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Mindful of Darwin’s suggestion that humanity’s forbearers lived in “some warm, forest-clad land,” Dubois became convinced Pithecanthropus would be found in Africa or the east indies. Because he could more easily reach the east indies, then under Dutch rule, he decided to journey there and begin his quest. He applied first to private philanthropists and the government, requesting financing for a scientific expedition, but was turned down. He then accepted an appointment as an army surgeon in Sumatra. With his friends doubting his sanity, he gave up his comfortable post as a college lecturer and with his young wife set sail for the east indies in December 1887 on the S. S. Princess Amalie.

7.1.1 Initial Discoveries

In 1888, Dubois found himself stationed at a small military hospital in the interior of Sumatra. His exact movements during this period remain somewhat unclear, but from a variety of accounts the following general sequence emerges. The year he arrived in Sumatra, Dubois published a scientific paper titled “On the need for an investigation of an ice Age Fauna in the Dutch east indies, and especially in Sumatra.” He was, of course, primarily interested in finding the remains of human ancestors. Dubois wrote: “Since all apes—and notably the anthropoid apes—are inhabitants of the tropics, and since man’s forerunners, as they have gradually lost their coat of hair, must certainly have continued to live in warm regions, we are inescapably led toward the tropics as the area in which we may expect to find the fossilized precursors of man” (von Koenigswald

1956, p. 28).

Dubois’s writings attracted the attention of officials of the colonial Mining Authority. In its first quarterly report for the year 1889, the Mining Authority informed its readers that Dubois had been authorized to undertake paleontological research in Sumatra. in his spare time, and using his own funds, Dubois investigated Sumatran caves, finding fossils of rhino and elephant, and the teeth of an orangutan, but no hominid remains.

In 1890, after suffering an attack of malaria, Dubois was placed on inactive duty and transferred from Sumatra to Java, where the climate was somewhat drier and healthier. He and his wife set up housekeeping in tulungagung, on eastern Java’s southern coast. the Mining Authority gave him permission to carry out his paleontological explorations in Java, supplying him with two sergeants from the corps of military engineers and a crew of fifty convict laborers. At the nearby marble quarry at Wadjak, Dubois turned up two fossil human skulls, both modern in type (related to the Australian aborigines) and therefore not worthy of consideration as ancestral ape-men. interestingly enough, Dubois did not report these skulls to the scientific world until 1922.

In November 1890, at Kedungbrubus, Dubois made another find—a fossil jaw with part of a tooth root embedded in it. in a preliminary report, he judged it to be human (von Koenigswald 1956, p. 31). this specimen was not fully described until 1924, at which time Dubois designated it Pithecanthropus.

7.1.2 The Discoveries at Trinil

During the dry season of 1891, Dubois conducted excavations on the bank of the Solo River in central Java, near the village of trinil. His laborers took out many fossil animal bones. in September, they turned up a particularly interesting item—a primate tooth, apparently a third upper right molar, or wisdom tooth. Dubois, believing he had come upon the remains of an extinct giant chimpanzee, ordered his laborers to concentrate their work around the place where the tooth had turned up. in October, they found what appeared to be a turtle shell. But when Dubois inspected it, he saw it was actually the top part of a cranium (Figure 7.1), heavily fossilized and having the same color as the volcanic soil. The fragment’s most distinctive feature was the large, protruding ridge over the eye sockets, leading Dubois to suspect the cranium had belonged to an ape. the onset of the rainy season then brought