ACCEPTED EVIDENCE - JAVA MAN

ACCEPTED EVIDENCE

JAVA MAN

At the end of the nineteenth century, a consensus was building within an influential portion of the scientific community that human beings of the modern type had existed as far back as the Pliocene and Miocene periods-and perhaps even earlier.

Anthropologist Frank Spencer stated in 1984: "From accumulating skeletal evidence it appeared as if the modern human skeleton extended far back in time, an apparent fact which led many workers to either abandon or modify their views on human evolution. One such apostate was Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913)." Wallace shares with Darwin the credit for having discovered evolution by natural selection.

Darwin thought Wallace was committing heresy of the worst sort. But Spencer noted that Wallace's challenge to e 626r1717g volutionary doctrine "lost some of its potency as well as a few of its supporters when news began circulating of the discovery of a remarkable hominid fossil in Java." Considering the striking way in which the Java man fossils were employed in discrediting and suppressing evidence for the great antiquity of the modern human form, we shall now review their history.

EUGENE DUBOIS AND PITHECANTHROPUS

Past the Javanese village of Trinil, a road ends on a high bank overlooking the Solo River. Here one encounters a small stone monument, marked with an arrow pointing toward a sand pit on the opposite bank. The monument also carries a cryptic German inscription, "P.e. 175 m ONO 1891/93," indicating that Pithecan­thropus erectus was found 175 meters east northeast from this spot, during the Years 1891-1893.

The discoverer of Pithecanthropus erectus was Eugene Dubois, born in Eijsden, Holland, in 1858, the year before Darwin published The Origin of the Species. Although the son of devout Dutch Catholics, he was fascinated by the idea evolution, especially as it applied to the question of human origins.

After studying medicine and natural history at the University of Amsterdam, Dubois became a lecturer in anatomy at the Royal Nor­mal School in 1886. But his real love remained evolution. Dubois knew that Darwin's opponents were constantly pointing out the almost com­plete lack of fossil evidence for human evolution. He care­fully studied the principal evidence then available-the bones of Neanderthal specimens. These were regarded by most authorities (among them Thomas Huxley) as too close to the modern human type to be truly intermediate between fossil apes and modern humans. The German scientist Ernst Haeckel had, however, predicted that the bones of a real missing link would eventually be found. Haeckel even commissioned a painting of the creature, whom he called Pithecan­thropus (in Greek, pitheko means ape, and anthropus means man). Influenced by Haeckel's vision of Pithecanthropus, Dubois resolved to someday find the ape-man's bones.

Mindful of Darwin's suggestion that humanity's forbearers lived in "some warm, forest-clad land," Dubois became convinced Pithecanthropus would be found in Africa or the East Indies. Because he could more easily reach the East Indies, then under Dutch rule, he decided to journey there and begin his quest. He applied first to private philanthropists and the government, requesting financing for a scientific expedition, but was turned down. He then accepted an appointment as an army surgeon in Sumatra. With his friends doubting his sanity, he gave up his comfortable post as a college lecturer and with his young wife set sail for the East Indies in December 1887 on the S. S. Princess Amalie.

In 1888, Dubois found himself stationed at a small military hospital in the interior of Sumatra. In his spare time, and using his own funds, Dubois investi­gated Sumatran caves, finding fossils of rhino and elephant, and the teeth of an orangutan, but no hominid remains.

In 1890, after suffering an attack of malaria, Dubois was placed on inactive duty and transferred from Sumatra to Java, where the climate was somewhat drier and healthier. He and his wife set up housekeeping in Tulungagung, on eastern Java's southern coast.

During the dry season of 1891, Dubois conducted excavations on the bank of the Solo River in central Java, near the village of Trinil. His laborers took out many fossil animal bones. In September, they turned up a particularly interesting item--a primate tooth, apparently a third upper right molar, or wisdom tooth. Dubois, believing he had come upon the remains of an extinct giant chimpanzee, ordered his laborers to con­centrate their work around the place where the tooth had turned up. In October, they found what appeared to be a turtle shell. But when Dubois inspected it, he saw it was actually the top part of a cranium, heavily fossilized and having the same color as the volcanic soil. The fragment's most distinctive feature was the large, protruding ridge over the eye sockets, leading Dubois to suspect the cranium had belonged to an ape. The onset of the rainy season then brought an end to the year's digging. In a report published in the government mining bulletin, Dubois made no suggestion that his fossils belonged to a creature transitional to humans. In August 1892, Dubois returned to Trinil and found there-among bones of deer, rhinoceroses, hyenas, crocodiles, pigs, tigers, and extinct elephants-a fossilized humanlike femur (thighbone). This femur was found about 45 feet from where the skullcap and molar were dug up. Later another molar was found about 10 feet from the skullcap. Dubois believed the molars, skull, and femur all came from the same animal, which he still considered to be an extinct giant chimpanzee.

In 1963, Richard Carrington stated in his book A Million Years of Man: "Dubois was at first inclined to regard his skull cap and teeth as belonging to a chimpanzee, m spite of the fact that there is no known evidence that this ape or any of its ancestors ever lived in Asia. But on refection, and after corresponding with the great Ernst Haeckel, Professor of Zoology at the University of Jena, he declared them to belong to a creature which seemed admirably suited to the role of the missing link.'" We have not found any correspondence Dubois may have exchanged with Haeckel, but if further research were to turn it up, it would add considerably to our knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the birth of Pithecanthropus erectus. Obviously, both men had a substantial emotional and intellectual stake in finding an ape-man specimen. Haeckel, on hearing from Uubois of his discovery, telegraphed this message: "From the inventor of Pith­ecanthropus to his happy discoverer!"

It was only in 1894 that Dubois finally published a complete report of his discovery. Therein he wrote: "Pithecanthropus is the transitional form which, in accordance with the doctrine of evolution, must have existed between man and the anthropoids." Pithecanthropus erectus, we should carefully note, had itself undergone an evolutionary transition within the mind of Dubois, from fossil chimpanzee to transitional anthropoid.

What factors, other than Haeckel's influence, led Dubois to consider his specimen transitional between fossil apes and modern humans? Dubois found that the volume of the Pithecanthropus skull was in the range of 800-1000 cubic centimeters. Modern apes average 500 cubic centimeters, while modern human skulls average 1400 cubic centimeters, thus placing the Trinil skull midway between them. To Dubois, this indicated an evolutionary relationship. But logically speaking, one could have creatures with different sizes of brains without having to posit an evolutionary progression from smaller to larger. Furthermore, in the Pleistocene many mammalian species were represented by forms much larger than today's. Thus the Pithecanthropus skull might belong not to a transitional anthropoid but to an exceptionally large Middle Pleistocene gibbon, with a skull bigger than that of modern gibbons.

Today, anthropologists still routinely describe an evolutionary progression of hominid skulls, increasing in size with the passage of time-from Early Pleistocene Australopithecus (first discovered in 1924), to Middle Pleistocene Java man (now known as Homo erectus), to Late Pleistocene Homo sapiens sapiens. But the sequence is preserved only at the cost of eliminating skulls that disrupt it. For example, the Castenedolo skull, discussed in Chapter 7, is older than that of Java man but is larger in cranial capacity. In fact, it is fully human in size and morphology. Even one such exception is sufficient to invalidate the whole proposed evolutionary sequence.

Dubois observed that although the Trinil skull was very apelike in some of its features, such as the prominent brow ridges, the thighbone was almost human. This indicated that Pithecanthropus had walked upright, hence the species designation erectus. It is important, however, to keep in mind that the femur of Pithecanthropus erectus was found fully 45 feet from the place where the skull was unearthed, in a stratum containing hundreds of other animal bones. This circumstance makes doubtful the claim that both the thighbone and the skull actually belonged to the same creature or even the same species.

When Dubois's reports began reaching Europe, they received much atten­tion. Haeckel, of course, was among those celebrating Pithecanthropus as the strongest proof to date of human evolution. "Now the state of affairs in this great battle for truth has been radically altered by Eugene Dubois's discovery of the fossil Pithecanthropus erectus," proclaimed the triumphant Haeckel. "He has actually provided us with the bones of the ape-man I had postulated. This find is more important to anthropology than the much-lauded discovery of the X-ray was to physics." There is an almost religious tone of prophecy and fulfillment in Haeckel's remarks. But Haeckel had a history of overstating physiological evidence to support the doctrine of evolution. An academic court at the University of Jena once found him guilty of falsifying drawings of embryos of various animals in order to demonstrate his particular view of the origin of species.

In 1895, Dubois decided to return to Europe to display his Pithecanthropus to what he was certain would be an admiring and supportive audience of scientists. Soon after arriving, he exhibited his specimens and presented reports at the Third International Congress of Zoology at Leyden, Holland. Although some of the scientists present at the Congress were, like Haeckel, anxious to support the discovery as a fossil ape-man, others thought it merely an ape, while still others challenged the idea that the bones belonged to the same individual.

Dubois exhibited his treasured bones at Paris, London, and Berlin. In December of 1895, experts from around the world gathered at the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory to pass judgment on Dubois's Pithecanthropus specimens. The president of the Society, Dr. Virchow, refused to chair the meeting. In the controversy-ridden discussion that followed, the Swiss anatomist Kollman said the creature was an ape. Virchow himself said the femur was fully human, and further stated: "The skull has a deep suture between the low vault and the upper edge of the orbits. Such a suture is found only in apes, not in man. Thus the skull must belong to an ape. In my opinion this creature was an animal, a giant gibbon, in fact. The thigh-bone has not the slightest connection with the skull." This opinion contrasted strikingly with that of Haeckel and others, who remained convinced that Dubois's Java man was a genuine human ancestor.