ABSTRACT
Homo erectus fossils and cultural remains are known from Africa, Asia, and possibly Eu¬rope (Figure 10-1). The first fossils eventually called Homo erectus were found in 1891 in Java, Indonesia, by Eugène Dubois, a Dutch physician. Dubois joined the medical division of the Dutch Colonial Service and traveled to Indonesia hopeful of recovering the remains of the link between apes and humans—the so-called missing link. Sev¬eral years before Dubois’s journey, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel postulated a human ancestral line based on fragmentary information. The only well-known fos¬sil remains were comparatively recent bones discovered years earlier in the Neander Valley of Germany. Haeckel suggested that the human evolutionary line began among some extinct Miocene apes and reached Homo sapiens by way of an imagined speech¬less group of “ape-men” that he called Pithecanthropi.
