ABSTRACT
Towards the close of the nineteenth century a young Dutch anatomist, Dr Eugene Dubois, resigned from his post as lecturer in the University of Amsterdam. Stirred and inspired by Charles Darwin's Descent of Man and by the results of his own research work, Dubois dreamed of discovering the remains of some fossil creature ancestral to man and yet embodying proof in its morphology of a very primitive status. The Dutch Government refused to support it and, in the end, Dubois accepted a commission as a surgeon in the Dutch Army and was sent overseas to the Dutch Indies. Many scientists, like Dubois, attributed it to a late phase of the Upper Pliocene; others preferred to assign it to the early Pleistocene period. In 1894 Dubois published a monograph on his discovery, in which he claimed that the Trinil fossil was 'the precursor of man', and represented the 'intermediate form between the anthropoids and man'.
