The Man Who Found the Missing Link: Eugine Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right

Like many scientists of his generation, Eugene Dubois (1858-1940) was devoted to the ideas of Charles Darwin. He was also profoundly ambitious, seeking not only to establish incontrovertible proof of human evolution from some apelike ancestor--and thus reinforce Darwin's theories--but also to earn a place for himself at the head of modern scholarship.

Logic dictated that the remains of apelike ancestors would be found in the tropics, writes Pat Shipman in her thoughtful biography of Dubois. And such fossils had indeed been turning up throughout the Dutch East Indies, to which Dubois traveled in 1887. There, he conducted a rigorous campaign of excavations, which yielded fruit four years later with the discovery of fragmentary remains of a creature that he called Pithecanthropus erectus, the "upright-standing apeman" who constituted a missing link between modern humans and their distant ancestors.

Dubois's discovery met with controversy on a number of fronts, and on his return to Europe he complicated matters by refusing to allow other scholars to examine his fossil collection. Irascible, competitive, and more than a little paranoid, Dubois managed to alienate even would-be allies, and thus to distance himself from the scientific community. Effectively self-ostracized, Dubois was deprived of the honors and appointments he had striven for. Though Shipman's arguments sometimes seem overwrought, she nevertheless helps rehabilitate the reputation of this "underestimated man" by pointing to Dubois's many contributions to evolutionary theory. --Gregory McNamee