ABSTRACT
Southeast Asia has the longest continuous record of human activity of any region on earth. Premodern hominids were living in Java by 1.6 million years ago. The last member of the genus Homo to share the planet with Homo sapiens lived on the island of Flores, eastern Indonesia. Fossils from Java represent all stages of the evolution of our species, from Homo erectus to modern humans, which are found in Africa. In addition to physical changes, transitions from hunting and gathering to farming, from nomadism to sedentariness, from the use of stone and wood to metal, from life in villages to towns and cities, can all be found in Seasia. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace was not far wrong when he speculated in 1869 that humans may have first walked the earth in Sumatra or Borneo, based on his research on
the orangutan. Eugene Dubois in the late nineteenth century conducted one of the first purposive surveys by a
scholar in search of human origins. He was fascinated by the discovery of a premodern skull in Neanderthal, Germany, in 1856, and by Wallace’s ideas, and was determined to find evidence to support
them. He obtained a position as a doctor in the Netherlands Indies and at his request was posted to west Sumatra where he arrived in 1887. He explored limestone caves there in search of human fossils but found only animal bones. Then he heard rumors of an ancient skull found in east Java in 1889. Dubois transferred to east Java, and at Trinil, he found the proverbial needle in the haystack when he discovered a skullcap of a premodern human in 1891, and a femur the next year. These were the first recognized
fossils of premodern humans found outside Europe. Dubois assigned them to the species Pithecanthropus erectus (erect ape-man).1
