Eugène Dubois

Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois (January 28, 1858 - December 16, 1940) was a Dutch anatomist, who earned world-wide fame with his discovery of the first specimens of early hominid remains to be found outside of Europe. These discoveries, made on the Indonesian island of Java from 1891, would later be classified as specimens of Homo erectus.

Though hominid fossils had been found and studied before, Dubois was the first anthropologist to embark upon a purposeful search for them. He was convinced that the origins of the human species must be in the tropics. For this reason he joined the Dutch army in the Dutch East Indies (the Dutch colony that would later become independent Indonesia).

Dubois searched at potential sites near rivers and in caves, first on the island of Sumatra, then on Java. Between 1886 and 1895 he indeed discovered remains of what he described as "a species in between humans and apes". He called his finds Pithecanthropus erectus or Java Man. Today they are classified as Homo erectus.

Back in Europe Dubois toured the continent to convince his colleagues that he had indeed found a missing link, but although most anthropologists were intrigued they did not always agree with Dubois' interpretations. After that, Dubois stubbornly refused others access to his fossils, until he was forced to do so in 1923. Meanwhile he became a professor in geology at the University of Amsterdam, a function that did not keep him from his research in anatomy. Though the scientific debate slowly began to turn in his favour in the twenties and thirties, it is said he died embittered in 1940. He was buried in Venlo.