In the year
1887 a young Dutchman named Eugene Dubois left the Netherlands
on a ship bound for the East Indies. Born in 1858, Dubois had
spent seven years studying medicine at the University of Amsterdam
before taking up a teaching post there. His chief interest, however,
was the evolution theory which had been proposed by Charles Darwin
some years earlier. Convinced that the most likely places to
find fossilized remnants of mankind's early ancestors lay in
tropical zones, Dubois quit his job at the university and joined
the Dutch Colonial Army as a medical officer.
Arriving first
in Sumatra, he was able to obtain financial support from the
army and began excavating in a number of caves. Initial results,
however, proved disappointing, since the fossils he discovered
were too young to yield evidence of the 'missing link' for which
he was searching. Then he heard news of some exciting discoveries
being made by van Rietschoten in the Wajak Mountains near Tulungagung
in East Java. Moving from Sumatra, Dubois turned his attention
to the region of Ngawi and in 1891 unearthed his first significant
evidence, a skull cap and upper jaw molar, on the banks of the
Solo River at Trinil. He attributed the fossils to a type of
ape which he named Anthropithecus. But eleven months later,
in August 1892, he discovered a femur on the same level as the
previous year's finds, which appeared to prove that the creature
had walked upright.
Eugene Dubois
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Original drawing
of the skull of pithecanthropus erectus by Dubois
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