ABOVE: The mandible found in Baishiya Cave
DONGJU ZHANG, LANZHOU UNIVERSITY
An 1980, a monk praying in a holy cave in Gansu Province, China came across a fragment of a human jaw. The find may not have surprised him, as the cave, Baishiya, was known locally for yielding animal and human fossils. People sometimes ground up human remains found there to make traditional medicines. But instead of grinding up the mandible, he handed it over to a local religious leader, who in turn passed it along to Guangrong Dong, a researcher at Lanzhou University in China who studied paleolithic fossils.
Thirty years later, Fahu Chen of the Institute of Tibet Plateau Research and Lanzhou University archeologist Dongju Zhang began working with Dong to investigate the mandible and the Baishiya Cave. The same year, a team at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany reported the DNA sequence of a ...
