What came before modern humans and the Neanderthals was the stuff of speculation.
In the closing decade of the 19thC Europe was the primary source of fossil evidence for human evolution—the sole exception was Talgai in Australia. Darwin had pointed to Africa as the likely location of the earliest human ancestors, but almost all researchers were convinced Europe was where our own species, Homo sapiens, originated. What came before modern humans and the Neanderthals was the stuff of speculation. This changed in 1894 with a publication making the case that three fossils recently excavated at Trinil, on the island of Java, were evidence of Pithecanthropus erectus, a creature that provided a link “from the anthropoid apes to Man”.1 The fossil evidence for what we now know as Homo erectus has been expanded over the years, and ideas about how it relates to modern humans have changed, but Eugène Dubois' paper remains an important milestone in our understanding of human evolution. Eugène Dubois' life and career, and the impact of his research on his contemporaries, have been meticulously researched by a historian of science.2 This account draws heavily on, and greatly benefits from, Bert Theunissen's meticulous scholarship and assiduous attention to detail. Pat Shipman has also written a biography of Dubois,3 but by her own admission it is unconventional in that she reconstructs actual, or imagined, conversations, thus making it challenging to tease out fact from informed fiction. Paul Storm worked as Shipman's research assistant on Dubois' biography, and the two of them published a much briefer, and more conventional, assessment of Dubois's contribution to paleoanthropology (Figure 1).4