Yunnan to Build Chinese Mankind Museum

Yuanmou County, southwest China's Yunnan Province, will invest 120 million yuan in building a mankind museum.

The county is best known in the world for the discovery of "Yuanmou Man".

The 13-hectare museum will be built in the protection area of "Yuanmou Man" relics. A showroom will be built in the excavation site where the fore-tooth fossils of Yuanmou Man were found in 1965.

The museum is designed to become a high-tech exhibition center. A demonstration hall will be built to show the multiplication process of Yuanmou Man in visual, photo and light forms. Tropic and semi-tropical plants will be grown outside the museum.

The Yuanmou County Government has already invested 500,000 yuan in construction of infrastructure including water, power and roads.

Also in Yuanmou, archaeologists found in 1986 fossils of paleoithecus living four million years ago, after the dental fossils of Yuanmou Man were excavated in 1965.

Up to now, the animal fossils that have been found in the county include fossilized horses, urus, deer and dinosaurs. Among the relics discovered are a cultural relic of Paleolithic Age dating back to 200,000-100,000 years, a cultural relic of Paleolithic Age dating back to 10,000 years, and a tribe relic of Neolithic Age dating back to 4,000 years and a bronze cultural relic of Warring States Period (475-221 BC) to Han Dynasty (206 BC-220).

Experts describe Yuanmou as the "museum of the development of human history."






People's Daily Online --- http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/