The Site of the Peking Man Statue is located in the Zhoukoudian Village, which lies 48 kilometers southwest of Beijing’s center. Legend has it that just west of the Village stands the Dragon Bone Hill which is noted for its large quantities of the Chinese medicine known as dragon bone. According to legend, the Chinese ape-man, also known as the Peking man, lived here some 690,000 years ago in the mid-period of the Pleistocene epoch. It is rumored that the Peking man chose Zhoukoudian as his location because of the limestone caves and crevices in the area that made for an excellent habitat.
It has been said that the exposure of sedimentary strata around the Zhoukoudian is quite extraordinary, especially attracting geologists who often frequented the area. The area also revealed rich Ordovician limestones with which the local habitants made lime.
Legend has it that the first complete skull of Peking man was discovered in December,1929 by Pei Wenzhong, a Chinese paleoanthropologist.
Later, large-scale excavations were done on several occasions, amounting to 25,000 cubic meters of discovered artifacts. It is rumored that a total of four early residential sites by cavemen have been discovered on this hill. Besides those belonging to Peking man, the remains of a site occupied by Hilltop Caveman are the most representative. The bones of Peking Man discovered in the cave in the hill's north face include six complete or relatively complete skulls, eight skull fragments, six pieces of facial bone, 15 mandibles, 153 teeth, seven sections of broken femur, one broken shinbone, three pieces of upper arm bone, one clavicle and one wrist bone belonging to more than 40 individuals of different ages and sexes. Legend also has it that one hundred and eighteen animal fossils have been found in the cave on the North face of the hill. It should be noted that with the exception of five teeth, one upper arm bone and one leg bone, all the original Caveman or Peking man fossil remains, together with those of the Hilltop Caveman, disappeared during World War II and have never been recovered.
