A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [218]
Many people refused to accept that the Neandertal bones were ancient at all. August Mayer, a professor at the University of Bonn and a man of influence, insisted that the bones were merely those of a Mongolian Cossack soldier who had been wounded while fighting in Germany in 1814 and had crawled into the cave to die. Hearing of this, T. H. Huxley in England drily observed how remarkable it was that the soldier, though mortally wounded, had climbed sixty feet up a cliff, divested himself of his clothing and personal effects, sealed the cave opening, and buried himself under two feet of soil. Another anthropologist, puzzling over the Neandertal's heavy brow ridge, suggested that it was the result of long-term frowning arising from a poorly healed forearm fracture. (In their eagerness to reject the idea of earlier humans, authorities were often willing to embrace the most singular possibilities. At about the time that Dubois was setting out for Sumatra, a skeleton found in Périgueux was confidently declared to be that of an Eskimo. Quite what an ancient Eskimo was doing in southwest France was never comfortably explained. It was actually an early Cro-Magnon.)
It was against this background that Dubois began his search for ancient human bones. He did no digging himself, but instead used fifty convicts lent by the Dutch authorities. For a year they worked on Sumatra, then transferred to Java. And there in 1891, Dubois—or rather his team, for Dubois himself seldom visited the sites—found a section of ancient human cranium now known as the Trinil skullcap. Though only part of a skull, it showed that the owner had had distinctly nonhuman features but a much larger brain than any ape. Dubois called it Anthropithecus erectus (later changed for technical reasons to Pithecanthropus erectus) and declared it the missing link between apes and humans. It quickly became popularized as “Java Man.” Today we know it as Homo erectus.
The next year Dubois's workers found a virtually complete thighbone that looked surprisingly modern. In fact, many anthropologists think it is modern, and has nothing to do with Java Man. If it is an erectus bone, it is unlike any other found since. Nonetheless Dubois used the thighbone to deduce—correctly, as it turned out—that Pithecanthropus walked upright. He also produced, with nothing but a scrap of cranium and one tooth, a model of the complete skull, which also proved uncannily accurate.
In 1895, Dubois returned to Europe, expecting a triumphal reception. In fact, he met nearly the opposite reaction. Most scientists disliked both his conclusions and the arrogant manner in which he presented them. The skullcap, they said, was that of an ape, probably a gibbon, and not of any early human. Hoping to bolster his case, in 1897 Dubois allowed a respected anatomist from the University of Strasbourg, Gustav Schwalbe, to make a cast of the skullcap. To Dubois's dismay, Schwalbe thereupon produced a monograph that received far more sympathetic attention than anything Dubois had written and followed with a lecture tour in which he was celebrated nearly as warmly as if he had dug up the skull himself. Appalled and embittered, Dubois withdrew into an undistinguished position as a professor of geology at the University of Amsterdam and for the next two decades refused to let anyone examine his precious fossils again. He died in 1940 an unhappy man.
Meanwhile, and half a world away, in late 1924 Raymond Dart, the Australian-born head of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, was sent a small but remarkably complete skull of a child, with an intact face, a lower jaw, and what is known as an endocast—a natural cast of the brain—from a limestone quarry on the edge of the Kalahari Desert at a dusty spot called Taung. Dart could see at once that the Taung skull was not of a Homo erectus like Dubois's Java Man, but from an earlier, more apelike creature. He placed its age at two million years and dubbed it Australopithecus africanus, or “southern ape