Dimensions
166 x 243 x 40mm
The Extraordinary Life of Eugene Dubois.
In Java in 1891 Eugene Dubois, now largely forgotten, made a discovery of staggering significance. Through sheer force of personality, intellect and luck, Dubois pulled off one of the most amazing scientific coups of all time. As a young man growing up in Holland, he decided that the most important contribution a man could make to science would be to find "the missing link", the extinct form that exemplifies the evolutionary connection between humans and apes - the ultimate proof of Darwinian evolution. He deduced where the missing link should be, gave up his promising academic appointment, and took his young family to the East Indies, where he found the fossil he sought: Pithecanthropus erectus, now known as Homo erectus.
In this compelling book Pat Shipman traces his life from his early education and work in Holland through to gruelling fossil-hunting years in colonial Sumatra and Java. Having found his ape-man, Dubois plunged into a fierce, five-year struggle to persuade the European scientific community of his convictions.
Weary of the fray, he withdrew himself and his fossils from palaeoanthropology for more than 20 years, until an international scandal forced him to make his fossils accessible once again. Though other discoveries finally vindicated his views, Dubois spent his last years embroiled in challenges from a much younger man who had found new fossils in Java. From the beginning to the end of his life, Dubois' passion and scientific genius engulfed him in a chain reaction of inspiration, betrayal and love that orbited around his fossils and their significance.
Using a fascinating range of letters, diaries, and photographs from Dubois' personal collection, supplemented by those of friends and many more enemies, Shipman has reconstructed the life of this brilliant and complex character.
