On November 3, 1964, Chinese researchers reported the finding of a skull from Lantian Man, an early member of the human line whose remains came from a site in Shaanxi province in north-central China. The announcement drew attention across the field of human origins.
The skull was older than the better-known Peking Man and showed that early humans had ranged widely across the region. Stone tools and animal bones at the same level helped date the layer.
The dig was hard. The prize was old. The skull was incomplete.
Lantian Man is now placed among the Homo erectus populations that lived in Asia roughly 1.15 million years ago, and the skull, though incomplete, gave scientists a face and a braincase to set beside the finds from Zhoukoudian, so the map of ancient humans in China grew fuller with a single specimen pulled from a hillside.
The discovery fed a long Chinese effort to write the story of human beginnings from local soil. Lantian remains a name students meet alongside Peking Man, and the date marks when one more piece of the deep past came to light in the loess of the north.
The find joined Peking Man in the Chinese record and gave local science a claim to the deep past. Later work refined the dates, but the skull kept its place as proof that early humans ranged the loess hills long before written time.