assigned it to "S." lantianensis, but later that year, he recognised the genus was falling out of favour and was being synonymised with Homo erectus. He recommended the combination Homo erectus lantianensis. Nonetheless, the skull is too distorted to morphologically assess Lantian Man's relationship with other H. erectus populations, so it is unclear if Lantian Man and Peking Man are more closely related to each other than Java Man (H. e. erectus). The discovery of Lantian Man was in the midst of an ever-increasing number of Chinese fossil ape sites, bringing the country to the forefront of anthropological discussions, beyond the capital's famous Peking Man. These were publicised in local site museums constructed in the 1980's and 1990's; Lantian Man became one such spectacle for the Shaanxi History Museum. Lantian Man was early on recognised as being older than Peking Man on purely morphological grounds. In 1973, American anthropologists Jean Aigner and William S. Laughlin suggested the Chenchiawo site was deposited 300,000 years ago and the Gongwangling site 700,000 years ago based on the animal remains (biostratigraphy), constrained to the Middle Pleistocene. In 1978, Chinese palaeoanthropologist Ma Xinghua and colleagues estimated, respectively, 650,000 and 750 to 800 thousand years ago using palaeomagnetism, extending into the Early Pleistocene. Using the same methods later that year, Chinese palaeoanthropologist Cheng Gouliang and colleagues instead reported 500,000 and 1 million years ago. In 1984, Chinese palaeoanthropologists Liu Dongsheng and Ding Menglin suggested the layers date to 500 to 690 thousand and 730 to 800 thousand years ago. In 1989, Chinese palaeoanthropologists An Zhisheng and Ho Chuan Kun stratigraphically placed the Chenchiawo at Palaeosol Unit 5 and the Gongwangling skull to Loess Unit 15, and palaeomagnetically dated them to 650,000 and 1.15 million years ago. This made Lantian Man the oldest firmly dated Asian human species at the time. An and Ho's dates became widely used, but in 2015, Chinese palaeoanthropologist Zhu-Yu Zhu and colleagues noticed a discontinuity in the stratigraphy, which put the Chenchiawo mandible in Palaeosol Unit 6, and the Gongwangling skull all the way down in Palaeosol Unit 23. This makes them 1.65–1.59 million and 710–684 thousand years old. Lantian Man is then roughly contemporaneous with the earliest humans to leave Africa: the 1.75 million year old Dmanisi humans (H. e. georgicus), the 1.6–1.5 million year old Sangiran humans (H. e. erectus), and the 1.7–1.4 million year old Yuanmou Man (H. e.