Homo erectus Fossil evidencehominin (Latin: “upright man”)

The first fossils attributed to Homo erectus were discovered by a Dutch army surgeon, Eugène Dubois, who began his search for ancient human bones on the island of Java (now part of Indonesia) in 1890. Dubois found his first specimen in the same year, and in 1891 a well-preserved skullcap was unearthed at Trinil on the Solo River. Considering its prominent browridges, retreating forehead, and angled rear skull, Dubois concluded that the Trinil cranium showed anatomic features intermediate between those of humans (as they were then understood) and those of apes. Several years later, near where the skull was discovered, he found a remarkably complete and modern-looking femur (thighbone). Since this bone was so similar to a modern human femur, Dubois decided that the individual to which it belonged must have walked erect. He adopted the name Pithecanthropus (coined earlier by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel) and called his discoveries Pithecanthropus erectus (“upright ape-man”), but the colloquial term became “Java man.” Only a few other limb fragments turned up in the Trinil excavations, and it would be some three decades before more substantial evidence appeared. Most paleontologists now regard all of this material as H. erectus, and the name Pithecanthropus has been dropped.