Bonch-Osmolovskii, Gleb

Born Oct. 22 (Nov. 3), 1890, in the village of Blon, in present-day Pukhovichi Raion, Minsk Oblast; died Nov. 1, 1943, in Kazan. Soviet anthropologist and archaeologist.

In 1924, in the Kiik-Koba cave (Crimea), Bonch-Osmolovskii was the first to discover remains of Neanderthal man in the USSR. Bonch-Osmolovskii’s works were very important for proving the successive cultural and physical interrelationship in man in the early Paleolithic era. He advanced the idea that the transition of man’s ancestors from an arboreal to a terrestrial way of life long preceded the transformation of ape into man.