532 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 31 



in the Malay Archipelago suggested the possibility that man's 

 ancestors may also have gone east. 



In the year 1887 Dr. Eugene Dubois, a junior member of the staff 

 of the anatomy department in the University of Amsterdam, was 

 offered promotion to the position of prosector, which was the step 

 toward the eventual attainment of the full professorship. To the 

 surprise of his colleagues he declined this promotion, and surprise 

 turned to amazement when he gave the reason that he was going out 

 to the East Indies to search for fossil remains of primitive man ! He 

 was impressed by the fact that as the western area of migration of 

 the higher Pi-imates had failed to provide any conclusive evidence 

 of really early man, it might be worth exploiting the possibilities of 

 the eastern route and determining whether the archaic members of 

 the human family may not have followed the footsteps of the ances- 

 tors of the orang-utan. He resigned his position in Amsterdam and 

 went out to the Indies as an army doctor, and began to search in the 

 caves of Sumatra and the fossiliferous deposits in Java for the object 

 of his quest. The most amazing aspect of this adventure was Doc- 

 tor Dubois's discovery of the sort of thing that had inspired his 

 mission. In 1891 he found in the gravels on the banks of the Solo 

 River, which natives of central Java refer to as Bengawan or " Great 

 River," the fossilized remains of a braincase, a couple of teeth, and 

 a femur. When these fossils were shown at the International Con- 

 gress of Zoologists in Leyden in 1894 they provoked a controversy 

 which has continued ever since then. 



In the first place the nature of the braincase was a matter of dis- 

 pute — whether it was part of a hitherto unknown gigantic ape or of 

 an equally unknown primitive type of human being, or, as Doctor 

 Dubois himself maintained, a creature that was not strictly either 

 simian or human, but a link between the two, the position of which 

 was so enigmatic that it would be misleading to call it either an ape 

 or a man. This problem, in spite of nearly 40 years of discussion, 

 is still in dispute. Although the majority of anthropologists admit 

 Pithecanthropus to membership of the human family, there is still 

 wide divergence of opinion as to what his position in the family is, 

 whether he is in the direct line of descent of later men, or whether he 

 represents a specialized and divergent member of the family. Then 

 again there is the question as to whether or not the teeth and the 

 thigh bone which were found in the same gravels, and in a similar 

 state of fossilization, are parts of the same or similar individuals, or 

 whether the femur of a more definitely human type of being hap- 

 pened to be deposited in the same bed of gravel with the remains of 

 the Ape Man, who was a fantastic caricature of a human being. 

 There are the widest divergences of opinion even at the present time 

 on this issue. 



