Ancient Man in Java and China
In the 1880’s a Dutch Army surgeon named Eugène Dubois decided to go to Java to find a kind of ape-man that the great German scientist Ernst Haeckel had envisioned fifteen years before. In 1891, beneath ancient deposits of the Solo River, Dubois discovered what he was looking for—or perhaps a slight improvement on it. What he found was the skull top, two molar teeth, and a thigh bone of a thing which was much more man than ape, but which received the name Pithecanthropus erectus (erect ape-man). For some years the skullcap of this Java man—a handier name—stood alone as the only fossil of really ancient man. Now it has been joined by portions of two other adults from the same geological level and the cranium of a child and portions of a rugged, robust male skull from a still older level, the discoveries of G. H. R. von Koenigswald. Reconstructions of Java man give us a fellow with a low sloping forehead, no chin, not much room for brains, and a very prominent ridge of bone above his eyes. This human of 300,000 or more years ago probably looked a good deal like the most primitive of modern men, the native Australians, who seem to have miraculously and uniquely survived without much change from the beginnings of Homo. Java man left no tools with his bones, but the massive Patjitanian stone choppers and crude flakes found in southern Java are thought to be of about the proper age.
JAVA MAN—Pithecanthropus erectus
Except for two molars and a thigh bone, the skullcap above was all that Dubois first found of Java man. The reconstruction, actually the right side of the skull, has been reversed for comparison. (The skullcap after Osborn, 1915; the reconstruction after Weinert, 1928.)
Java man has a slightly younger relative in Peking man, also beetle-browed. The first finds were made in 1929, about forty miles southwest of Peking in the Choukoutien Cave, on Dragon Bone Hill. Since then parts of about forty men and women have been dug out. We now have four skulls that are more complete than those of Java man. We also have 148 teeth and thirteen jaws, and some odd pieces of other skulls. We have fire hearths and a large number of implements, ranging from eoliths to hammerstones and crude choppers and scrapers. We also have some fossil bones of monkey, baboon, ostrich, rhinoceros, and mammoth, besides animals common to China today. The most interesting bones, of course, are those of man himself, and our concern with them is increased by the odd and disturbing fact that the thigh bones had been cracked for their marrow as only a man could crack them, and the skulls had suffered violence. If Peking man was not a cannibal, he had a neighbor who was. And that is probably true for the Abbevillian and Acheulean times of Europe. But at least Peking man, like Java man, stood erect.