New Chinese fossil discovery named Luanchuan Man

Chinese paleoanthropologists have given the name Luanchuan Man to Homo erectus fossil specimens discovered in Central China's Henan province.

The fossilized teeth of an early human were recently discovered at the Sunjiadong excavation site in Luanchuan county in the city of Luoyang.

Researchers from the Henan Provincial Bureau of Cultural Relics said on Thursday that the teeth came from the skull of a deceased minor.

The extinct Homo erectus species is believed to have lived around 2 million to 200,000 years ago.

Li Zhanyang, a member of an archaeological research team in Henan, said experts believe the stratum of the Sunjiadong site belongs to the middle Pleistocene period, or the same period as Peking Man, an example of Homo erectus that was discovered in the Zhoukoudian cave system near Beijing in the early 20th century.

The Henan bureau has convened experts from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Archeological Institute under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to study the new fossils. They have jointly agreed on the name of the finding.

Gao Xing, a member of the IVPP, said there have been few new Homo erectus fossil discoveries in the world. The Sunjiadong site will provide more data to advance paleoanthropological studies, he said.

In the Sunjiadong caves, archaeologists have also unearthed a large amount of ancient animal fossils, including deer and rhinoceros, that are similar to those found in Zhoukoudian.