ABSTRACT
More than a century ago, Dutch paleontologistEugene Dubois suggested that human origins lay in Southeast Asia, and he soon found the undeniably earliest hominid skeletal remains on the island of Java. In the 1930s, many more fossils of similar primitive character came to light near Beijing, and the entire Asian collection became known as Homo erectus. Presumably arising from an Asian ape, “upright man” had evidently occupied a great swath of eastern Asia, and provided the logical precursor to the more advanced and younger Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon (Homo sapiens) fossils of Europe. In evolutionary terms, Homo erectus was thought to have emerged in Asia and later dispersed to Europe.
