Davidson Black

Davidson Black ( born July 25, 1884 in Toronto, Canada, † March 15, 1934 in Beijing) was a Canadian physician in the Department of Anatomy and a paleoanthropologist. He became internationally known after he discovered under the direction of Otto Zdansky 1926 in the Lower Cave of Zhoukoudian and from that already assigned to the genus Homo fossil teeth in 1927 as the remains of Sinanthropus pekinensis ( " Peking Man " ) beschrieb.a

Life and work

Davidson Black studied medicine from 1906 and additionally Comparative Anatomy at the University of Toronto. In 1914, he worked for half a year in England at the Institute of Grafton Elliot Smith, where his interest in the phylogeny of the people was aroused. In 1917 he performed military service in the First World War in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps. After discharge from the army, he accepted an offer to work in Beijing on Union Medical College, Tsinghua University. There he was employed as a professor of neuroanatomy and embryology, but he was interested in continue for the evolutionary history of man.

1921 began the geological Administration of China with excavations in the Lower Cave of Zhoukoudian. When he learned in 1926 that there discovered two teeth and the genus Homo had been assigned, he recruited a generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and began in 1927 with its own excavations. After he had discovered a tooth, he named the finds as legacies of Sinanthropus pekinensis. Thanks to the financial support of his team was able to recover more skull fragments and two skulls in the following two years. As early as 1932 he pointed to the great similarity of the Peking man and Java fossils discovered on back ( Pithecanthropus erectus ), were actually brought together decades later under the species name Homo erectus.

Davidson Black was suffering from a congenital heart defect, which worsened due to his physically demanding participation in the excavations and their documentation. He died in 1934 during a nighttime survey of fossils. Franz Weidenreich succeeded him.

1932 Davidson Black was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

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