Friday, March 25, 2011

Long Distance Shoe For Heavy Runner

the biped.


Perpetrated by Oskarele

As seen in the previous article, when Eugene Dubois went to Sumatra in search of the missing link between apes and us, had been discovered only a few remnants, rather than clarifying anything from our past, which had generated is a hard debate between supporters and detractors.

went there as a doctor of the Dutch armed forces (remember that at that time Sumatra belonged to the Dutch East Indies), with his wife and son, and in his spare time looking for fossils, it seems be that successful, for shortly after the government spent to service two engineers and 50 workers convicted.

But it was not very well: they failed in their search for the difficult conditions: an engineer was killed and the workers fled.

So next year, in 1890 he moved to Java.


There a couple of bits before a miner had found a fossil skull, and there, where he made the discovery that man was where he addressed his team Dubois, somewhere in the middle of island but found nothing. So they began to search the Solo River fluvial deposits. And there, in August 1891 found (or rather his team, he rarely visited the excavations) a section of a human skull looks very old now known as the Cap of Trinil. Revealed that armadillos head was clearly not an ape or a human, so it must be the long-awaited missing link.

Dubois decided to call it Anthropithecus Erectus ", but later change the name proposed by Haeckel," Pithecanthropus "with the epithet" Erectus. "


became popularly known as "Java Man"

Although you sound more like its current scientific name "Homo Erectus" ... Indeed

Dubois had discovered a missing link human evolution, something that his subsequent findings did nothing but confirm. So soon found a nearly complete femur seemed very modern (in fact many believe that is modern and has nothing to do with the species to which the skull belonged.) Anyway, Dubois used the femur to deduce, correctly, that the Pithecanthropus walked upright (hence the "Erectus").


also reconstructed with the few remains of course open to a complete skeleton, extraordinarily successful.

In 1895 he returned to Europe, hoping to be received as if he had discovered America. Actually found virtually the opposite: the majority of scientists were opposed to his theories and conclusions, possibly as arrogant as the exposed (Dubois was not characterized by humility, it seems). The scientific establishment in general felt that the skull belonged to a gibbon, a type of ape in the area, and not a pre-human.


Dubois, hoping to get to show their moves allowed in 1897 to a renowned anatomist at the University of Strasbourg, Gustav Schwalbe, hiciese a cast of the cranial vault and investigate. To the chagrin of Dubois, master 'wrote a paper that received more favorable attention than he had raised him, even giving a few lectures in which they treated him as if he had discovered the skull.

shocked, bitter and to crumbs, Dubois put an end to his career, accepting a modest post of professor of geology at the University of Amsterdam, and during the next two decades, did not allow anyone to take a look at your precious fossils.

died, bitter, in 1940. Then their theories were beginning to be accepted ...


More and sources here , here , here , here.

0 comments:

Post a Comment