ABSTRACT
In September of 1939 Great Britain declared war on Germany and one by one the countries of Europe were engulfed in a major conflict which was waged on land and sea and in the air for the next five years. In the Far East, however, an uneasy peace prevailed until the end of 1941, and work was continued at the famous Choukoutien site in China, Java where von Koenigswald found another mandible of the Meganthropus palaeojavanicus type. The evidence afforded by second ‘giant’ mandible still failed to convince most authorities that von Koenigswald had sufficient justification for separating Meganthropus palaeojavanicus from Pithecanthropus. Java was occupied by Japanese troops who had been ordered to confiscate all the Pithecanthropus material. Casts of the fossils tactics were highly successful, and when von Koenigswald was released from captivity after the end of the war, nearly all his Pithecanthropus fossils were recovered.
