Java Man : Fossils Discovered in 1891 at Java, Indonesia

Java Man

Java Man is the name given to fossils discovered in 1891 at Trinil - Ngawi Regency on the banks of the Solo River in East Java, Indonesia, one of the 1st known specimens of Homo erectus. Its discoverer, Eugxne Dubois, gave it the scientific name Pithecanthropus erectus, a name derived from Greek and Latin roots meaning upright ape-man.
In 1887, Eugxne Dubois began to excavate caves in Southeast Asia while working as a military surgeon. Dubois hoped to learn more about human evolution and to discover an ancestor of modern man. With this goal in mind he traveled to Sumatra, but after he failed to find the fossils he was looking for on the island he moved onto Java in 1890. Assisted by convict laborers and two army sergeants, Dubois began searching along the Solo River at Trinil in August of 1891.
The new date of the Mojokerto child, Dr. Swisher's group [of the Institute of Human Origins in Berkeley] has determined, is about 1.81 million years, and the Sangiran fossils are about 1.66 million years old.
Until older human remains were discovered in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, Dubois' and Koenigswald's discoveries were the oldest hominid remains ever found. Some scientists of the day suggested Dubois' Java Man as a potential intermediate form between modern humans and the common ancestor we share with the other great apes. The current consensus of anthropologists is that the direct ancestors of modern humans were African populations of Homo erectus, rather than the Asian populations exemplified by Java Man and Peking Man.

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