The Man Who Found the Missing Link
Subtitle: Eugine Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right
Edition: 1st edition
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: January 11, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 515
ISBN-13: 9780684855813
Subjects: Evolution; Netherlands; Historical - General; Organic Evolution; Physical anthropologists; Biography & Autobiography; Biography / Autobiography; Life Sciences - Evolution - Human; Biography/Autobiography; Java man; Indonesia; Scientists - General; Biography & Autobiography / Historical; 1858-1940; Biography; Dubois, Eugene,; Java
First sentence: The letter comes by the last post on a weakly sunny afternoon in February of 1937.
Description: "The Dubois family motto, "Recte et fortiter," means straight and strong, and Dubois lived it to the letter. He willfully abandoned his home and promising career at the University of Amsterdam to drag his wife and baby daughter halfway around the world to search the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) for the legendary missing link. After five years, two weeks, and three days of life-threatening work, Dubois' excavations yielded the missing link. It was a form he called Pithecanthropus erectus, a heavily fossilized skullcap, tooth, and femur (thigh hone) of an ape-man the like of which the world had never seen." "Drawing on Dubois' personal archives, to which she has had unprecedented access, Pat Shipman sets the historic and scientific record right in this dramatic and moving biography. In her revisionist view, Dubois is the unrecognized father of modern paleoanthropology (the science of human origins and evolution), one of the greatest discoverers of human origins. He was much more than just a fossil-finder; he was a scientist of genius."--BOOK JACKET.