Who is eugene dubois

Together with his wife and newborn daughter he moved to the Dutch colony to search for the missing link in human evolution. He joined the Dutch Army as a medical officer and Dubois along with his family arrived at Sumatra in late Since the first studies conducted by Dubois in his spare time were successful, the government assigned a team of engineers and laborers to help him.

Unfortunately, the area was densely forested and they were short on water. After many workers ran away and one of his engineers died, the scientist only were able to excavate a few insignificant fossils. Thus, he decided that in java they might have better chances of success. He was transferred there in and began searching near Solo River with a new team which proved to be more successful. In the next year, Dubois found a tooth, a skullcap, the fossil which became widely known as the Java Man.

He described it as something between an ape and a human. The scientist started to promote his findings one year later in Europe, and even though some contemporaries welcomed his work, most disagreed with Dubois. However, Eugene Dubois kept promoting his work, traveling through Europe, and his position received more and more support. In , Eugene Dubois was awarded an honorary doctorate in botany and zoology by the University of Amsterdam, and in became a professor there in crystallography, mineralogy, geology and paleontology.

After ceasing to discuss Java Man and basically hiding the fossils at his home, Dubois allowed access to Java Man in the s. It became a gain a topic of debate after similar fossils had been found. In , the first Peking Man fossils were excavated and in the s, other pithecanthropine fossils were found in Java at Sangiran. Dubois was a difficult person to deal with, and as he grew older, his unpleasant character traits came to the fore.

As a result, he became increasingly isolated from the scientific world. Dubois is considered to be the first researcher who was purposefully on the search for human ancestors since He was one of the first to recognize that brain size and body weight are in an allometric relationship. Your email address will not be published.

Eugene Dubois Related Posts. Christiaan Huygens and the Development of the Pocket Watch. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. No single discovery in the realm of dead things has given rise to such a voluminous literature, to so many animated discussions or to so many divergent opinions.

There are not so many alive now who remember the arrival of Dubois in England in the autumn of , and saw with their own eyes the material evidence of man's evolutionary past which he had just brought back from Java, and took part in the debates which the discovery aroused. Right to the end of his life Dubois maintained that the being he had unearthed was neither man nor ape, but represented a stage which marks the transition from ape to man. Some of his Continental critics regarded Pithecanthropus as a gigantic gibbon; others gave the thigh bone to an extinct form of man and the skull cap to an extinct form of ape.

British anatomists, on the other hand, took the view that Pithecanthropus was a hominid—an early form of man. Dubois was above medium stature, and although full-bodied, carried himself rather rigidly erect. When in England in he seemed to be under thirty years of age; from the above statement one infers he must have been born about This letter, although it contains further interesting details, is too long to give in full; the original is to be added to the library of the Royal College of Surgeons.

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