The Man Who Found the Missing Link

"Dubois was a Dutchman who grew up hearing about Darwin. He grew up going into the fossil-rich hillsides in the southern Netherlands and was really interested in natural history. He was brilliant, he became a physician, but he concluded that the most important thing anybody could ever discover was the supposed missing link between humans and apes. He decided he was going to find it. In what must be one of the most rash and perhaps luckiest expeditions in the history of palaeontology, he decided that the cradle of humanity must be in Asia, and he thought, ‘Let’s go to the Dutch East Indies!’ How convenient, if you are a Dutchman! He searched in Indonesia, and darned if he didn’t find what we know today as Java Man, or the species Homo erectus . He threw the luckiest dart in the history of palaeontology. He had to work hard and spent years in difficult conditions not finding anything. But the fact that he found anything is remarkable; many people who followed him to the same region didn’t find anything in thirty years. So Dubois is a character who could have easily made no mark and been quickly forgotten, but with persistence and a bit of luck he did strike gold. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Pat Shipman tells a remarkable story. Again, I singled that book out because it was, to me, an example of something different about what a book could be. Pat didn’t always have the dots connected in documentary sources. I think she took more license in telling the Dubois story than a conventional academic biography would allow. That’s right. She’s good in that missing link area. It’s a hell of a tale. And by telling a great story, she brought that character back to life, back to people’s attention. It’s a book I treasure. Like a lot of discoveries, admired by some and reviled by many. He had fierce critics and a few supporters. Some of the critics were anti-Darwinian, they just wanted to deny the evidence. They were essentially saying all he found were the bones of an ape or the bones of a modern man, whichever critic it was. He expected that when he came back with these remarkable fossils he’d be praised from every quarter of the scientific community, but that was a naïve expectation. He got hammered, and he didn’t take it well. There are some tragic notes in Dubois’s tale, and Pat goes into those dark places very well. Dubois was, in many ways, his own worst enemy in the way he behaved. He had a difficult personality and he made his own world more difficult. It’s a tale that we find in other places in literature, of people who are visionaries and great dreamers, and committed to that vision, but at the same time they are shooting themselves in the foot and dragging down the people around them."