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Eugene Dubois (1890)
Portrait of Eugene Dubois (photo: ca 1890).
Eugene Dubois (1858-1940) was a Dutch doctor and anatomist who in 1891 discovered the first fossils of Homo erectus in Trinil, Java. These finds included a thick skullcap or calotte showing a relatively small cranial capacity of about 900 cc, and a femur showing upright posture, for which he named the find Pithecanthropus erectus ("erect ape man"). The species is now named Homo erectus, and is also informally called Java Man.
Dubois selected Java as a likely region for early human fossils,due in part both to the tropical climate, and the presence of orang-utans. Notably, these were the first early hominid remains to be found outside of Africa or Europe. Beside the major find site of Trinil in East Java, Dubois carried out fieldwork during the 1890s at Sangiran in Central Java, where a number of Homo erectus fossils have since been discovered.
References
Shipman, Pat 2002. The Man who Found the Missing Link. Eugène Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right, Harvard University Press.
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