Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [331]
During and after the period of withdrawal, the controversies concerning Pithecanthropus continued. Marcellin Boule, director of the institute of Human paleontology in paris, reported (1923, p. 96), as had other scientists, that the layer in which the Pithecanthropus skullcap and femur were said to have been found contained numerous fossil bones of fish, reptiles, and mammals. Why, therefore, should anyone believe the skullcap and femur came from the same individual or even the same species? Boule, like virchow (Section 7.1.4), stated that the femur was identical to that of a modern human whereas the skullcap resembled that of an ape, possibly a large gibbon. dr. F. Weidenreich, honorary director of the Cenozoic Research Laboratory at Peiping Union Medical College, also stated (1941, p. 70) that there was no justification for attributing the femur and the skullcap to the same individual. the femur, Weidenreich said, was very similar to that of a modern human, and its original position in the strata was not securely established. Modern researchers have employed chemical dating techniques in order to determine whether or not the original Pithecanthropus skull and femur were both contemporary with the Middle pleistocene trinil fauna, but the results were inconclusive (Section 7.5.2).
7.1.7 More Femurs
The belated revelation that more femurs had been discovered in Java further complicated the issue. in 1932, dr. Bernsen and eugene dubois recovered three femurs from a box of fossil mammalian bones in the Leiden Museum in the netherlands. the box contained specimens said to have been excavated in 1900 by dubois’s assistant, Mr. Kriele, from the same trinil deposits on the left bank of the Solo river that had yielded Dubois’s first Java man finds. Dr. Bernsen died very shortly thereafter, without providing further information about the details of this museum discovery.
dubois (1932, p. 719) stated that he was not present when the femurs were taken out by Kriele. therefore the exact location of the femurs in the excavation, which was 75 meters (246 feet) long by 6–14 meters (20–46 feet) wide, was unknown to him. According to standard paleontological procedures, this uncertainty greatly reduces the value of the bones as evidence of any sort. nevertheless, as we shall see, authorities later assigned these femurs to a particular stratum without mentioning the dubious circumstances of their discovery in boxes of fossils over 30 years after they were originally excavated (Section 7.6). Moreover, G. H. R. von Koenigswald (1956, p. 36) reported that Dubois’s collection “comprised finds from various sites and various ages, which are very inadequately distinguished, because some of the labels got lost.”
eugene dubois (1934, p. 139) reported that in december of 1932 he discovered a fragment of a fourth new femur in the same collection in which the others had been found. Once again, dubois pointed out that the original place of excavation was unknown. in August 1935, a museum employee named van der Steen handed dubois yet another femur fragment from the collection, but dubois said that this bone was “certainly not from trinil but from another part of the Kendeng region.” dubois (1935, p. 850) speculated that it may have been found at Kedungbrubus, but he admitted that he was not really sure.
the existence of these additional femurs has important implications for the original Pithecanthropus skull and femur found by dubois in the 1890s. As we have seen, the fact that the apelike skull and humanlike femur were found at a great distance from each other is sufficient to suggest that they belonged not to one ape-man creature but to two different creatures, one apelike and the other fully human. in response, one might argue, as dubois’s supporters did, that the odds of an apelike creature leaving a skull and no leg