Editing Java Man (section)

==Early interpretations==
[[Image:Java man.jpg|thumb|1922 reconstruction of a Java Man skull, due to Trinil 2 being only a cranium, Dubois who believed Java man was transitional between apes and humans, drew the reconstruction with an ape-like jaw but a brain larger than apes'|alt=1922 reconstruction of a Java Man skull, due to Trinil 2 being only a cranium, Dubois who believed Java man was transitional between apes and humans, drew the reconstruction with an ape-like jaw but a brain larger than apes']]
More than 50 years after Dubois's find, [[Ralph von Koenigswald]] recollected that, "No other paleontological discovery has created such a sensation and led to such a variety of conflicting scientific opinions."{{Sfn|Swisher|Curtis|Lewin|2000|p=69, citing von Koenigswald's ''Meeting Prehistoric Man'' (1956)}} The ''Pithecanthropus'' fossils were so immediately controversial that by the end of the 1890s, almost 80 publications had already discussed them.{{Sfn|Swisher|Curtis|Lewin|2000|p=70}}

Until the [[Taung child]]{{spaced ndash}}the 2.8 million-year-old remains of an ''[[Australopithecus africanus]]''{{spaced ndash}}were discovered in [[South Africa]] in 1924, Dubois's and Koenigswald's discoveries were the oldest hominid remains ever found. Some scientists of the day suggested{{sfn|Schwartz|2005|p={{page needed|date=July 2014}}}} that Dubois's Java Man was a [[Transitional fossil#Missing links|potential intermediate form]] between modern humans and the common ancestor we share with the other [[great ape]]s. The current consensus of anthropologists is that the direct ancestors of modern humans were African populations of ''[[Homo erectus]]'' (''[[Homo ergaster]]''), rather than the Asian populations of the same species exemplified by Java Man and [[Peking Man]].{{sfn|Hetherington|Reid|2010|p=[https://books.google.com/books?id=AAja8FTPF6QC&pg=PA64 64]}}

===Missing link theory===
Dubois first published his find in 1894.<ref name="Athena">{{cite magazine |title=The Discovery of Java Man in 1891 |magazine=Athena Review |volume=4|issue=1: Homo erectus |url=http://www.athenapub.com/13dubox1.htm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100514083346/http://www.athenapub.com/13dubox1.htm |archive-date=2010-05-14 |page=15}}</ref> Dubois's central claim was that ''Pithecanthropus'' was a [[transitional form]] between apes and humans, a so-called "[[Transitional fossil#Missing links|missing link]]".{{sfnm|1a1=de Vos|1y=2004|1p=272|2a1=Swisher|2a2=Curtis|2a3=Lewin|2y=2000|2p=69}} Many disagreed. Some critics claimed that the bones were those of an upright walking ape, or that they belonged to a primitive human.{{sfn|de Vos|2004|p=272}} This judgment made sense at a time when an [[human evolution|evolutionary view of humanity]] had not yet been widely accepted, and scientists tended to view hominid fossils as racial variants of modern humans rather than as ancestral forms.{{sfn|Swisher|Curtis|Lewin|2000|p=54}} After Dubois let a number of scientists examine the fossils in a series of conferences held in Europe in the 1890s, they started to agree that Java Man may be a transitional form after all, but most of them thought of it as "an extinct side branch" of the human tree that had indeed descended from apes, but not evolved into humans.{{sfn|de Vos|2004|pp=272–73 ["extinct side branch of human evolution"]}} This interpretation eventually imposed itself and remained dominant until the 1940s.{{sfn|Schmalzer|2008|p=258 ["While at the turn of the century a linear model of human evolution was widely accepted, from around 1910 to the 1940s, the dominant model placed fossil hominids like Java Man, Peking Man, and the Neanderthals on side branches of the family tree. These 'cousins' were understood to have become extinct, replaced by our unknown direct ancestors."]}}

[[File:Siamang 140807.jpg|thumb|The gibbon's ability to stand and walk upright made [[Eugène Dubois]] believe it was closely related to humans. This is one of the reasons why he once claimed that Java Man looked like a "giant gibbon".]]
Dubois was bitter about this and locked the fossil up in a trunk until 1923 when he showed it to Ales Hrdlicka from the Smithsonian Institution.<ref name="Athena" /> In response to critics who refused to accept that Java Man was a "missing link", in 1932 Dubois published a paper arguing that the Trinil bones looked like those of a "giant gibbon".{{sfnm|1a1=Theunissen|1y=1989|1p=152|2a1=Swisher|2a2=Curtis|2a3=Lewin|2y=2000 |2p=68|3a1=Gould|3y=1993|3p=134}} Dubois's use of the phrase has been widely misinterpreted as a retraction,{{sfnm|1a1=Theunissen|1y=1989|1pp=152–56|2a1=Swisher|2a2=Curtis|2a3=Lewin|2y=2000|2p=68 ["The second popular and persistent myth about Dubois and his supposed reaction to the anthropological world's largely negative assessment of ''Pithecanthropus'' as a putative missing link.... It is true... that Dubois's proposition found little support among professional anthropologists&nbsp;... But the rest of the story, about Dubois's supposed withdrawal and craziness, is apocryphal..."]|3a1=Gould|3y=1993|3p=134 ["And now... I may finally correct the last and most insidious claim of the standard legend—[that] Dubois... redesignates his once-proud ancestor as nothing but a giant gibbon."]}} but it was intended an argument to support his claim that ''Pithecanthropus'' was a transitional form.{{sfn|Gould|1993|p=136 ["Dubois's ingenious attempt to retain ''Pithecanthropus'' as a direct human ancestor has been widely misread in a precisely opposite manner as an ultimate surrender, almost comical in its transmogrification of a human forebear into a giant gibbon."]}} According to Dubois, evolution occurred by leaps, and the ancestors of humanity had doubled their [[Brain-to-body mass ratio|brain-to-body ratio]] on each leap.{{sfn|Gould|1993|pp=133–34}} To prove that Java Man was the "missing link" between apes and humans, he therefore had to show that its brain-to-body ratio was double that of apes and half that of humans. The problem was that Java Man's cranial capacity was 900 cubic centimeters, about two-thirds of modern humans'.{{sfn|Gould|1993|p=135 ["Dubois desperately wanted ''Pithecanthropus'' as a direct ancestor under his evolutionary view. But the brain of Java Man ranked with embarrassing bulk at some 900&nbsp;cm3, or two-thirds human volume."]}}

Like many scientists who believed that modern humans evolved "[[Out of Asia]]", Dubois thought that gibbons were closest to humans among the great apes.{{sfn|Swisher|Curtis|Lewin|2000|p=74 ["In common with other anthropologists of the time, Dubois believed that the human stock was rooted in some kind of gibbonlike ancestor."]}} To preserve the proportions predicted by his theory of [[evolution of the brain|brain evolution]], Dubois argued that Java Man was shaped more like a gibbon than a human. Imagined "with longer arms and a greatly expanded chest and upper body", the Trinil creature became a gigantic ape of about {{convert|100|kg}}, but "double cephalization of the anthropoid apes in general and half that of man".{{sfn|Gould|1993|p=135 [the second citation is from Dubois's paper]}} It was therefore halfway on the path to becoming a modern human.{{sfnm|1a1=Theunissen|1y=1989|1pp=152–156|2a1=Swisher |2a2=Curtis|2a3=Lewin |2y=2000|2p=74 ["Because Dubois applied the name 'Giant Gibbon' to this creature, many people took it to mean that ... he no longer considered his ''Pithecanthropus'' to be linked to human ancestry. ... By describing ''Pithecanthropus'' as a giant gibbon, Dubois simply meant that it was closer to gibbons than to humans in body form. And, he pointed out, gibbons and humans share many anatomical features that relate to humans' habitually and gibbons' occasionally upright mode of walking."]|3a1=Gould|3y=1993|3pp=134–35 ["Dubois used the proportions of a gibbon to give ''Pithecanthropus'' a brain at exactly half our level, thereby rendering his man of Java ... as the direct ancestor of all modern humans. He argued about gibbons to exalt ''Pithecanthropus'', not to demote the greatest discovery of his life."], 135–36 [citing from Dubois's 1932 paper: "''Pithecanthropus'' was not a man, but a gigantic genus allied to the gibbons, however superior to the gibbons on account of its exceedingly large brain volume and distinguished at the same time by its faculty of assuming an erect attitude and gait. It had the double cephalization of the anthropoid apes in general and half that of man."] and 136 [... "Dubois never said that ''Pithecanthropus'' was a gibbon (and therefore the lumbering, almost comical dead end of the legend); rather, he reconstructed Java Man with the proportions of a gibbon in order to inflate the body weight and transform his beloved creature into a direct human ancestor—its highest possible status—under his curious theory of evolution."]}} As Dubois concluded his 1932 paper: "I still believe, now more firmly than ever, that the ''Pithecanthropus'' of Trinil is the real 'missing link.'"{{sfnm|1a1=Theunissen|1y=1989|1p=156|2a1=Gould|2y=1993|2p=136 |3a1=Swisher|3a2=Curtis |3a3=Lewin|3y=2000|3p=74 [all three sources cite Dubois's phrase to show that he never abandoned the claim that Java Man was a "missing link"]}}

===Reclassification as ''Homo erectus''===
{{further|Homo erectus}}
Based on Weidenreich's work and on his suggestion that ''Pithecanthropus erectus'' and ''Sinanthropus pekinensis'' were connected through a series of [[interbreeding]] populations, German biologist [[Ernst Mayr]] reclassified them both as being part of the same species: ''[[Homo erectus]]''.{{sfn|Boaz|Ciochon |2004|pp=66–67}} Mayr presented his conclusion at the [[Cold Spring Harbor Symposium]] in 1950,{{sfn|Schmalzer|2008|p=98. The original paper is {{harvnb|Mayr|1950}}}} and this resulted in Dubois's ''erectus'' species being reclassified under the [[genus]] ''Homo''. As part of the reclassification, Mayr included not only ''Sinanthropus'' and ''Pithecanthropus'', but also ''Plesianthropus'', ''Paranthropus'', ''Javanthropus'', and several other genera as [[Synonym (taxonomy)|synonyms]], arguing that all human ancestors were part of a single genus (''Homo''), and that "never one more than one species of man existed on the earth at any one time".{{sfn|Delisle|2007|p=298, citing Mayr's 1950 paper}} A "revolution in taxonomy", Mayr's single-species approach to human evolution was quickly accepted.{{sfn|Boaz|Ciochon|2004 |p=67}} It shaped [[paleoanthropology]] in the 1950s and lasted into the 1970s, when the African genus ''[[Australopithecus]]'' was accepted into the human [[phylogenetic tree|evolutionary tree]].{{sfnm|1a1=Schmalzer|1y=2008|1p=98 ["the "single-species" thesis to which he was committed became the theoretical foundation for paleoanthropology for years to come"]|2a1=Boaz|2a2=Ciochon|2y=2004|2p=67 ["was to sweep anthropology in the 1950s"&nbsp;... "Thus was born the single-species hypothesis, a powerful model that endured until the late 1970s when fossil discoveries in Africa disproved it, at least for the early part of the hominid fossil record"]}}

In the 1970s, a tendency developed to regard the Javanese variety of ''H. erectus'' as a subspecies, ''Homo erectus erectus'', with the Chinese variety being referred to as ''Homo erectus pekinensis''.<ref>{{cite book |last=Sartono |first=S. |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ejsyIZMsC9oC&pg=PA327 |chapter=Implications arising from Pithecanthropus VIII|title=Paleoanthropology: Morphology and Paleoecology |editor=Russell H. Tuttle |publisher=Mouton & Co. |date=1975 |isbn=978-90-279-7699-4 |page=328}}</ref>