Archaeologist Herman Medvedev was born in 1936 in Naro-Fominsk city in Moscow region. He moved to Irkutsk in 1954 to study at the Faculty of History and Philology of Irkutsk State University. Initially, Medvedev tried to enter Moscow State University, but was not accepted and moved to Siberia, where his grandparents lived.

Herman Medvedev never regretted moving and later said about it:

Archeology was actively developing at the university during that time. Famous Soviet archaeologists Bernhard Petri, Alexey Okladnikov and Mikhail Gerasimov lived and worked in Irkutsk. Medvedev worked with Gerasimov the most and said that he “instilled a colossal amount of the most fundamental principles (precisely — the most fundamental principles) in my future life and work”.

In 1968, Herman Medvedev defended his PhD thesis on the topic “Mesolithic era of the Upper Angara region”, where he hypothesized how the life in the Mesolithic era in Siberia looked like. The archaeologist received a doctorate in Historical Sciences in 1984.

Herman Medvedev had been teaching at Irkutsk State University up until 2015. An archaeological laboratory and a Department of Archeology, Ethnology and History of the prehistoric world were established there under his direction, and later the Scientific Research Centre “Baikal region” was founded.

Medvedev published more than 145 scientific papers in Russia and abroad during his work. Among his main achievements is his archaeological research, in addition, he discovered important Paleolithic complexes and revised the Siberian Paleolithic era chronology — he proposed the concept of the gradual development of Paleolithic Siberia.