A fossilized frontal bone of Peking Man, who lived about 500,000 years ago in what is now Zhoukoudian area of suburban Beijing, went on show Sunday for the first time since its discovery 37 years ago.

The frontal bone, discovered in 1966 by Pei Wenzhong, the late Chinese archeologist, is the only piece of skull fossil of Peking Man in China. The frontal bone will be displayed at the Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site Museum from Sunday till Oct. 7.

Just slightly bigger than the palm of a human being, the frontal bone was of immeasurable value in academic study, said Zhu Min, head of the ancient vertebrate and ancient human research institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Chinese archaeologists unearthed the first skull of Peking Man at Zhoukoudian, 48 kilometers southwest of downtown Beijing, in December 1929. The discovery stunned the world.

Zhu Min said five complete skulls of Peking Man had been unearthed at the site by 1937 since excavation of the Peking Man site started in 1927. Besides the three teeth of Peking Man stored in a lab in Sweden, the other five skulls mysteriously disappeared during the Second World War and no trace of them has ever been found.

Excavation of the Peking Man site resumed after the founding of New China in 1949 and to date, Chinese archaeologists have unearthed fossils belonging to 40 Peking men, over 100,000 items of stoneware, traces of fire use and large quantities of fossilized vertebrae.

The frontal bone is the only exhibit in the current exhibition.

China put the site under state key protection in 1961, and in 1987 it was included by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on the World Heritage list.

(China Daily September 22, 2003)