Zhoukoudian, a mountainous area 50 kilometers southwest of Beijing, gained international fame after a human skull was discovered on December 2, 1929. Chinese anthropologists called it the Peking Man skull.

Peking Men, who lived 500,000 years ago, are believed to be one of the earliest primitive human beings to use fire. Proof lies in the ashes and burnt animal bones found in the caves in which they lived. The discovery was regarded as a milestone in the history of the study of paleoanthropology, as it provided materials for the study of the early biological evolution of human beings.

During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45), the skulls, together with other Peking Men fossils, mysteriously disappeared. Their whereabouts remain unknown to this day.

New clues gained from a fresh round of searches might shed some light on the whereabouts of the "lost civilization," according to a Beijing committee in charge of the search.

A working committee tasked with searching for missing fossils including Peking Man skulls, the first government-led search group of its kind, was officially set up yesterday in Beijing.

It released a long list of missing fossils it has been tasked to recover.

The list, by far the most complete ever compiled, includes the famous Peking Man skulls, and hundreds of teeth and bone fossils of Peking Men and 18,000-year-old Upper Cave Men, also unearthed in Zhoukoudian.

Liu Yajun, deputy head of the committee and head of the Cultural Committee of Fangshan District, where Zhoukoudian is located, said that since July they had received 63 tips and clues about the whereabouts of the missing fossils.

These clues are from all over the country, Liu said. "Some of the clues sound interesting."

Yang Haifeng, head of the search committee, said his team members would carefully examine the tips and clues.

He said experts from China, the US and Japan searched in vain for the precious fossils after the war.

"However, as long as there is still a glimmer of hope, we will never give up our search," said Yang, who is also the curator of the Zhoukoudian Peking Men Site Museum.

During World War II, Chinese scientists planned to send the fossils to the US to prevent them from being looted by Japanese invaders. However, at some point in the process of the transfer, the fossils went missing, said Gao Xing, deputy head of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

(China Daily September 6, 2005)