Born in Africa_ The Quest for the Origins of Human Life - Martin Meredith [3]
But the Irish anatomist William King considered it to be distinctly different from modern humans, and in 1864 he accorded it the species name Homo neanderthalensis—Neanderthal Man—making the first formal recognition that another human species other than Homo sapiens had existed on earth. As the new science of palaeoanthropology developed over the years, it was to become a common feature that scientists examining the same evidence reached diametrically opposed conclusions.
The next significant discovery was made in southeast Asia. Inspired by Ernst Haeckel’s suggestion that the ‘missing link’ would be found in Asia, a young Dutch anatomist, Eugène Dubois, travelled there in 1887 on assignment as an army doctor hoping to find Pithecanthropus. After two unsuccessful years on Sumatra, he moved to the island of Java. In 1891, his team of labourers found a hominid molar, then a skullcap, at a site near the village of Trinil. The skullcap had strong brow ridges and no forehead, similar to a male ape, but a brain size that was large for an ape though small for a human. The following year Dubois’s team found a left femur, or thighbone, that was humanlike in both size and shape, indicating an upright posture. Dubois claimed that all three remains belonged to the same individual. He was convinced he had found the missing link and named it Pithecanthropus erectus—‘upright ape-man’. To the world at large it became known as Java Man.
Returning to Europe in 1895, Dubois was acclaimed for his exploits in Java but, to his dismay, he found most of the scientific community sceptical about his conclusions. His monograph on the subject was openly mocked. One prominent German anatomist, Rudolph Virchow, declared that the Java bones belonged to a giant gibbon. A rising young Scottish anatomist, Arthur Keith, took a different approach. Following Huxley’s lead, he argued that brain size was the determining factor. Java Man, therefore, was neither an ape nor an intermediate link between apes and humans, as Dubois had claimed, but a primitive human; its brain size was estimated to be 900 cubic centimetres, about two-thirds the size of a modern human brain; it therefore crossed the threshold—‘the cerebral Rubicon’—that qualified it to be classified as a human, albeit one with low intelligence, lower than Neanderthal Man. Keith concluded that the Java bones fitted neatly into a ladderlike progression in the human line: first came Pithecanthropus with its comparatively small brain; then Neanderthal Man with its bigger brain; and finally, true man.
By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly eighty scientific books and articles had appeared discussing Dubois’s Pithecanthropus, almost all of them disagreeing with his claims. Embittered by the reaction of his colleagues, Dubois withdrew from scientific debate and hid his Java bones inside cabinets in his dining room, refusing to let any researchers see them.
Meanwhile, the fortunes of Neanderthal Man as a contender for the missing link had improved. Further discoveries of Neanderthal fossils were made in Belgium, Croatia, Germany and France, demonstrating conclusively that the Neander Valley specimen was not an aberration. But the reputation of Neanderthals was soon ruined. In 1908, two young priests excavating a small cave near the village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in central France, unearthed the most complete Neanderthal skeleton yet discovered. The skeleton was sent for examination to Marcellin Boule, a renowned palaeontologist at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Boule’s verdict was decisive. He described the Chapelle-aux-Saints individual as a coarse brute with a short, thick-set body, heavy overhanging