a map of the world today, you will see that Java is an island separated from the mainland of Asia. The world at the time of initial human movement out of Africa was a different place. The ancestors of Sangiran 17 would have been able to follow a coastal route and simply walk from Africa to Java. The islands of western Indonesia were linked to mainland Southeast Asia in a now drowned land mass known as Sunda.
