The Problem of Pithecanthropus ¹

Abstract

NEARLY twenty years have gone since Eugene Dubois, then a young surgeon attached to the Dutch forces in Java, and now professor of geology in the University of Amsterdam, discovered that remarkable individual to which he gave the name of Pithecanthropus erectus. The actual discovery, it will be remembered, consisted of the roof of a skull, a thigh bone, and two teeth; they were found in a fossil-bearing stratum on the left bank of the Solo or Bengawan, a stream which, after flowing through the province of Mediun—“the hell of Java” —in the centre of the island, turns in a north-easterly direction to reach the sea. Experts agree that the bones found were parts of the same individual or at least of individuals of the same race or species. As to the nature of the individual, there has been a wide divergence of opinion; the discoverer regarded it as more anthropoid than human, hence the name, while others, looking on it as altogether human, simply name it the “fossil man of Java.”