Hominin around Asia

In 1887, the Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois left his university position to join the Dutch East Indies army as a surgeon.

The position was merely a matter of convenience to Dubois, a way to get to Southeast Asia, where he believed he would find the fabled missing link between apes and humans.

At first, he explored caves around Sumatra without much success, and so he shifted his attention to the island of Java in Indonesia.

His journey took him to the banks of the Solo River, near the village of Trinil.

The site was unexceptional.

The Solo River had carved a steep bank about 30 feet high into the landscape, and Dubois, with his team of convict laborers and two army corporals, took advantage of this natural exposure by cutting trenches into the riverbank.

By 1891, they had found a fossilized human-like molar, and two months later they discovered the now famous skull cap called Trinil 2.

If you think of a modern human skull, we have a large forehead, and the shape of the cranium where the brain is located is very round.

The Trinil 2 skull cap, though, was shaped more like a rugby ball.

It had a long and low cranium with a flat forehead and a distinctive ridge on top of the back of the head that ran from front to back, called a sagittal keel.

And at the back of the skull there was another ridge of bone called an occipital torus, where strong neck muscles would have supported the head.

But more prominent of all was the thick ridge of the bone above the eyes, a massive brow ridge.

At first, Dubois considered the fossil to be more ape-like, so he called it Anthropopithecus, the man ape.

By 1894, however, he realized that the brain of Trinil 2 would have been larger than he had originally estimated.

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.

In 1887, the Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois left his university position to join the Dutch East Indies army as a surgeon.

The position was merely a matter of convenience to Dubois, a way to get to Southeast Asia, where he believed he would find the fabled missing link between apes and humans.

At first, he explored caves around Sumatra without much success, and so he shifted his attention to the island of Java in Indonesia.

His journey took him to the banks of the Solo River, near the village of Trinil.

The site was unexceptional.

The Solo River had carved a steep bank about 30 feet high into the landscape, and Dubois, with his team of convict laborers and two army corporals, took advantage of this natural exposure by cutting trenches into the riverbank.

By 1891, they had found a fossilized human-like molar, and two months later they discovered the now famous skull cap called Trinil 2.

If you think of a modern human skull, we have a large forehead, and the shape of the cranium where the brain is located is very round.

The Trinil 2 skull cap, though, was shaped more like a rugby ball.

It had a long and low cranium with a flat forehead and a distinctive ridge on top of the back of the head that ran from front to back, called a sagittal keel.

And at the back of the skull there was another ridge of bone called an occipital torus, where strong neck muscles would have supported the head.

But more prominent of all was the thick ridge of the bone above the eyes, a massive brow ridge.

At first, Dubois considered the fossil to be more ape-like, so he called it Anthropopithecus, the man ape.

By 1894, however, he realized that the brain of Trinil 2 would have been larger than he had originally estimated.

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.