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concluded that the skull was found embedded in the putjangan layers. the real location of this skull was, however, known only by Andojo, because von Koenigswald was not present at the time of the discovery. During the course of most of the Sangiran finds, von Koenigswald remained at Bandung, about 200 miles away, although he would sometimes travel to the fossil beds after being notified of a discovery. Andojo’s credibility is suspect, because as we shall see in the description of the next discovery, the Javanese collectors employed by von Koenigswald were sometimes driven, by a desire for extra profit, to engage in deception and trickery.

in the fall of 1937, one of von Koenigswald’s collectors, Atma, mailed him a temporal bone that apparently belonged to a thick, fossilized, hominid cranium. this specimen (S2 in table 7.2, p. 498) was said to have been discovered near the bank of a river named the Kali tjemoro, at the point where it breaks through the sandstone of the Kabuh formation at Sangiran.

von Koenigswald took the night train to central Java and arrived at the site the next morning. “We mobilized the maximum number of collectors,” stated von Koenigswald (1956, pp. 95–96). “i had brought the fragment back with me, showed it round, and promised 10 cents for every additional piece belonging to the skull. that was a lot of money, for an ordinary tooth brought in only ½ cent or 1 cent. We had to keep the price so low because we were compelled to pay cash for every find; for when a Javanese has found three teeth he just won’t collect any more until these three teeth have been sold. consequently we were forced to buy an enormous mass of broken and worthless dental remains and throw them away in Bandung—if we had left them at Sangiran they would have been offered to us for sale again and again.”

the highly motivated crew quickly turned up the desired skull fragments. von Koenigswald (1947, p. 15) would later recall: “there, on the banks of a small river, nearly dry at that season, lay the fragments of a skull, washed out of the sandstones and conglomerates that contained the trinil fauna. With a whole bunch of excited natives, we crept up the hillside, collecting every bone fragment we could discover. i had promised the sum of ten cents for every fragment belonging to that human skull. But i had underestimated the ‘big-business’ ability of my brown collectors. the result was terrible! Behind my back they broke the larger fragments into pieces in order to increase the number of sales! . . . We collected about 40 fragments, of which 30 belonged to the skull. . . . they formed a fine, nearly complete Pithecanthropus skullcap. Now, at last, we had him!”

How did von Koenigswald know that the fragments found on the surface of a hill really belonged, as he claimed, to the Middle pleistocene Kabuh formation? perhaps the native collectors found a skull elsewhere and broke it apart, sending one piece to von Koenigswald and scattering the rest by the banks of the Kali tjemoro.

von Koenigswald constructed a skull from the 30 fragments he had collected, calling it Pithecanthropus II, and sent a preliminary report to dubois. the skull (S2 in table 7.2, p. 498) was much more complete than the original skullcap found by dubois at trinil. von Koenigswald (1956, pp. 97–99) had always thought that dubois had reconstructed his Pithecanthropus skull with too low a profile, and believed the Pithecanthropus skull fragments he had just found allowed a more humanlike interpretation. dubois, who by this time had concluded his original Pithecanthropus was merely a fossil ape (von Koenigswald 1956, p. 55), disagreed with von Koenigswald’s reconstruction and published an accusation that he had indulged in fakery. He later retracted this indictment and said that the mistakes he saw in von Koenigswald’s reconstruction were probably not deliberate.

But von Koenigswald’s position was gaining support. Franz Weidenreich, supervisor of the peking man excavations at choukoutien, stated (1938, p. 378) in the prestigious journal Nature that von Koenigswald