The Peking Man fossils vanished in 1941 and are still missing

The Peking Man fossils - the h**o erectus skullcaps and bones from Zhoukoudian cave that anchored the theory that humans evolved in Asia - disappeared in December 1941 and haven't been seen since. 

With Japanese forces advancing through China, the fossils, representing at least 40 individuals, were packed into two wooden footlockers to be carried by U.S. Marines to the SS President Harrison, bound for the American Museum of Natural History. The ship was attacked by Japanese warships and ran aground. Whatever happened to the footlockers after they left the Peking Union Medical College on December 4, 1941, is unknown.

Rumors have put them aboard the sunken Awa Maru or ground up for traditional Chinese medicine. Marine corporal Richard Bowen recalled digging up a box of bones one night in 1947 while excavating a foxhole in Qinhuangdao during a Communist siege; a Chinese port historian calculated that if Bowen's story is right, the fossils most likely sit under roads, a warehouse, or a parking lot at a specific set of coordinates. Cash rewards have turned up nothing.

Science lucked out on one count: anatomist Franz Weidenreich had made plaster casts, X-rays, and detailed drawings of everything. As the paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, "The loss is more a matter of sentiment than a true tragedy for science." 

Four teeth from the original digs survive at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Previously:

• Man notices ancient human jawbone embedded in parents' tile floor

• Evidence of hominins building wooden structures half a million years ago

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