Java Man (Pithecanthropus erectus) meaning erect ape-man was discovered by Eugene Dubois in 1891. The story of one man's adventure to find evidence to support a theory begins in September 1891 near the village of Trinil in a damp place by the Solo River, Dubois found a skull cap. A year later and fifty feet from where he had found the skull cap, he found a femur. Later he found three teeth in another location in that area. Dubois assumed that all these bones were from the same individual and that they were as much as a million years old.
Nearby, in the same condition (indicating the same approximate age), he also found two human skulls, but he never publicize this find. Thirty-one years later, in 1922 , he admitted that the human skull's were actually ape skulls.
Dubois excitedly reported that his find (the pieces of bone) as Java Man, and spent the rest of his life promoting this great discovery. The thigh bone was a normal human upper leg bone. As might be expected, many experts questioned whether all the bones came from the same person, and even if they did, they said they were human bones, not ape bones. But Dubois spent most of the remainder of his life lecturing and telling people about the "half-human/half-ape" bones that he found in Java in 1891-1892.
About 15 years before his death, and after most evolutionists had become convinced that his find was nothing more than bones from a modern human. Dubois announced that the bones belonged to a gibbon.
School textbooks and popular books for the public continue to cite 500,000 years as the age of Java man, which admittedly, is quite an imaginary figure. For more information on Java Man go to http://www.wikipedia.com.
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