Spending his youth in Mitau and Tilsit, Jankuhn studied Germanistics, history, philology and physical exercise at the universities of Königsberg, Jena and Berlin.

Jankuhn was strongly influenced by Wilhelm Unverzagt and Albert Kiekebusch, both of whom where critical of the settlement archaeology theories of Gustaf Kossinna.

During World War II, Jankuhn travelled across German-occupied Europe, where he reported to the Sicherheitsdienst on the reliability of scholars in occupied countries.

[1] In the summer of 1942, Jankuhn followed 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking into the Crimea to conduct excavations at Mangup, capital of the Crimean Goths.

[1] He spent the last years of the war as an intelligence officer in 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, which surrendered to the United States Army in Bavaria in 1945.

From the 1950s onward, Jankuhn played an instrumental role in reviving the field of settlement archaeology, and advocated an interdisciplinary approach to the study of prehistory.