Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [334]
Returning to the Heidelberg jaw, we note that the circumstances of discovery were less than perfect. if an anatomically modern human jaw had been found by a workman in the same sand pit, it would have been subjected to merciless criticism and judged recent. After all, no scientists were present at the moment of discovery. But the Heidelberg jaw, because it fits, however imperfectly, within the bounds of evolutionary expectations, has been granted a dispensation.
7.3 Further Java Man Discoveries by Von Koenigswald
In 1929, another ancient human ancestor was discovered, this time in china. eventually, scientists would group Java man, Heidelberg man, and peking man together as examples of Homo erectus, the direct ancestor of Homo sapiens. But initially, the common features and evolutionary status of the Indonesian, chinese, and German fossils were not obvious, and paleoanthropologists felt it particularly necessary to clarify the status of Java man.
In 1930, Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald of the Geological Survey of the netherlands east indies was dispatched to Java. in his book Meeting Prehistoric Man, von Koenigswald (1956, p. 55) wrote: “despite the discovery of Pekin man, it remained necessary to find a further Pithecanthropus sufficiently complete to prove the human character of this disputed fossil.”
Upon personally examining dubois’s Pithecanthropus skull, von Koenigswald (1956, p. 33) had noted: “it is no more than a calvarium from which the most important parts are missing—the temporal region, which is essential to an accurate assessment of its nature.” dubois had attributed three teeth (two large molars and one premolar) to his Java man specimen, but von Koenigswald believed that only one of them belonged to Pithecanthropus. the others were apparently from the jaw of an orangutan. von Koenigswald (1956, p. 34) concluded: “it therefore becomes manifest on what shaky ground dubois erected his hypothetical building, and we can only wonder at the boldness and tenacity with which he defended his Pithecanthropus.”
Von Koenigswald, like dubois, was fascinated by fossils as a youth, having also gathered a collection of ancient bones, teeth, and shells. He managed to put himself through a university education in Germany during the troubled years following the First World War, and upon graduation obtained a position as a museum assistant in Munich. in 1930, he took an opportunity to join the Geological Survey in the Dutch East Indies, where his finds would eventually gain him a reputation as one of the twentieth century’s greatest fossil hunters.
7.3.1 The Ngandong Fossils
Von Koenigswald arrived in Java in January 1931. in August of that same year, one of von Koenigswald’s colleagues, the dutch archeologist ter Haar, was surveying the Kendeng Hills region near trinil. He set up camp at the kampong of ngandong on the River Solo. One evening at sundown, while going to the river for a bath, he happened upon a terrace of old river gravels, from which he pulled out a buffalo skull and some other bones. A trained native collector, or mantri, named Samsi, who was employed by the Geological Survey, was given the job of excavating the site. Samsi dutifully sent boxes of fossils back to the city of Bandung, where they were examined by dr. W. F. F. Oppenoorth, the head of the Geological Survey. On September 15, 1931, Oppenoorth examined a specimen labeled by Samsi as a tiger skull and determined it was actually the major portion of a humanlike braincase. More fragments turned up in the boxes of bones arriving in Bandung, and others were turned over to Oppenoorth at the ngandong site. Von Koenigswald (1956, pp. 65–77) classified the Solo specimens discovered in the fall of 1931