FURTHER JAVA MAN DISCOVERIES BY VON KOENIGSWALD

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 Beijing 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 foss 848k103i ils 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 wrote, "Despite the discovery of Pekin [Beijing] man, it remained necessary to find a further Pithecanthropus sufficiently complete to prove the human character of this disputed fossil."

Von Koenigswald arrived in Java in January 1931. In August of that same year, one of von Koenigswald's colleagues found some hominid fossils at Ngandong on the River Solo. Von Koenigswald classified the Solo specimens as a Javanese variety of Neanderthal, appearing later in time than Pithecanthropus erectus.

Gradually, the history of human ancestors in Java seemed to be clearing up, but more work was needed. In 1934, von Koenigswald journeyed to Sangiran, a site west of Trinil on the Solo River. He took with him several Javanese workers, including his trained collector, Atma, who also served as von Koenigswald's cook and laundryman in the field.

Von Koenigswald wrote: "There was great rejoicing in the kampong over our arrival. The men gathered all the jaws and teeth they could lay hands on and offered to sell them to us. Even the women and girls, who are generally so retiring, took part." When one considers that most of the finds attributed to von Koenigswald were actually made by local villagers or native collectors, who were paid by the piece, the scene described cannot but cause some degree of uneasiness.

At the end of 1935, in the midst of the worldwide economic depression, von Koenigswald's position with the Geological Survey in Java was terminated. Undeterred, von Koenigswald kept his servant Atma and others working at Sangiran, financing their activities with contributions from his wife and colleagues in Java.

Uncovered during this period was what appeared to be the fossilized right half of the upper jaw of an adult Pithecanthropus erectus. An examination of many reports by von Koenigswald has failed to turn up any description by him of exactly how this specimen was found. But in 1975 the British researcher K. P. Oakley and his associates stated that the fossil was found in 1936 on the surface of exposed lake deposits east of Kalijoso in central Java by collectors employed by von Koenigswald. Because the jaw was found on the surface, its exact age is uncertain.

An anthropologist might say that this jaw fragment exhibits the features of Homo erectus, as Pithecanthropus erectus is now known. Hence it must have been deposited at least several hundred thousand years ago, despite the fact that it was found on the surface. But what if there existed in geologically recent times, or even today, a rare species of hominid having physical features similar to those of Homo erectus! In that case one could not automatically assign a date to a given bone based on the physical features of that bone. In Chapter 11 can be found evidence suggesting that a creature like Homo erectus has lived in recent times and in fact may be alive today.

During the difficult year of 1936, in the course of which the fossil jaw discussed above was uncovered, the unemployed von Koenigswald received a remarkable visitor-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom von Koenigswald him­self had invited to come and inspect his discoveries in Java. Teilhard de Chardin, a world-famous archeologist and Jesuit priest, had been working in Peking (now Beijing), where he had participated in the Peking man excavations at Choukoutien (now Zhoukoudian).

During his visit to Java, Teilhard de Chardin advised von Koenigswald to write to John C. Merriam, the president of the Carnegie Institution. Von Koenigswald did so, informing Merriam that he was on the verge of making important new Pithecanthropus finds.

Merriam responded positively to von Koenigswald's letter, inviting him to come to Philadelphia in March 1937 to attend the Symposium on Early Man, sponsored by the Carnegie Institution. There von Koenigswald joined many of the world's leading scientists working in the field of human prehistory.

One of the central purposes of the meeting was to form an executive committee for the Carnegie Institution's financing of paleoanthropological research. Suddenly, the impoverished von Koenigswald found himself ap­pointed a research associate of the Carnegie Institution and in possession of a large budget.

THE ROLE OF THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTION

Considering the critical role played by private foundations in the financing of research in human evolution, it might be valuable at this point to further consider the motives of the foundations and their executives. The Carnegie Institution and John C. Merriam provide an excellent case study. In Chapter 10, we will examine the Rockefeller Foundation's role in financing the excavation of Beijing man.

The Carnegie Institution was founded in January 1902 in Washington, D.C., and a revised charter approved by Congress became effective in 1904. The Institution was governed by a board of 24 trustees, with an executive committee meeting throughout the year, and was organized into 12 departments of scientific investigation, including experimental evolution. The Institution also funded the Mt. Wilson Observatory, where the first systematic research leading to the idea that we live in an expanding universe was conducted. Thus the Carnegie Institution was actively involved in two areas, namely evolution and the big bang universe, that lie at the heart of the scientific cosmological vision that has replaced earlier religiously inspired cosmologies.

It is significant that for Andrew Carnegie and others like him, the impulse to charity, traditionally directed toward social welfare, religion, hospitals, and general education, was now being channeled into scientific research, laboratories, and observatories. This reflected the dominant position that science and its world view, including evolution, were coming to occupy in society, particularly within the minds of its wealthiest and most influential members, many of whom saw science as the best hope for human progress.

John C. Merriam, president of the Carnegie Institution, believed that science had "contributed very largely to the building of basic philosophies and beliefs," and his support for von Koenigswald's fossil-hunting expeditions in Java should be seen in this context. A foundation like the Carnegie Institution had the means to use science to influence philosophy and belief by selectively funding certain areas of research and publicizing the results. "The number of matters which might be investigated is infinite," wrote Merriam. "But it is expedient in each period to consider what questions may have largest use in furtherance of knowledge for the benefit to mankind at that particular time."

The question of human evolution satisfied this requirement. "Having spent a considerable part of my life in advancing studies on the history of life," said Merriam, "I have been thoroughly saturated with the idea that evolution, or the principle of continuing growth and development, constitutes one of the most important truths obtained from all knowledge."

By training a paleontologist, Merriam was also by faith a Christian. But his Christianity definitely took a back seat to his science. "My first contact with science," Merriam recalled in a 1931 speech, "was when I came home from grammar school to report to my mother that the teacher had talked to us for fifteen minutes about the idea that the days of creation described in Genesis were long periods of creation and not the days of twenty-four hours. My mother and I held a consultation-she being a Scotch Presbyterian-and agreed that this was rank heresy. But a seed had been sown. I have been backing away from that position through subsequent decades. I realize now that the elements of science, so far as creation is concerned, represent the uncontaminated and unmodified record of what the Creator did."

Having dispensed with scriptural accounts of creation, Merriam managed to turn Darwinian evolution into a kind of religion. At a convocation address at the George Washington University in 1924, Merriam said of evolution, "There is nothing contributing to the support of our lives in a spiritual sense that seems so clearly indispensable as that which makes us look forward to continuing growth or improvement."

He held that science would give man the opportunity to take on a godlike role in guiding that future development. "Research is the means by which man will assist in his own further evolution," said Merriam in a 1925 address to the Carnegie Institution's Board of Trustees. He went on to say: "I believe that if he [man] had open to him a choice between further evolution directed by some Being distant from us, which would merely carry him along with the current; or as an alternative could choose a situation in which that outside power would fix the laws and permit him to use them, man would say, 'I prefer to assume some responsibility in this scheme.'"

"According to the ancient story," Merriam continued, "man was driven from the Garden of Eden lest he might learn too much; he was banished so that he might become master of himself. Aflaming 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 hard-charging scientific super achiever like Merriam.

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. More fossils were found. But almost all of them were jaw and skull fragments that came from poorly specified locations on the surface near Sangiran. This makes it difficult to ascertain their correct ages.

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.

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 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. "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 1/2 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 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 was much more complete than the original skullcap found by Dubois at Trinil. Von Koenigswald 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, 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. In 1938, Franz Weidenreich, supervisor of the Beijing man excavations at Zhoukoudian, stated in the prestigious journal Nature that von Koenigswald's new finds had definitely established Pith­ecanthropus as a human precursor and not a gibbon as claimed by Dubois.

In 1941, one of von Koenigswald's native collectors, at Sangiran, sent to him, at Bandung, a fragment of a gigantic lower jaw. According to von Koenigswald, it displayed the unmistakable features of a human ancestor's jaw. He named the jaw's owner Meganthropuspalaeojavanicus (giant man of ancient Java) because the jaw was twice the size of a typical modern human jaw.

A careful search of original reports has not revealed a description of the exact location at which this jaw was found, or who discovered it. If von Koenigswald did report the exact circumstances of this find then it is a well-kept secret. He discussed Meganthropus in at least three reports; however, in none of these did he inform the reader of the details of the fossil's original location. All he said was that it came from the Putjangan formation, but no further information was supplied. Hence all we really know for certain is that some unnamed collector sent a jaw fragment to von Koenigswald. Its age, from a strictly scientific standpoint, remains a mystery.

Meganthropus, in the opinion of von Koenigswald, was a giant offshoot from the main line of human evolution. Von Koenigswald had also found some large humanlike fossil teeth, which he attributed to an even larger creature called Gigantopithecus. According to von Koenigswald, Gigantopithecus was a large and relatively recent ape. But Weidenreich, after examining the Meganthropus jaws and the Gigantopithecus teeth, came up with another theory. He proposed that both creatures were direct human ancestors. According to Weidenreich, Homo sapiens evolved from Gigantopithecus by way of Meganthropus and Pithecan­thropus. Each species was smaller than the next. Most modern authorities, however, consider Gigantopithecus to be a variety of ape, living in the Middle to Early Pleistocene, and not directly related to humans. The Meganthropus jaws are now thought to be much more like those of Java man (Homo erectus) than von Koenigswald originally believed. In 1973, T. Jacob suggested that Meganthropus fossils might be classified as Australopithecus. This is intriguing, because accord­ing to standard opinion, Australopithecus never left its African home.