Davidson Black

Davidson Black (born July 25, 1884 in Toronto , Canada , † March 15, 1934 in Beijing ) was a Canadian doctor specializing in anatomy and a paleoanthropologist . He became internationally known after he discovered the fossil teeth under the direction of Otto Zdansky in 1926 in the lower cave of Zhoukoudian and described them in 1927 as the remains of Sinanthropus pekinensis (" Peking man "), which had already been assigned to the genus Homo .

life and work

Davidson Black first studied medicine and from 1906 also comparative anatomy at the University of Toronto . In 1914 he worked for six months in England at the institute of Grafton Elliot Smith , where his interest in human tribal history was aroused. From 1917 he did military service in World War I in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps . After his discharge from the army in 1919, he accepted an offer to work at the Union Medical College of Tsinghua University in Beijing . There he was employed as a professor of neuroanatomy and embryology , but he was still interested in human tribal history.

In 1921, the Geological Administration of China began excavations in the Lower Cave of Zhoukoudian . When he learned in 1926 that two teeth had been discovered there and assigned to the genus Homo , he acquired a generous donation from the Rockefeller Foundation and began his own excavations in March 1927. After he had also discovered a tooth, he named the finds as the remains of Sinanthropus pekinensis (literally: "Chinese man from Beijing"). Thanks to the financial support, his team was able to recover further skull fragments and two skulls as well as numerous stone tools in the two following years . As early as 1932 he pointed out the great similarity between the Peking people and the fossils discovered on Java ( Pithecanthropus erectus ), which decades later were actually brought together under the species name Homo erectus .

Davidson Black had a congenital heart defect that worsened as a result of his physically strenuous involvement in the excavations and their documentation. He died in 1934 during a nightly fossil inspection. Franz Weidenreich became his successor.

In 1932 Davidson Black had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 1931 he had received the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences .

Fonts

• On a lower molar hominid tooth from the Chou Kou Tien deposit. In: Palaeontologia Sinica. Series D, Volume 7, No. 1, 1927, pp. 1-29.
• Evidences of the use of fire by Sinanthropus. In: Bulletin of the Geological Society of China. [= Acta Geologica Sinica ] Volume 11, No. 2, 1931, pp. 107-108, doi: /10.1111/j.1755-6724.1932.mp11002002.x .

literature

• Alan Walker and Pat Shipman: Chinese fortunes. Chapter 3 in: The Same: Turkana Boy. In search of the first person. Galila Verlag, Etsdorf am Kamp 2011, pp. 71-82, ISBN 978-3-902533-77-7 .

Web links

• Biography (with photo, in English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gary J. Sawyer, Viktor Deak: The Long Way to Man. Life pictures from 7 million years of evolution. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2008, p. 128 f.