

Figure 24: Outer and inner views of the calotte of Homo erectus I from 

 Trinil, Indonesia. The capacity of the calvaria, long regarded as 900, 

 935, or even 950 c.c, has been redetermined as 850 c.c. 



Homo erectus I of Trinil, Indonesia 



The original discovery of a hominid in Java late in the last century was 

 made by E. Dubois. The first skull was represented by little more than the 

 calotte, or roof, of the braincase, but sufficient of the side walls of the vault 

 and of the occipital squamous portion were preserved to enable Dubois to 

 determine the capacity (Figure 24). It has been overlooked hitherto that, at 

 a meeting of the Royal Dublin Society on 20 November 1895, Dubois esti- 

 mated the internal capacity of the cranium as 1000 c.c. (Dubois 1895): it is 

 clear that this was little more than a guess. In 1898 he reported to the 

 Fourth International Congress of Zoology at Cambridge that the volume of 

 water that could be held in the preserved part of the calvaria was 570 c.c. In 

 order to determine what the total volume would have been, Dubois filled a 



^ 8; 



