Lanpo Jia (1908–2001)

[excerpt from Washington Post online obituary]
Jia Lanpo helped unearth the Peking Man fossils, one of the most important discoveries in the search for human origins. He was a graduate student in 1936 when he found three fossilized skulls in Zhoukoudian, a village on the southwestern outskirts of Beijing, then known as Peking. The site, where the first fossils were found in 1929, eventually yielded remains of 40 half-human, half-ape creatures that lived 250,000 to 500,000 years ago. The fossils disappeared during World War II. He 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 Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 by hiding them in his home.