ABSTRACT
Java man was an acceptable human ancestor to the Victorian fossil hunters—certainly more than anything from Africa—but nothing would be as satisfying as a European origin for humanity. In 1912 an amateur fossil hunter discovered pieces of a cranium and jaw in England. The designation of humans as Man the Hunter rapidly attained axiomatic status. The greatest men in British science put the puzzle pieces together and marveled over the extremely large brain case combined with a primitive jaw. To view the inception of Man the Hunter's forceful accession and acceptance, we need to go back and fill in the people who inhabited the rather small and esoteric world of paleoanthropology in the 1920s. The next widely accepted version of the recurring Man the Hunter theme was presented in the late 1960s by Sherwood Washburn (the father of American field primatology) and his colleagues.
