The scent of lavender filled the warm air yesterday around the famous caves in Dragon Bone Hill, where the remains of Peking Man were found. Only a few tourists broke the silence in the high-roofed caverns at the village of Zhoukoudian, on the boundary of the Taihang Range and the north China plain.
Here some 70 years ago were found old bones and animal remains - six skull caps, 14 cranial fragments, 15 mandibles, 157 teeth, a bit of a collar bone, three upper-arm bones, one wrist bone, seven thigh bones and one shin bone to be exact - providing scientists with stunning evidence of a settlement by man as old as 500,000 years.
The most important find was made in 1929, when a Chinese archaeologist, the late Pei Wenzhong, dug up an almost-whole skull, the discovery of which "thundered round the world", as the guidebook in Zhoukoudian museum puts it. It proved the existence of a creature similar to modern man with a prominent eyebrow ridge and a slightly smaller brain who lived between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago.
The museum contains two life-size clay models of homo erectus, as our five-foot human ancestor is known, as well as colourful pictures of a Peking Man and Peking Woman cooking meat over burning wood on the site which anthropology books describe as the world's oldest-known campfire.
The evidence of the use of fire has always excited the scientific world. A pile of yellow-brown ash containing charred stones and bone fragments found in the limestone caves is displayed in a glass case in the museum as proof of the theory.
Above it is written in English and Chinese: "This indicates that Peking Man could already control and preserve fire. Fire expels coldness and moisture and would discourage carnivores from entering the cave. The illumination provided by the fire would also have been important for life in the dark cave. Cooked food is also easier to be digested. Thus the ability to use fire is an important milestone in the cultural development of mankind."
The museum artists used their imagination to depict Peking Man chasing away wolf-like creatures with flaming firebrands. The ability to tame fire, visitors are told, was a crucial part of the evidence that Peking man occupied the intermediary stage in the evolution from ape to 20th century homo sapiens.
Alas, the theory that Peking Man used fire or, indeed, that he ever lived in the dark caves at all, is most probably not true, according to findings published on Friday by the US journal Science.
Using new sophisticated analysis of cave soils, an international team of five scientists from the US, Israel and China concluded that Peking Man very probably did not conquer fire, and that man only learned to control fire at a much later stage. No charcoal remnants or wood ash could be detected in the caves, said the researchers, headed by Mr Steve Weiner, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. "Hence, although indirect evidence for burning is present, there is no direct evidence for in situ burning."
The fossil remains do not necessarily mean early humans killed and cooked animals, they said. Natural forest fires could have blackened the bones in the caves. The rounded bowls in the floor, which earlier researchers said were hearths, could have been formed by water, and the vivid red clay in these "fire-places" was fine sediments deposited by the water. And rain water probably washed the bones into the cave, which filled with human remains over time.
"This had nothing to do with people having a picnic and roasting animal bones in a fire," Mr Clark Howell, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley, was reported as saying.
The importance of the new finding is that it points to a different era - possibly 100,000 years later - as the time when humans were first able to use fire, and thereby begin to penetrate the colder regions of Europe and Asia.
The oldest site where fire is known to have been used is now a 300,000-year Neanderthal Man encampment in Hungary. "In a sense we spoil the story," Mr Weiner told Science.
The journal's findings certainly spoil the interesting museum at Dragon Bone Hill, where the attendants and Chinese visitors have yet to hear the news.
It is rather sad walking round the museum knowing that one of its most important premises has been challenged. However, no one doubts that the bones found here are those of about 40 people of different sexes and ages who lived in China up to 500,000 years ago.
What would make up for the setback would be the recovery of the six precious Peking Man skull caps which went missing during the second World War. They were packed in crates for shipment to the US but got lost when the Japanese invaded China.
Last month, Beijing's leading scientists launched an appeal for clues to their whereabouts. "These skull caps are most likely buried somewhere in China, but the search might be extremely difficult," said Mr Jia Lanpo, a leading Chinese paleoanthropologist, who has spent six decades studying Peking Man fossils. Chinese scientists and their global counterparts have to rely for now on a single broken Peking Man skull, preserved in a Chinese institute.