Items related to Man Who Found the Missing Link: The Extraordinary Life...
Synopsis
Pat Shipman's latest book is a scientific biography, written like a novel. It tells the story of one of the greatest scientists at the turn of the century - a Dutchman called Eugene Dubois - now largely forgotten, but the man whose discovery of the 'missing link' altered our view of human origins. Through force of personality, intellect and luck, Dubois pulled off one of the most amazing scientific coups of all time. As a young man, he decided that the most important contribution a man could make to science would be to find the missing link, the extinct form that exemplifies the evolutionary connection between humans and apes. It would be the proof of Darwinian evolution, then still controversial. He deduced where the missing link should be and found the fossil, now known as homo erectus, in Java in 1891. Shipman uses a fascinating range of letters, diaries and photographs from Dubois' personal collection, friends and enemies to create a story-driven account of how Dubois' life and career exploded across the world in the 1890s. This man's passion and scientific genius engulfed him and his friends' lives in a chain reaction of inspiration and betrayal that orbited around his precious fossils for forty years.
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Review
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, writes Pat Shipman in her thoughtful biography of Dubois, that the remains of apelike ancestors would be found in the tropics, and such fossils had indeed been turning up throughout the Dutch East Indies, to which he travelled in 1887. There he conducted a rigorous campaign of excavations that 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 even paranoid, Dubois managed to alienate even would-be allies, and thus to distance himself from the scientific community. Effectively self-ostracised, Dubois was deprived of the honours and appointments for which he had strived. Her arguments sometimes seem overwrought, but all the same Shipman helps rehabilitate the reputation of this "underestimated man" by pointing to Dubois's many contributions to evolutionary theory. --Gregory McNamee
About the Author
Pat Shipman is an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherDiane Pub Co
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 075679160X
- ISBN 13 9780756791605
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages580
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