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 Uni