* Astronomy

Chinese researchers are hopeful of finding the remains of the world's most famous cave dweller, the 500 000-year-old Peking Man, more than 60 years after they disappeared.

Several interesting clues have come to light in recent months, according to members of a recently established committee charged with looking for the Peking Man's bones and other missing relics.


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If the clues lead anywhere, it could potentially mark a breakthrough in a search that has lasted since the early 1940s.

Five skull fragments belonging to Peking Man were lost under mysterious circumstances during World War II and have never been recovered.

Just in the last two months, the committee has received 63 tip-offs on the whereabouts of the elusive relics, according to Liu Yajun, deputy head of the commission.

However, it may be a while before the Peking Man bones see the light of day, as one of the clues has them buried under a residential building in Beijing.

The discovery in 1929 of the Peking Man was one of the most decisive steps in the scientific quest to trace man's prehistoric development from the apes.

Since Peking Man was first unearthed in a cave at Zhoukoudian, 50 kilometres south-west of Beijing, in China, archaeologists have found fossils belonging to 40 different individuals and more than 100 000 stone implements and other objects.

Between 1929 and 1937, 14 partial craniums, 11 lower jaws, many teeth, some skeletal bones and large numbers of stone tools were discovered in the Lower Cave at Locality 1 of the Peking Man site. Their age is estimated to be between 500,000 and 300,000 years old. (A number of fossils of modern humans were also discovered in the Upper Cave at the same site in 1933.)