Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [325]
to Darwin, this was heresy of the worst sort. But Spencer (1984, p. 14) noted that Wallace’s challenge to evolutionary doctrine “lost some of its potency as well as a few of its supporters when news began circulating of the discovery of a remarkable hominid fossil in Java.” considering the striking way in which the Java man fossils were employed in discrediting and suppressing evidence for the great antiquity of the modern human form, we shall now review their history.
We will discuss the initial discoveries made by Eugene Dubois in the 1890s, the discoveries made by G. H. R. von Koenigswald in the 1930s and 1940s, and the discoveries made by other researchers since 1950. We will then discuss the chemical and radiometric dating of these discoveries, and conclude with a critique of standard scientific presentations of the Java Homo erectus evidence. in this chapter, we shall also discuss the Heidelberg jaw, discovered not long after the original Java man finds and also classified as Homo erectus.
In succeeding chapters, we will examine other paleoanthropological evidence currently employed by scientists to support their hypothesis that the modern human form evolved within the past 100,000 years from more primitive hominid ancestors. We will focus on discoveries made in china (chapter 9) and Africa (chapter 11). in addition to this conventionally accepted evidence, we will also examine the controversial piltdown case (chapter 8) and evidence for living ape-men (chapter 10).
7.1 Dubois and Pithecanthropus Erectus
The city of Bandung lies in the high cool uplands of western Java. From there a road leads eastward, down to the steaming plain of Leles, continuing on to the district town of Madiun. the green, forested peaks of the volcanos Mt. Lawu and Mt. Willis rise against the brilliantly blue tropical sky. pushing onward one arrives at the kampong, or village, of Trinil, surrounded by fields of rice and sugar cane, as well as groves of coconut trees. past the village, the road ends on a high bank overlooking the Solo River. Here one encounters a small stone monument, marked with an arrow pointing toward a sand pit on the opposite bank. the monument also carries a cryptic German inscription, “p.e. 175 m OnO 1891/93,” indicating that Pithecanthropus erectus was found 175 meters east northeast from this spot, during the years 1891–1893.
the discoverer of Pithecanthropus erectus was Eugene Dubois, born in eijsden, Holland, in 1858, the year before Darwin published The Origin of Species. As a boy, Dubois explored the nearby limestone quarries, filling his pockets with fossils. Although the son of devout Dutch Catholics, the idea of evolution, especially as it applied to the question of human origins, fascinated him. His imagination was quickened by this passage in A. R. Wallace’s Malay Archipelago (1869): “With what interest must every naturalist look forward to the time when the caves and tertiary deposits of the tropics may be thoroughly examined and the past history and earliest appearance of the great man-like apes be at length made known.”
After studying medicine and natural history at the University of Amsterdam, Dubois became a lecturer in anatomy at the Royal normal School in 1886. But his real love remained evolution. Dubois knew that Darwin’s opponents were constantly pointing out the almost complete lack of fossil evidence for human evolution. He carefully studied the principal evidence then available—the bones of Neanderthal specimens. these were regarded by most authorities (among them Thomas Huxley) as too close to the modern human type to be considered truly intermediate between fossil apes and modern humans. the German scientist Ernst Haeckel had, however, predicted that the bones of a real missing link would eventually be found. Haeckel even commissioned a painting of the creature, whom he called Pithecanthropus (in Greek, pitheko means “ape,” and anthropus means “man”). influenced by Haeckel’s vision of Pithecanthropus,