The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey by Spencer Wells Page B
Authors: Spencer Wells
Tags: Non-Fiction
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widespread and distinct species of ancestral hominid, christened Neanderthal Man after the site of its discovery. This was the first scientific recognition of a human ancestor, and provided concrete evidence that the hominid lineage has evolved over time. By the end of the nineteenth century the race was well and truly on to find other ‘missing links’ between humans and apes. And in 1890 a doctor working for the Dutch East India company in Java hit the jackpot.
Eugène Dubois was obsessed with human evolution, and his medical appointment in the Far East was actually part of an elaborate plan to bring him closer to what he saw as the cradle of humanity. Born in 1858 in Eijsden, Holland, Dubois specialized in anatomy at medical school. By 1881, he had been appointed as an assistant at the University of Amsterdam, but he found academic life to be too confining and hierarchical. So, in 1887, he packed up his worldly belongings and convinced his wife to set off with him on a quest to find hominid remains.
Dubois believed that humans were most closely related to gibbons, a species of ape only found in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago. This was because of their skull morphology (lack of a massive, bony crest on the top and a flatter face than that found in other apes) and the fact that they sometimes walked erect on their hind legs – both reasonable enough pieces of evidence, he thought, to look for the missing link in south-east Asia. His first excavations in Sumatra yielded only the relatively recent remains of modern humans, orang-utans and gibbons, but when he turned his attention to Java his luck changed.
In 1890 Dubois was sifting through fossils recovered from a river-bank at Trinil, in central Java, when he found a rather odd skullcap. To him it looked like the remains of an extinct chimpanzee known as
Anthropopithecus
, although without benefit of a good anatomical collection for comparison (he was in a colonial outpost, after all) it was difficult to be certain. The following year, however, a femur recovered from the same location threw the specimen into a whole new light. The leg bone was clearly not from a climbing chimpanzee,but rather from a species that walked upright. His calculations of the cranial capacity, or brain size, of the new find, in combination with its upright stance, led him to make a bold leap of faith. He named the new species
Pithecanthropus erectus
, Latin for ‘erect ape-man’. This was the missing link everyone had been searching for.
The main objection to Dubois’ discovery – battled out in public debates and carefully worded publications over the next decade – was that there was very little evidence that the skull and femur (and a tooth that was later found at the site) had actually come from the same individual. They were excavated at different times, and the relationship between the soil layers from which they had been recovered was unknown. Later finds of
Pithecanthropus
did reveal the Trinil femur to be anomalous, and it seems likely that it actually belongs to a more modern human. The tooth may well be that of an ape. Despite this, and despite Dubois’ incorrect assertion that the remains proved that modern humans had originated in south-east Asia from gibbon-like ancestors, the discovery of the Trinil skullcap was a watershed event in anthropology. The Javanese ape-man was clearly a long-extinct human ancestor – one with a cranial capacity much lower than our own, but still far above the range seen in apes. Although he got it wrong in so many ways, Dubois had got it right where it counted.
The competition to find other hominid remains intensified in the early twentieth century, with the lion’s share of the activity focused on east Asia and Africa. The discovery of
Pithecanthropus
-like fossils in the 1920s and 30s at Zhoukoudian, China, showed that Dubois’ ape-man had been widespread in Asia. The uniting of the Zhoukoudian
Sinanthropus
(‘Peking man’)
Eugène Dubois was obsessed with human evolution, and his medical appointment in the Far East was actually part of an elaborate plan to bring him closer to what he saw as the cradle of humanity. Born in 1858 in Eijsden, Holland, Dubois specialized in anatomy at medical school. By 1881, he had been appointed as an assistant at the University of Amsterdam, but he found academic life to be too confining and hierarchical. So, in 1887, he packed up his worldly belongings and convinced his wife to set off with him on a quest to find hominid remains.
Dubois believed that humans were most closely related to gibbons, a species of ape only found in the Indo-Malaysian archipelago. This was because of their skull morphology (lack of a massive, bony crest on the top and a flatter face than that found in other apes) and the fact that they sometimes walked erect on their hind legs – both reasonable enough pieces of evidence, he thought, to look for the missing link in south-east Asia. His first excavations in Sumatra yielded only the relatively recent remains of modern humans, orang-utans and gibbons, but when he turned his attention to Java his luck changed.
In 1890 Dubois was sifting through fossils recovered from a river-bank at Trinil, in central Java, when he found a rather odd skullcap. To him it looked like the remains of an extinct chimpanzee known as
Anthropopithecus
, although without benefit of a good anatomical collection for comparison (he was in a colonial outpost, after all) it was difficult to be certain. The following year, however, a femur recovered from the same location threw the specimen into a whole new light. The leg bone was clearly not from a climbing chimpanzee,but rather from a species that walked upright. His calculations of the cranial capacity, or brain size, of the new find, in combination with its upright stance, led him to make a bold leap of faith. He named the new species
Pithecanthropus erectus
, Latin for ‘erect ape-man’. This was the missing link everyone had been searching for.
The main objection to Dubois’ discovery – battled out in public debates and carefully worded publications over the next decade – was that there was very little evidence that the skull and femur (and a tooth that was later found at the site) had actually come from the same individual. They were excavated at different times, and the relationship between the soil layers from which they had been recovered was unknown. Later finds of
Pithecanthropus
did reveal the Trinil femur to be anomalous, and it seems likely that it actually belongs to a more modern human. The tooth may well be that of an ape. Despite this, and despite Dubois’ incorrect assertion that the remains proved that modern humans had originated in south-east Asia from gibbon-like ancestors, the discovery of the Trinil skullcap was a watershed event in anthropology. The Javanese ape-man was clearly a long-extinct human ancestor – one with a cranial capacity much lower than our own, but still far above the range seen in apes. Although he got it wrong in so many ways, Dubois had got it right where it counted.
The competition to find other hominid remains intensified in the early twentieth century, with the lion’s share of the activity focused on east Asia and Africa. The discovery of
Pithecanthropus
-like fossils in the 1920s and 30s at Zhoukoudian, China, showed that Dubois’ ape-man had been widespread in Asia. The uniting of the Zhoukoudian
Sinanthropus
(‘Peking man’)
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