JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 1887, a young Dutch doctor with an un-Dutame, MarieEugène Fran?ois Thomas Dubois, arrived in Sumatra, ich East Indies, with theiion of finding the earliest human remains oh.
1Several things were extraordinary about this. To begin with, no one had ever gone lookingfor a human bones before. Everything that had been found to this point had been foundactally, and nothing in Dubois』s background suggested that he was the ideal didate tomake the process iional. He was an anatomist by training with no background iology. Nor was there any special reason to suppose that the East Indies would holdearly human remains. Logic dictated that if a people were to be found at all, it would beon a large and long-populated landmass, not in the parative fastness of an archipelago.
Dubois was driven to the East Indies on nothing strohan a hunch, the availability ofemployment, and the knowledge that Sumatra was full of caves, the enviro in whichmost of the important hominid fossils had so far been found. What is most extraordinary in allthis—nearly miraculous, really—is that he found what he was looking for.
At the time Dubois ceived his plan to search for a missing link, the human fossil recordsisted of very little: five inplete Neaal skeletons, one partial jawbone of uainprovenance, and a half-dozen ice-age humaly found by railway workers in a cave at acliff called agnon near Les Eyzies, France. Of the Neaal spes, the bestpreserved was sitting unremarked on a shelf in London. It had been found by workers blastingrock from a quarry in Gibraltar in 1848, so its preservation was a wonder, but unfortunatelyno o appreciated what it was. After being briefly described at a meeting of the GibraltarStific Society, it had beeo the Hunterian Museum in London, where it remainedundisturbed but for an occasional light dusting for over half a tury. The first formaldescription of it wasn』t written until 1907, and then by a geologist named William Sollas「with only a passing peten anatomy.」
So ihe name and credit for the discovery of the first early humao theNeander Valley in Germany—not unfittingly, as it happens, for by uny eander in Greek means 「new man.」 There in 1856 workmen at another quarry, in a cliff faceoverlooking the Düssel River, found some curious-looking bones, which they passed to alocal schoolteacher, knowing he had an i in all things natural. To his great credit theteacher, Johann Karl Fuhlrott, saw that he had some ype of human, though quite what itwas, and how special, would be matters of dispute for some time.
Many people refused to accept that the Neaal bones were a at all. August Mayer,a professor at the Uy of Bonn and a man of influence, insisted that the bones were1Though Dutch, Dubois was from Eijsden, a town b the French-speaking part of Belgium.
merely those of a Mongolian Cossack soldier who had been wounded while fighting inGermany in 1814 and had crawled into the cave to die. Hearing of this, T. H. Huxley inEngland drily observed how remarkable it was that the soldier, though mortally wounded, hadclimbed sixty feet up a cliff, divested himself of his clothing and personal effects, sealed thecave opening, and buried himself uwo feet of soil. Another anthropologist, puzzlihe Neaal』s heavy bre, suggested that it was the result of long-term frowningarising from a poorly healed forearm fracture. (In their eagero reject the idea of earlierhumans, authorities were often willing to embrace th