Black showed an interest in biology at an early age, despite being born to a family associated with the legal profession.

He spent half a year in 1914 working under neuroanatomist Grafton Elliot Smith, in Manchester, England.

During this period Johan Gunnar Andersson, who had done excavations near Dragon Bone Hill (Zhoukoudian) in 1921, learned in Sweden of Black's fossils examination.

During this time, though military unrest involving the National Revolutionary Army caused many western Scientists to leave China, Davidson Black and his family stayed.

In summer 1926, two molars were discovered by Otto Zdansky, who headed the excavations and who described them in 1927 (Bulletin of the Geolocical Survey, China) as fossils of genus Homo.

Most of the original bones were lost in the process of shipping them out of China for safe-keeping during the beginning of World War II.

The Japanese gained control of the Peking Union Medical Center during the war, where the laboratory containing all the fossils was ransacked and all the remaining specimens were confiscated.

[5] Paleotontologists who believed human origins were to be found in Asia included Johan Gunnar Andersson, Otto Zdansky and Walter W. Granger.

All three of these scientists were known for visiting China and for their work and discoveries by excavating the sites at Zhoukoudian that yielded the Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis).

Further funding for the excavations was carried out by Davidson Black, a key proponent of the Asia hypothesis.

[7] Black wrote a paper in 1925, Asia and the dispersal of primates, which claimed that the origins of man were to be found in Tibet, British India, the Yung-Ling and the Tarim Basin of China.

[8] In 1931, Black was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.

Nevitt died on 1 February 2020 aged 94 and was survived by her children, twelve grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.