"Peking Man"
Dragon Bone Hill : an Ice-Age saga of Homo erectus by Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon.Great discussion at the beginning of the book about the history of the discoveries of Homo erectus fossils near Zhoukoudian, at Dragon Bone Hill.
"The discovery in Africa of Homo erectus was also ultimately to disprove Weidenreich's hypothesis of the giant ancestry of Homa sapiens. Hundreds of hominid fossils from Africa, and even fossilized footprints, now document that our earliest hominid ancestors were small-bodied. Homo erectus, far from being the smallest of an evolving human lineage, is now known to have been the first hominid of virtually modern human body size and proportions. Weidenreich's early ideas, advanced to explain the unusually thick cranial vault and other anatomical peculiarities of Homo erectus, fell prey to a more complete fossil record found in better-dated contexts. Yet the time between the demise of Homo habilis about 1.6 million years ago, and the appearance of Homo heidelbergensis, now put at approximately 600,000 years ago, has been aptly termed the "muddle in the middle." This one million-year period of time was when hominids left Africa and populated most of the Old World. Homo erectus was the species responsible and we are only now learning how this amazing event happened."
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