New clues have surfaced that suggest the long-lost fossils of Peking Man may be buried in a port city of North China's Hebei Province, South African and Chinese scientists said.

The skulls of the Homo erectus, found more than a century ago in Zhoukoudian, southwestern Beijing, were lost in 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, disrupted a plan to ship them for safekeeping in the US.

The whereabouts of what many believe holds the key to studies of early mankind have been one of the world's biggest archaeological mysteries, until a retired US Marine lately claimed that he saw them in 1947 in Qinhuangdao.

According to former soldier Richard Bowen, the fossils may be lying underneath a parking lot in Qinhuangdao, some 290 kilometers east of Beijing, said South African paleontologist Lee Berger and two Chinese colleagues, Liu Wu and Wu Xiujie, in the March edition of a scientific journal published by the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

In his memoir, Bowen said he dug up wooden crates of relics and used them as a machine gun nest when his base came under attack from Chinese troops, the Associated Press reported yesterday. The crates could have since been reburied where they were found.

Berger, from the South African university, and coauthors Liu and Wu, from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, investigated the Marine's story and "found it to be perhaps the most credible account of the last known sighting of these important fossils," said the AP.

The Chinese government in 1941 commissioned the shipment of five craniums so that they would not fall into the hands of the advancing Japanese. It was the last time anyone had ever seen the relics.

Global Times/AP