Construction of the China Human Museum will begin at the site where the Yuanmou Man lived more than 1.7 million years ago, in Yuanmou County, southwest China's Yunnan Province, sources said.

A showroom will be built for displaying modeled fossils of Yuanmou Man's front-tooth and a model of the stratum section.

The museum will also include an exhibition hall for high-tech achievements, a room showing the process of evolution of the Yuanmou Man and an out-door plantation for tropical and subtropical plants.

The whole project is expected to cost 120 million yuan (14.45 million U.S. dollars), according to the sources.

The fossils of the tooth of Yuanmou Man were first discovered at Shangnabang Village in Yuanmou County in 1965. Later in 1996, Chinese scientists found fossils of ancient Yuanmou monkeys at the site.

Up to now, Chinese archaeologists have discovered fossils of horses, buffaloes, deer and dinosaurs, ruins of microlithic culture dating back 10,000 years, 4,000-year-old New Stone Age ruins, and sites of bronze culture dating to between the Warring States (BC 475-BC 221) and the Han Dynasty (BC 206 –AD 220) in Yuanmou County.

Many experts have called Yuanmou a museum of human development history.

(People’s Daily 03/26/2001)