Java Man

Perhaps this was transitional from between apes and humans after all, and in Dubois' imagination, something that's similar to an upright walking gibbon.

So he changed the name to Pithecanthropus erectus, the upright ape man.

Finally, in 1950, Pithecanthropus and a variety of other fossils of various names were recognized to be the same species, this time with the human family tree, and so they were called Homo, Homo erectus.

This is a great story to frame this episode with, Helen, and good job with all those really crazy long names.

[laughs]

I certainly recognize that you have fame and fortune that have come to people like Donald Johanson, best known for his discovery of a famous fossil named Lucy, but this is the guy who also regards Java man as a valid transitional form.

So they're believing in mythology that actually has been undermined by evolutionists themselves.

Java man, or Pithecanthropus erectus, was completely discounted by evolutionists themselves who produced a 342-page report that shows that Pithecanthropus erectus plays no part whatsoever in human evolution.

So I don't think that these ape men fictions, fantasies, and frauds help the evolutionary paradigm in any sense whatsoever.

Let's go back to the phone lines, talk to Alice, also listening in Kansas.

They were just following food, generation after generation, each group pushing a little farther than their parents had gone.

In 1891, a Dutch physician named Eugène Dubois found fossils in Java that he called Pithecanthropus erectus .

Local villagers had been finding bones for years, but Dubois was the first to recognise what they were – an ancient human, nearly a million years old, living on an island thousands of miles from Africa.

In the 1920s and 30s, excavations at Joukoudian Cave near Beijing uncovered fossils of Peking Man.

But the stating of these differences reveals how little variance there is.

Thus, several of the anthropoid apes assume the erect posture, and the much-talked-of ape-man of Java, the Pithecanthropus erectus, was an erect ape.

The difference in the toes is perhaps more clear, but the muscles and tendons which afford prehensibility in the ape are present in the man, as the development of grasping power in the toes has been shown by men who had lost their arms in an accident, for example, while there are few who cannot pick up some such article as a handkerchief from the floor by the prehensile grip of the toes.

Articulate speech, however clear a distinction, cannot be considered as a structural variance, an objection which is even more valid in higher reasoning power.

Certain discoveries, however, point to an earlier physical form of man than any which are now known.

These have formed the basis for much anthropological argument.

The men of the Neanderthal, of Spy, of La Gen Basse, and the latest of all, Pithecanthropus erectus, or the fossil ape-man of Java, have of description of comparison and of surmise.

The discoveries of an actual osseous remain of primitive man are of vast importance, but they are very few.

Leaving these evidences of human antiquity, we come to the most remarkable and significant of all the known relics of man, if indeed it is man, for it seems to many a link between man and ape, not yet human while no longer simian.

This is the fossil find made by Dr. Eugene Dubois in 1891 on the banks of the Bungalowan River, Java, and named by him Pithecanthropus erectus, he maintaining that it represents a new genus of upright animals or even a new family.

The remains found by him consisted of the upper part of a skull, a molar tooth, and a femur, possibly not belonging to a single individual, as they were found somewhat separated.

These were exhumed from a stratum of volcanic tufa, claimed to be of tertiary age, perhaps quaternary, and lay at a depth of some forty feet beneath the surface.

From this fact we may fairly conclude that the possession of a simple graphic art does not necessarily indicate any considerable intellectual advance.

If we consider the remains of man himself, the few bones which mark his early pathway through time, a similar conclusion must be drawn.

Beginning with Pithecanthropus, which science is yet in doubt whether to class with the apes or with men, we pass upward to the bestial Neanderthal man and his fellows of the same low type.

Of the sparse remains of Paleolithic man that exist, the most are of this degraded type.

We would not understand them very well unless we had the somewhat later Javanese lot, the more commonly known Pythicanthropers, or Java man, against which to refer them for study.

One of the less well-known and earliest fragments, a piece of lower jaw and some teeth, rather strongly resembles the lower jaws and teeth of the Australopithecine type.

Was Macanthropus a sort of halfway point between the Australopithecines and Pithecanthropus? It's still too early to say.

We shall need more finds before we can be definite one way or the other.

Java man pithecanthropus comes from geological beds equal in age to the latter part of the second alpine glaciation.

He was the first human fossil to be recognized as such.

Principal known types of fossil men.

Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, Modern Skull, Kuhn-Kepo, Sinanthropus, Pithecanthropus.