March 27 to April 2
Zuojhen Man (左鎮人) stood high atop its perch as the oldest human found in Taiwan for 40 years. Initially deemed to have lived between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago, its prestige came crashing down in late 2015 when a team led by Chiu Hung-lin (邱鴻霖), using the latest radiocarbon dating technologies, announced that it was only about 3,000 years old.
Zuojhen Man is named after the site of its discovery in Tainan’s Zuojhen District (左鎮), which has been a hotbed of fossil discovery since 1931. The first human bones were reportedly found in 1970. They were sent to Japan, where they underwent fluoro-manganese dating — which produced the wildly exaggerated results, which were published in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Nippon on March 31, 1976, making the Zuojhen Man officially the oldest human ever found in Taiwan.
Photo: Wu Chun-feng, Taipei Times
Chiu says in a Rhythms Monthly article that Zuojhen Man’s age was so quickly accepted because no human remains were found during the 1968 to 1970 excavations of the Changbin Culture (長濱文化) site in Taitung County, which was deemed to be Taiwan’s oldest at between 5,500 and 35,000 years. Scholars were hoping for the Zuojhen man to fit within that date period — which it did — and questioned it no further, Chiu says.
Zuojhen Man soon made its way into the junior high and high school textbooks, and as of January last year it is still listed as the oldest human in Taiwan.
FOSSIL HOTSPOT
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Several Taiwanese made their name at the Zuojhen site, where fossils were first discovered in 1931 by, legend has it, “Fossil Grandpa,” (化石爺爺), the late Chen Chun-mu (陳春木) who was a government clerk with a fifth-grade education living in the area.
There are two versions of the story — Chen was either the first person to find a fossil at the site, attracting the attention of Taipei Imperial University professor Hayasaka Ichiro, or he was commissioned by Hayasaka to help him find fossils.
Since Chen lived close to the site, he would go looking for fossils when he was out fetching water. Apparently, he was so good at it that other interested parties would ask him to help out. This became a lifelong passion for Chen, who was even invited to a fossil conference at Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science in 1964. Unfortunately, travel restrictions were tight, and the government denied his visa, citing his “lack of education.”
Photo courtesy of Du Fu-an
In 1970, amateur fossil hunters Kuo Te-ling (郭德鈴) and Kuo Tung-hui (郭東輝) found a bone that resembled part of a human skull. Unsure whether it was human or monkey, they decided to keep it in their collection. A year later, Pan Chang-wu (潘常武), another legendary self-taught archaeologist with a grade-school education, discovered a complete rhinoceros fossil at Zuojhen, attracting the attention of several scholars in Taipei.
During their time in the area, the scholars also examined Kuo’s collection and saw the skull fragment. They deduced that it belonged to a human, and eventually it was sent along with several other pieces found by Pan to Japan for further study.
Many scholars doubted the age of Zuojhen Man over the years, but for whatever reason, its place was firmly secure until Chiu announced his results.
With Zuojhen Man out of the picture, who does the oldest human fossil honors go to? Some say it’s Penghu 1, a mandible fished out of the Penghu Channel by fishermen and estimated to be between 10,000 and 190,000 years old (which raises a whole set of new questions because it’s different enough to possibly be a different species) — but other academics, such as archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華), say more work needs to be done because the bone was found in the ocean and is not tied to any particular ancient culture.
Tsang believes that the honor goes to about 2,500 human remains found by him and his team at the Tainan Nanke Site (南科遺址) dating to about 5,000 years ago. And the debate continues.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that have anniversaries this week.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located