Pre-history

In another epoch, long before man existed as a species, Yunnan was home to dinosaurs. In 1938 the Chinese paleontologist Yan lhoujian unearthed a fossilised skeleton in Lufeng County, 104 km west of Kunming. It was China's earliest dinosaur find. In 1981 a team from the county's Cultural Centre dug up another one, nearly intact, six metres long and two metres high. These and pterodactyl fossils (the flying dinosaur) are on display at the Centre's museum. The walking dinosaur specimens are all of the plant-eating, long-necked type, displayed in a roam with paintings on the walls of these dinosaurs in busy Triassic jungles. No big-jawed,ferocious carnivorous types here, nor among the dinosaur fossils found elsewhere in the province, which are sites mainly in Chuxiong Prefecture.

But who knows how many were ground up by ancient quack apothecaries and sold as dragon hone medicine? Local legend had it that the place where the fossils were excavated was the burial place of dragons. These dragons had flown up to Heaven one day when the gases were already closed. Either it was dark, or they weren't paying attention, or whatever.Anyway, they crashed into the gate, which knocked them out and they then fell back to earth on this spot, burying themselves in the impact.

In a later epoch long after the demise of the dinosaurs, Yunnan hosted a number of strange (because now extinct) kinds of mammals. Among these was an important hominid on the human evolutionary chain, a creature called Bamapithecus, which had as many human characteristics as simian. Discoveries, also in Lufeng County, began in 1975 and culminated in the excavation of a nearly complete skull in 1980. Its age was deter-mined to be eight million years old.

North of Lufeng, 200 km from Kunming, is Yuanmou County, the other major paleontological digging area. The earliest find here, in 1965, was a pair of teeth similar to. but bigger and nearly three times as ancient as, the teeth of Bejing Man, long considered China's oldest human ancestor. Hand-made stoneware and evidence of the use of are discovered along with the teeth pushed proto-man s history back to 1.7 million years ago. The new species of Homo erertus was named Yuanmou Man. Then discoveries in the late 1980's revealed an earlier model, dating hack 2.5 million years. This set of teeth was similar enough to Yuanmou Man's to be obviously in the same line of evolution, yet sufficiently different to earn a new species name-Orient Man. Almost Incidentally, excavators also found the fossils of a three-toed small horse.

Besides fossils of proto-man, Yuanmou County has yielded many relics from the Stone Age, Including an entire Neolithic village at Dadunzi, near the county capital. Near Chuxiong city, the prefectural capital. bronze drums have been excavated, dated 690 B,C. The find supposedly confirms Yunnan as the birthplace of the Bronze Drum Cult, associated with the Zhuang, Yao and other peoples in soulhern China and Southeast Asia.