Davidson Black 1884-1934

Davidson Black was born and educated in Toronto. He had begun a career in medicine when Sir Grafton Elliot Smith interested him in the problem of fossil man. After World War I, Black accepted a post at the Pekin Union Medical College, considering China to be a likely field for his studies. There, in 1927, on the basis of a fossil tooth found at Chou Kou Tien, he identified a new genus and species hominid, Sinanthropus pekinensis. This discovery of "Peking man" was subsequently confirmed by the excavations of W.C. Pei and a team of Chinese and European scientists working with Black. He died in China.