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Marco Langbroek's Asteroid website
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Asteroid (206241) Dubois
Honour to a great scientist who found the "Missing Link"
Asteroid (206241) Dubois
Honour to a great scientist who found the "Missing Link"
In June 2009, the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), on the suggestion of the author of this webpage, officially named asteroid (206241) Dubois. The naming citation, published in Minor Planet Circular #66245, reads as follows:
(206241) Dubois = 2002 WM28 Dutch anatomist, surgeon and paleontologist Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois (1858-1940) was the "founding father" of palaeoanthropology. His dedicated search culminated in 1891 with the discovery of the first Homo erectus fossils in a bank of the Solo river near Trinil, Java. The name was suggested by M. Langbroek. MPC #66245
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This recognition for Eugène Dubois, the 'father' of the field of science we call Palaeoanthropology, was long overdue. Dubois was and is a legend within the world of paleoanthropology: but virtually unknown outside that field and completely forgotten in his own country of origin, the Netherlands. This while he singlehandedly founded a completely new field of research: the study of Human Evolution based on human fossils.
below: a young Dubois at age 25, 1883
A concise biography of Eugène Dubois (skip)
Eugène (Marie Eugène François Thomas) Dubois was born in the village of Eijsden in Dutch Limburg on 28 January 1858 as the oldest of four children to a Roman-Catholic countryside pharmacist. In 1877 he moved to Amsterdam to study Medicin, where he graduated as a medical Doctor in 1884. In 1886 he was appointed lecturer in anatomy at Amsterdam University, under professor Max Fürbringer, to whom he already had been assistant from 1881 onwards. That same year, he married Anna Lojenga (1862-1943).
Dubois' Amsterdam career ended shortly after this. Dubois had a difficult, somewhat paranoid personality (nowadays we would say: he suffered from a personality disorder) that grew more serious with the years. In 1887 this personality characteristic seriously emerged for the first time when he fell out with his superior, Fürbringer, in a conflict over credits for ideas expressed in Dubois' study of the ontogeny of the Larynx.
This conflict seems to have been the final drop that made Dubois decide to leave Amsterdam for the Dutch East-Indies (current Indonesia). He signed up as a surgeon in the Royal Dutch East-Indies Army (KNIL), and set sail to Sumatra, where he arrived on 11 December 1887.
On Sumatra, Dubois started to pursue his ambition to find the "missing link" (*), the ancestral link between ape and Man. He published a paper giving arguments as to why the Dutch East-Indies were ideally suited for that endeavour.
With permission of his superiors, he started excavations in several Sumatran limestone caves. This yielded rich fossil Pleistocene fauna's (including fossil primates), but no human fossils.
An accidental discovery of a fossilized human skull near Wajak on the island of Java by the mining engineer Van Rietschoten, in October 1888, made Dubois switch attention to that island. While the skull was a modern Homo sapiens (and is now estimated to be of neolithic age), it was fossilized, which to Dubois showed promise for more fossil finds. In April 1890, Dubois' request for a transfer to Java was granted by his superiors. Instead of focussing on caves as he had done in Sumatra, he now also started to include other types of localities.
Among the several localities were he dug (with the help of two KNIL corporals, Kriele and De Winter, and a gang of convict labourers) was a locality near Trinil, in the banks of the Solo river. In September 1891, barely a month after the start of excavations at Trinil, the excavations yielded a primate molar, initially assigned to be that of a 'chimpansee'. The next month, in October 1891, a skullcap was found. It looked distinctively more primitive than a human skull with its small brain cavity size, strong eyebrow ridges and low forehead, but nevertheless more advanced than the skull of extant primates. During the next field season, in August 1892, a very human-like femur was found in the same deposits as the molar and skullcap.
below: the author
of this website -and discoverer of asteroid (206241) Dubois- with the
original
Pithecanthropus (= Homo) erectus fossils discovered by Dubois: skullcap, femur and molar.
Photo taken at the Dutch National Museum of Natural History, Leiden, 2008
Pithecanthropus (= Homo) erectus fossils discovered by Dubois: skullcap, femur and molar.
Photo taken at the Dutch National Museum of Natural History, Leiden, 2008
Taken all together, it convinced Dubois that he had fulfilled his goal: these were the remains of the 'missing link' between Apes and Humans, showing the correct mix of archaic and advanced anatomical characteristics, including (from the femur) evidence of bipedalism. Initially calling his finds Anthropopithecus erectus ('the upright walking chimpansee'), his further studies convinced him that it was somewhat more human than ape, and he changed the name into Pithecanthropus erectus, 'the upright walking Ape-man'. In August 1894, he published his find in a now famous 39-page monograph written in German: Pithecanthropus erectus, eine menschenähnliche Uebergangsform aus Java, which appeared with the State Press at Batavia, Java, the capitol of the Dutch East-Indies.
It is important to point out that Dubois made his discovery because he was deliberately searching for fossils of human ancestors. During the decades before his find, several finds of remains of another fossil hominine, the Neandertal, had been made in Europe. These were all chance finds by quarry-men however, instead of the result of a deliberate search for the 'missing link', and in general most scholars at that time were of the opinion that Neandertals were peculiar extinct humans rather than a link between humans and apes. Dubois' activities in the Dutch East-Indies, culminating in his discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus (nowadays known as Homo erectus), represents the true birth of Palaeanthropology, the quest for and study of human evolutionary ancestors. As Theunissen (1985) has pointed out, the finds of Dubois and his interpretation of them, backed by anatomists like Schwalbe who also incorporated the Neandertal finds in the argument, created the first truely phylogenetic models of human evolution. Dubois is therefore widely seen as the 'founding father' of the discipline.
Dubois publication got a mixed reception. While some (including important palaeontologists and anatomists like Manouvrier and Haeckel) accepted his finds as representing a human ancestor linking humans and apes, others such as Virchow were more critical, suggesting amongst others it was merely a "fossil gibbon". When one scholar supporting Dubois in his ideas, the German anatomist Gustav Schwalbe, published a very extensive series of studies of Dubois' fossils, Dubois felt deprived of his priorities as the discoverer of them and feared that his plans for a much more in-depth study of the fossils would threathen to become nipped in the bud. It led him to stop access of others to the fossils. Taking in the critiques more heavily than the support, becoming more and more angered and paranoid by the motives he perceived to be behind some of the critique and disagreement, he became more and more withdrawn. It finally took a gentle but clear "order" by the Dutch Academy of Sciences in 1922 (following complaints by foreign scholars) to convince Dubois to grant other scholars access to the original fossils again.
During the first decades of the 20th century, Dubois' publications and research digressed to other fields, notably the evolution of the brain in the mammal clade. But his involvement in human evolution and specifically the phylogenetic position of Pithecanthropus re-emerged during the twenties and thirties. This was at least partly forced by the fact that he could no longer monopolize the study of his Pithecanthropus fossils, and by new finds in China by Black, Pei and Weidenreich (Sinanthropus pekinensis, 'Peking Man', now with the Pithecanthropus fossils merged into Homo erectus) and, during the second half of the '30-ties, new Pithecanthropus finds on Java at Modjokerto and Sangiran by Ralph von Koenigswald and at Ngandong by Oppenoorth. Dubois did not suffer opinions deviant from his own easily, and this resulted in some bitter disputes, notably with Von Koenigswald, whom Dubois at one point even publicly accused of grave errors in a skull reconstruction. Many of these discussions were held by means of 'letters to the editor' to various newspapers. Dubois by that time was residing at his mansion at Haelen in Dutch Limburg, De Bedelaar, where he experimented with extinct biotope reconstructions.
The invasion of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in May 1940 and the severing of contacts with the Dutch East-Indies cut the discussions short. On 12 December 1940 Eugène Dubois died, less than 1 month short of 83 years old. His written and material legacy as well as the fossils he found on Sumatra and Java (including the Pithecanthropus fossils), are now preserved in the Dutch National Museum of Natural History 'Naturalis' at Leiden, the Netherlands. The Pithecanthropus skullcap, femur and molar from Trinil are on permanent display there. In modern times, Pithecanthropus has been taxonomically merged into the species Homo erectus along with Sinanthropus and a number of other fossils.
* note: throughout this essay, 'missing link' has been put in parenthesis, to denote that the concept of a 'missing link', while still very popular and often used in the popular press, is no longer used in science. Evolution is a continuous process, and instead of 'a' missing link, all species, fossil and extant, are part of evolutionary lines.
(een Nederlandse vertaling van
Pat Shipman's biografie van Dubois uit 2001, genaamd "De ontbrekende
schakel", is verkrijgbaar bij uitgeverij Vorroux)
below: blink of a segment of the discovery image triplet
of (206241) Dubois = 2002 WM28, taken 24 Nov 2002
(images by NEAT)
Asteroid (206241) Dubois
Asteroid (206241) Dubois is a small object with an estimated size of about 2.5 km (or possibly larger, if the albedo is as low as that of other Hygiea-family objects). It moves in an orbit with an inclination of about 5.5 degrees, perihelion at 2.6 AU and aphelion at 3.6 AU, in the asteroid main belt between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It's orbital period is 5.52 years.
Based on its orbital elements, asteroid (206241) Dubois appears to belong to the Hygiea family of asteroids, a grouplet of carbonaceous objects in similar orbits signifying a single origin, perhaps in the breakup of a large asteroid after an impact on the parent body. The main member of this family is asteroid (10) Hygiea.
Asteroid (206241) Dubois was discovered as an unidentified object in December 2008 by the author of this webpage (who is both a professional stone age archaeologist, see his palaeolithic research website, and an amateur astronomer a.o. hunting for asteroids, see his asteroid website) on archive images from the NEAT project taken on 24 November 2002 with the 1.2m Schmidt telescope at Mt. Palomar in Arizona. He found several more detections of the same object on images taken between October 31 and December 10, 2002. After sending in the linked astrometry obtained from these images, allowing a preliminary orbit determination, to the Minor Planet Center of the IAU at Harvard, the object was awarded the temporary designation 2002 WM28 in MPEC 2008-Y02.
More single-night observations by other observatories were linked to this object by the MPC, resulting in the assignment of the permanent number (206241) early 2009. Following this, the author proposed to name the object after Eugène Dubois, a personal "hero" of him, a proposal which was forwarded to the IAU by the kind cooperation of the people from NEAT, who hold the formal discovery credits. In June 2009, the IAU's Committee on Small Body Nomenclature approved of the name, after which it was published in Minor Planet Circular no. 66245.
below:
the orbit of asteroid (206241) Dubois in the solar system
An interactive 3D orbit diagram for (206241) Dubois can be found at the NASA-JPL Small Body Database Browser.
Orbital elements of (206241) Dubois
source: Minor Planet Center
Epoch 2009 June 18.0 TT = JDT 2455000.5 |
| Sources: - Dubois, M. E. F. T., 1894: Pithecanthropus erectus, eine menschenähnliche Uebergangsform aus Java. Batavia: Landsdrukkerij. - Shipman P., 2001: The Man Who Found the Missing Link. The extraordinary life of Eugène Dubois. New York: Simon & Schuster. (*) - Theunissen B., 1985: Eugène Dubois en de aapmens van Java. Een bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van de paleoantropologie. Amsterdam: Rodopi. - Minor Planet Circular #66245, June 2009. (* een Nederlandse vertaling van dit boek, getiteld "De ontbrekende schakel", is verkrijgbaar bij uitgeverij Vorroux) |
about the author of this webpage:
Dr Marco Langbroek (1970) is a professional Palaeolithic (old stone age) archaeologist at the Institute for Geo- and BioArchaeology, faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, VU University Amsterdam. He is also an avid high-level amateur astronomer, and discovered a number of asteroids, including asteroid (206241) Dubois. In 2008, The IAU named an asteroid after him: (183294) Langbroek
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Marco Langbroek's Asteroid website
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(c) 2009 by Dr Marco
Langbroek. Page created
June
13 & 14, 2009, last updated August 1, 2009.
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