Jan Ove R. Ebbestad

Otto Zdansky: The scientist who discovered Peking Man and explored China’s fossil past

During his nearly three years in China, the Austrian-Swedish palaeontologist Otto Zdansky (1894-1988) made pioneering discoveries of fossil faunas that greatly enhanced the understanding of the evolution of Chinese vertebrates. The most important was found in 1921 during his very first field trip in the country, to Zhoukoudian outside Beijing, where he discovered a fossil human tooth of Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis). Zdansky had come to Sweden in 1920 as an exchange student at Uppsala University, before travelling to China to take part in the Sino-Swedish science collaborations run there by the geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson. At the time there was an ongoing scientific race to find conclusive evidence of early Man in Asia, and although Zdansky never made much out of it, his discovery of Peking Man became a world sensation. Soon Zdansky also excavated some of the first dinosaurs ever found in China and surveyed the so-called Hipparion fauna that today is of great importance for the understanding of ancient climate changes. This book celebrates the 100th anniversary of both the ground-breaking discovery of Peking Man and of Otto Zdansky's arrival in China. It tells the story of Zdansky's life, tracks his fieldwork in China, explains his scientific achievements and also presents for the first time his own memoirs illustrated with photos, drawings and documents from Swedish archives. The book also includes a Chinese translation of Zdansky's memoirs.