The Evolution of Javan Homo erectus

The story is well known: the young Dutchman Eugène Dubois, inspired by the writings of Ernst Haeckel and by hearing him lecture, gets a medical degree and gets himself posted to what was then the Dutch East Indies, where he intends to search for the missing link  and he finds it. What he actually found, in 1891 and 1892, were a calotte (skullcap), a femur, and two molars from Trinil, on the Solo River in Central Java, and a tiny mandibular fragment from Kedung Brubus in East Java (or rather, a gang of Indonesian workers supervised by two Dutch Army sergeants found them). These formed the basis for his description of the new genus and species Pithecanthropus erectus. Forty years later (!), he identified three more fragmentary femora from a box of Trinil fossils, then a further one with Trinil written on it in the handwriting of one of the Army sergeants, and finally a sixth femoral fragment which, for whatever reason, he thought might have come from Kedung Brubus. The story of this eccentric individual and his fossil discoveries is told by Shipman (2002).