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In 2001, the Journal of Asian Studies published an article titled "Peking Man and the Politics of Paleoanthropological Nationalism in China" by Barry Sautman. It attempted to broaden the discussion regarding the prominence of nationalism in post-Mao China by examining a state-sponsored discourse that adapted a body of complex scholarship of archaeology and anthropology of the Stone Age to identify "Chineseness." In that nationalist discourse, Peking Man--a Homo erectus (H. erectus) group that inhabited mountain caves in Zhoukoudian (about 50 kilometers southwest of today's metropolitan Beijing) more than half a million years ago and was first discovered in 1929--was established to represent all Paleolithic hominid groups whose archaeological sites found in China identified them as the direct ancestors of the Chinese people. The most recent estimate is that Peking Man is 770,000 years old (Shen et al. 2009).
At the time of its discovery, Peking Man pushed back the timeline for studies of human evolution by about half a million years from Neanderthals and put China in the field's limelight. But now the key point in understanding the significance of this Chinese version of human evolution involves a debate between the world's mainstream paleoanthropologists and their Chinese peers. While the former adopt the theory first proposed by Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan Wilson in their famous 1987 article "Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution" and believe that both H. erectus and Homo sapiens (H. sapiens) originated in Africa and that modern humans are the descendants of the H. sapiens that migrated out of Africa in a time as early as 125,000 years and as late as 60,000 years ago and replaced the previous H. erectus groups worldwide, the latter claims that the H. erectus group that arrived in the land of what is today's China had independently evolved into H. sapiens. Ordinary readers may construe the meaning of the debate simply as a question of whether Chinese share a common modern human origin with the rest of the world, and if not, then exactly how "old" are they--one million or two million years?
Sautman (2001, 95) presents the discourse as a pronounced case of racial nationalism, which "holds that each...