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By Root 1456 0

he might become master of himself. A flaming sword was placed at the east gate, and he was ordered to work, to till the ground, until he could come to know the value of his strength. He is now learning to plough the fields about him, shaping his life in accordance with the laws of nature. in some distant age a book may be written in which it will be stated that man came at last to a stage where he returned to the Garden, and at the east gate seized the flaming sword, the sword that symbolized control, to carry it as a torch guiding him to the tree of life.” Seizing the flaming sword and marching to take control of the tree of life? One wonders if there would be enough room in eden for both God and a hardcharging scientific superachiever like Merriam.

7.3.4 Back to Java

Armed with carnegie grant money, von Koenigswald returned to Java in June of 1937. immediately upon his arrival, he hired hundreds of natives and sent them out in force to find more fossils.

Meanwhile, in the course of looking through baskets of fossils gathered at Sangiran during his absence, von Koenigswald came upon a large, fossilized, lower right jaw fragment (S1b in table 7.2, p. 498). von Koenigswald stated (1940a, p. 142) that the fossil had been lying on the surface at the time it was discovered. von Koenigswald then asked his native collectors to specify the exact location at which it was discovered, and they informed him that it was found at a place where the djetis beds of the putjangan formation are exposed. von Koenigswald searched this area, but he stated that he was unable to locate the exact spot at which this fossil was said to have been found.

Adhering to the S1b jaw fragment was a fine-grained conglomerate, the presence of which caused von Koenigswald (1937, p. 884) to conclude that the fossil had originally been embedded in the Kabuh formation, which lies above the putjangan formation. it is in the early Middle pleistocene trinil beds of the Kabuh formation that dubois reported he found the original Pithecanthropus specimens. two years later, in 1939, after the conglomerate surrounding the S1b jaw fragment had been removed in the Cenozoic Research Laboratory in Peking, it was observed that the fossil had fine cracks in it. Such cracks are typically reported on specimens that have been embedded in a clayey layer, such as one would find in the Putjangan formation. Also, this fossil was more heavily fossilized than most bones found in the Kabuh formation. in light of these new facts, von Koenigswald (1940a, p. 142) reversed himself and declared that the S1b jaw must have come from the putjangan formation, considered early Middle pleistocene or late early pleistocene (Section 7.5.1).

A radically different opinion was expressed by dubois, who thought that the jaw belonged to Homo soloensis (the Javanese neanderthal) and therefore was only about 100,000 years old (von Koenigswald 1956, p. 93). von Koenigswald countered that such recent layers were not present at Sangiran.

But the fact remains that the jaw was said to have been discovered by native collectors on the surface at a location the collectors themselves could not clearly remember, and thus we do not know for sure where the jaw was originally situated. it is apparent from the above discussion that the actual age of the jaw is unknown.

At Modjokerto, in 1936, one of von Koenigswald’s native collectors, Andojo, discovered the skullcap of a young hominid and labeled it an orangutan. On unpacking the specimen, von Koenigswald reported that the skull exhibited features that are typically human, and not those of an ape; yet its brain capacity was smaller than that of an anatomically modern human of corresponding age. H. deterra (1943, p. 443) stated that “since the facial part and the base of the skull are missing, its true phylogenetic rank is unknown.” But today most paleoanthropologists believe several features of the skull indicate it belonged to a Homo erectus child.

von Koenigswald, relying on Andojo’s statement that the skull was dug up from a depth of 3 feet at Modjokerto,