Jia Lanpo; Helped Discover Peking Man

Jia Lanpo, an archeologist who helped unearth the Peking Man fossils, one of the most important discoveries in the search for human origins, has died. He was 92.

Jia died of a cerebral hemorrhage July 8 at his home in Beijing.

He was a graduate student in 1936 when he found three fossilized skulls in Zhoukoudian, a village on the southwestern outskirts of Beijing. The site, where fossils were first found in the mid-1920s, eventually yielded the remains of 40 pre-human creatures that lived 250,000 to 500,000 years ago.

The fossils were lost in World War II during a failed effort by U.S. Marines to get them to safety outside of China. Crates bound for the American Museum of Natural History were believed by some to have been captured by Japanese soldiers.

Jia devoted much of his career to studying Peking Man and trying to preserve the Zhoukoudian site. He is credited with saving important records from looters during the upheaval of China’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution by hiding them in his house.

A prolific writer, Jia was the author of two well-known books, “The Story of Peking Man” and “Early Man in China.” He also wrote more than 180 papers, many of which focused on the evolution of hominids in China.

In 1990, he directed a joint Chinese-U.S. excavation in Nihewan Basin in northern China.

In 1980, Jia was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

He is survived by four children.