Dr. Eugene Dubois

Abstract

DR. EUGENE DUBOIS who, exactly half a century ago, discovered in Java the fossil remains of that strange being which he regarded as transitional between ape to man and to which he gave the name Pithecanthropus erectus, died at his home in Haarlem, Holland, on December 16, 1940. The discovery of the most famous of missing links was announced to the world by a monograph published in Batavia in 1894 and entitled “Pithecanthropus erectus, eine Ubergangsform”. No single discovery in the realm of dead things has given rise to such a voluminous literature, to so many animated discussions or to so many divergent opinions. There are not so many alive now who remember the arrival of Dubois in England in the autumn of 1895, and saw with their own eyes the material evidence of man's evolutionary past which he had just brought back from Java, and took part in the debates which the discovery aroused. Right to the end of his life Dubois maintained that the being he had unearthed was neither man nor ape, but represented a stage which marks the transition from ape to man. Some of his Continental critics regarded Pithecanthropus as a gigantic gibbon; others gave the thigh bone to an extinct form of man and the skull cap to an extinct form of ape. British anatomists, on the other hand, took the view that Pithecanthropus was a hominid—an early form of man.