THE memories of a U.S. World War II-era Marine have renewed hopes of solving one of the world’s greatest archaeological mysteries — the whereabouts of the lost Peking Man fossils, South African and Chinese scientists said.

In the March edition of a scientific journal published by Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, renowned South African paleontologist Lee Berger and two Chinese colleagues say the fossils may be lying under a parking lot in China’s northern port city of Qinhuangdao, where the Marine said he saw two crates of bones in 1947.

Richard M. Bowen described the sighting in memoirs being compiled by his son.

The fossils, found a century ago and believed to hold a key to studies of early mankind, disappeared at the outbreak of the war in the Pacific while destined for safe keeping in the United States.

What Bowen saw in 1947 might have been the fossils at U.S. Camp Holcomb, the researchers said. Bowen told his son in 2010 about how he dug up wooden crates of relics and used them as a machine gun nest when the base came under attack from Chinese troops. He was captured in the assault.

The veteran’s family then contacted the South African university, which is reputed for archaeological research that has blazed a trail in contemporary studies of prehistory.

Berger of Witwatersrand’s Institute of Human Evolution and co-authors Liu Wu and Wu Xiujie, 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,” the Johannesburg university said in a statement.

Despite one of the most intensive searches in the history of archaeological science, over six decades, no verifiable sign of the historical objects’ whereabouts had emerged before the Marine’s recollection, according to the university statement.

The scientists visited Qinhuangdao, where Bowen said he last saw the crates that could have since been reburied beneath what is now a parking lot in a heavily developed area.

“If these were the fossils, they may be lost to history, or they may still be buried under a few feet of asphalt in this Chinese port city,” the university statement said.

The Peking Man fossils went missing in 1941. When Japanese forces were advancing on the Chinese capital, now Beijing, it was decided to ship the fossils to the United States. But as some of the bloodiest fighting in the Pacific conflict intensified, the crates disappeared on the way to the coast.

(SD-Agencies)