In 1893, Dutch paleontologist Eugene Dubois set out to prove Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by discovering an alleged missing link between humans and great apes. He began by looking for fossils in caves on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. He had little luck until a colleague told him a promising skull turned up on a river bank on neighboring Java, where locals had long reported a number of big bones.
“They just stick out from the ground. There [was] no missing them,” says Josephine Joordens, a paleontologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
Dubois excavated at the river site, called Trinil. His findings were the first scientifically reported discovery of Homo erectus, widely regarded as a direct ancestor to modern humans, also known as Homo sapiens.
