Chapter 2 - The History of Classification - Will the Real Missing Link Please Stand Upright

To understand Dubois and the exposure of the Pilt Down man, I think we have to look in depth at the information in the section “Where We Came From”.

Consider for a moment in the time of Darwin and more importantly of Wallace, orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees were just becoming known to western anatomists. Wallace was doing his research in Southeast Asia during the 1850’s. Late in the 19th century around 1890, a Dutch anatomist and medical doctor named Eugene Dubois was stationed in the East Indies (now known as Indonesia). His assigned role was that as a medical doctor for the military. However, his primary love was to search for human fossils. Much of the literature that discusses Dubois’ research centers on his research for early man in Asia. Little discussion is devoted to why the research was conducted in Asia. Dubois is now credited with finding the first fossilized remains of a sub category of bipedal hominid termed Homo erectus. His find occurred on the island of Java in 1891. Just as the Neandertal finds had created trouble for the established understanding of humanity the new Erectus find would set the world on edge. Add to the mixture the circumstances of the find and eventually, Dubois would die a recluse no longer respected in his field. Probing into the circumstances that drove Dubois to reclusion provides some insight to our own understanding of race. By the beginning of the 20th Century evolutionary theory was just gaining tepid acceptance from the scientific community. The concept that man had evolved from a lower order animal was not the most popular idea within society as a whole.

Given the state of expansion of the British Empire, the influence of the European Cultures and the power of the Christian Church during the time, there was only one way the proverbial visitor at the door was going to be accepted into the castle of assigned dominance of the western culture. The Garden of Eden had to be located somewhere in the East. Be that Middle or Far East, it was clear the first man and woman had come from possibly Asia. The age of Chinese culture was well documented and it artifacts such as the Pyramids located in Egypt provided further suggestion that ancient man must have come from the Asian continent. Likewise more information was known about Orangutan than was known about Gorillas and Chimpanzees. Add to this that the research done by Owen indicated superficial physical attributes of Caucasians more similar to Orangutans than Gorillas.Returning to our thoughts in the introduction of this book, we see that at this point the field research being conducted in anthropology was being led by thoughts established through political, popular and religious understandings. Although Dubois was willing to call the emperor naked to some degree, he lacked the complete ability to reach beyond many common misconceptions of human evolution. Dubois, like many other scientists at the time saw the evolution of the human races in what is now called the Candelabra Theory. In this theory, there is a clear line of evolution from primate to human. The Candelabra Theory early on suggested that anthropologist would find an animal that was clearly not human at the same time it was not ape either. The concept led to the term missing link.

In the hardcore racist Candelabra theory takes this simplistic idea of evolution to extreme. The concept is presented in the following manner. At a early time there was a non-bipedal animal. This animal was some form of tree dwelling prosimian. Whites evolved from this prosimian a long time prior to blacks and some time shorter than Asians. With this method of understanding, the evidence of evolutionary theory could be not only acceptable to those that wanted to maintain the Western influence of dominance, but it also supplied "scientific" evidence that whites were superior to the other races. The problem is the Candelabra theory is not that simple. When we arose from the tree dwelling prosimian to our present understanding of humanness is still a complex story.

Even Dubois as early as 1890 new the Candelabra Theory was more difficult to understand than that which is presented by whites attempting to create scientific methods for their opinions. However, Dubois and other scientist at the time maintained that this crossing over had occurred as a distinct event that could be traced through the fossil record through osteomorphology. Dubois was a gifted anatomist that understood the physical dimensions of the human body. So in 1892 when he returned to the Netherlands with a skull cap, some molars and a femur he was sure that these items were neither from ape nor from human, but were from something that had resided in between. Dubois called the creature, Pithecanthropus erectus – literally translated the name means ape-human which stood upright. Here is where the whole story gets to be a bit sticky. Good science is never easy. Using prison labor on forced digs, and justification of dating determined by geological stratification matching simply were not enough for the scientist of the day. The bones were located almost a mile apart in a riverbank. The retrieval method was suspect. There was no way to insure the femur came from the same animal as the skull cap and molars and the diminutive size of a skull cap did not mean the animal was anything more than a diseased human. Even the scientist at the turn of the century recognized a tremendous gradation in human ostemetrics. Add to these complications the fact that there was already a sort of missing link called Neanderthal.