• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1256 0

at Trinil was unclear. Three of the geologists with the expedition thought the deposits were pleistocene, perhaps recent, but two other experts agreed with dubois that they might be pliocene. As far as the bones themselves were concerned, their age was uncertain. Some of the geologists believed volcanic activity could have caused their fossilization, which therefore was not a sure sign of great age. the bones might have been recent, and might have been mixed in with older fossils by floods. The report mentioned a flood that occurred in Java in 1909, sending mud slides down the volcanic mountainsides, killing 500 persons and sweeping away entire villages. perhaps even more troubling was the discovery in the trinil strata of signs of a human presence— splintered animal bones, charcoal, and foundations of hearths. Signs like this led Lenore Selenka to conclude that humans and Pithecanthropus erectus were contemporary (Bowden 1977, pp. 134–135). the implications of all this for an evolutionary interpretation of dubois’s Pithecanthropus specimens were, and still are, unsettling.

Furthermore George Grant Maccurdy, a Yale professor of anthropology, wrote in his book Human Origins (1924a, p. 316): “the Selenka expedition of 1907–1908 . . . secured a tooth which is said by Walkoff to be definitely human. it is a third molar from a neighboring stream bed and from deposits older (pliocene) than those in which Pithecanthropus erectus was found. Should this tooth prove to be human, Pithecanthropus could no longer be regarded as a precursor of man. instead it would simply give us the cross section of a different limb of the primate tree whose branches now represent the various types of Hominidae.” the beds referred to by Maccurdy as being older than the Pithecanthropus erectus deposits might be the djetis Beds of the putjangan formation, now placed in the early pleistocene or in the early Middle pleistocene (Section 7.5.1).

in the aftermath of the Selenka expedition, tourists began coming to Java to look at the place where Java man had been discovered. they found the site littered with hundreds of beer bottles left by the thirsty scientists. As might be expected, many of the pilgrims were hoping they might stumble upon a Pithecanthropus bone. The local residents, who would find all kinds of bones washed out of the ground after floods, obliged them by selling them assorted pieces of skeletons. On december 27, 1926, a newspaper in Batavia announced that dr. c. e. J. Heberlein had found at trinil a new skull of Pithecanthropus. But it turned out to be a large ball-like joint from the leg bone of a fossil elephant.

7.1.6 Dubois Withdraws from the Battle

Meanwhile, the status of dubois’s ape-man remained somewhat controversial. Surveying the range of opinion about Pithecanthropus, Berlin zoologist Wilhelm dames gathered statements from 25 scientists: three said Pithecanthropus was an ape, five said it was human, six said it was an ape-man, six said it was a missing link, and two said it was a link between the missing link and man. virchow had said: “All i can do is warn against drawing decisive conclusions from these few pieces of bone about the greatest question facing us in the study of our creation. Pithecanthropus will remain doubtful as a transitional form until someone can demonstrate how this transition, which to me is conceivable only in my dreams, actually came true” (Wendt 1972, p. 169).

But although virchow and others maintained their doubts, many scientists followed Haeckel in hailing Java man as stunning proof of darwin’s theory. Some used Java man to discredit evidence for a fully human presence in the tertiary. As we learned in Section 5.5.13, W. H. Holmes (1899, p. 470) dismissed discoveries of stone tools in the tertiary auriferous gravels of california because they “implied a human race older by at least one-half than Pithecanthropus erectus of dubois, which may be regarded as an incipient form of human creature only.”

At a certain point, dubois became completely disappointed with the mixed reception the scientific