Johan Gunnar Andersson (3 July 1874 – 29 October 1960)[1] was a Swedish archaeologist, geomorphologist, and paleontologist who was closely associated with the beginnings of Chinese archaeology in the 1920s.

After studies at Uppsala University, and research in the polar regions, Andersson served as Director of Sweden's National Geological Survey.

[citation needed] His work on the Falkland Islands and the Bjørnøya, where he first coined the term solifluction, influenced Walery Łoziński's creation of the concept of periglaciation in 1909.

His affiliation was with China's National Geological Survey (Dizhi diaochasuo) which was organized and led by the Chinese scholar Ding Wenjiang (V.K.

Andersson paid his first visit to Zhoukoudian in 1918 drawn to an area called "Chicken Bone Hill" by locals who had misidentified the rodent fossils found in abundance there.

[4] In collaboration with Chinese colleagues such as Yuan Fuli and others, he then discovered prehistoric Neolithic remains in central China's Henan Province, along the Yellow River.

[7] Andersson's most well-known book about his time in China is Den gula jordens barn, 1932, translated into several languages, including English (as Children of the Yellow Earth, 1934, reprinted in 1973), Japanese, and Korean.

The last documentary evidence of these objects was a 1948 Visitors Guide to the Geological Survey museum in Nanjing, which listed Andersson's Yangshao artefacts among the exhibits.