Helmut de Terra was born in Germany in 1900 in a family of French Huguenot origin.
Crossing the Himalayas into Tibet and Chinese Turkestan prepared him for later expeditions to Kashmir, India, Burma and Java.
He was the first to produce a glaciological map of the Eastern Himalayas and to advance the theory that humans were established in Asia almost as early as in Africa.
Teilhard joined de Terra's 1935 Yale-Cambridge India Expedition, and together they carried out research in Burma in 1938.
In February 1947, he discovered Tepexpan Man in the Valley of Mexico, which is generally regarded as the beginning of Mexican pre-history.