"Seeking Adventure And Gold? Crack This Poem and Head Outdoors." NPR Weekend Edition Sunday. (If you're interested in reading more about Fenn's treasure, you might like this HowStuffWorks story on it, too: " Are People Dying to Find Fenn's Treasure?") As of right now though, the booty's still at large. Last year, the New Mexico State Police chief asked him to call the whole thing off. Nevertheless, at least four explorers have died while pursuing it.
He insists that the treasure isn't hiding in a dangerous spot. At a presentation in the Santa Fe Center for Contemporary Arts, Fenn said that a few participants in the hunt unwittingly ventured within 200 feet (61 meters) of the chest. And in 2017, he acknowledged some close calls. In an interview with ABC's "Nightline," Fenn guessed that roughly 350,000 people have gone looking for the treasure. Once the book came out, it was off to the races. He then proceeded to hide the loot somewhere in the Rockies.Ĭlues regarding the chest's location were hidden within a cryptic poem in "The Thrill of the Chase," Fenn's self-published memoir. Altogether, the items are worth between $1 million and $5 million. In 2010, Fenn filled a bronze chest with hundreds of golden coins and nuggets. Some believe the bones now reside in Japan, others think they made it to the states before going AWOL and still others believe they were buried under a parking lot in Qinhuangdao. Theories on the fossils' whereabouts are a dime a dozen. In losing the Peking Man remains, the Chinese people lost a national treasure. But after the fossils were loaded up into crates in December 1941, they disappeared. The Manhattan staff agreed to hold onto the Peking Man bones for temporary safekeeping until the war ended. Worried that the Japanese would soon conquer Beijing, China got in touch with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
During their stay, German anthropologist Franz Weidenreich had the foresight to make casts of several bones. Informally, these researchers called it the " Peking Man."īefore 1941, the fossils were housed at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital. We now know that these came from the species Homo erectus, but at the time, scientists thought they represented a never-before-seen primate. During the 1920s and 1930s, archaeologists dug up numerous teeth, some lower skeleton bones, 11 lower jaws and components of 14 different craniums. Zhoukoudian turned out to be a hotbed for hominid fossils.