ABSTRACT
It has been known for more than a century that Southeast Asia has had one of the longest histories of human settlement of any part of the world. Fossils of ancient hominids (human ancestors), discovered in Java in 1891 by the Dutch physician Eugene Dubois and classifi ed by scientists as Homo erectus, played an important role in the early debates over human evolution. Since then, the Javanese sites have yielded a rich series of fossils, covering much of the history of the biological evolution of humankind. at it has proven diffi cult to date the earliest human remains with confi dence has resulted in a lively and continuing debate, which places their age anywhere from somewhat less than one million years to nearly two million years.
