Man Who Found the Missing Link: Eugene DuBois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right by Pat Shipman

From Barnes & Noble

This exhaustively researched book brings to light the work of a man who could rightfully be known as the father of modern paleoanthropology. Eugene Dubois was the original discoverer of Java Man and spent his entire life trying to receive proper recognition for his accomplishment

From the Publisher

Eugène Dubois was born on January 28, 1858, an interesting between-time in science. It was some eighteen months after the first Neanderthal skeleton was found in Germany and a little more than a year before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in England. Believing that a powerful truth must lie in Darwin's deceptively simple ideas, Dubois -- a brilliant young Dutch physician and anatomist -- vowed to discover it. There is a link, he declared, a link as yet unknown, between apes and Man. Finding it would be the greatest scientific discovery ever, and the name Eugène Dubois would be remembered.

The Dubois family motto, "Recte et fortiter," means straight and strong, and Dubois lived it to the letter. He willfully abandoned his home and promising career at the University of Amsterdam to drag his wife and baby daughter halfway around the world to search the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) for the legendary missing link. After five years, two weeks, and three days of life-threatening work, Dubois' excavations yielded the missing link. It was a form he called Pithecanthropus erectus, a heavily fossilized skullcap, tooth, and femur (thigh bone) of an ape-man the like of which the world had never seen. Barely surviving a harrowing sea journey during which the precious fossils were nearly lost, Dubois arrived in Europe triumphant in having accomplished the impossible. But instead of the praise and admiration he had dreamed of, he was greeted with skepticism and debate. His finds were too surprising, his techniques and analysis too new, his conclusions too sweeping to be easily accepted. Refusing to yield to his detractors, Dubois battled well past the turn of the century to convince his scientific colleagues of the true nature and value of his find. His solitary crusade cost him dearly -- the love of his wife, the trust of his best friend, the support of his closest professional associates, the legacy of respect he risked everything to achieve. On December 16, 1940, he died, alone, bitter, and misunderstood.

Drawing on Dubois' personal archives, to which she has had unprecedented access, Pat Shipman sets the historic and scientific record right in this dramatic and moving biography. In her revisionist view, Dubois is the unrecognized father of modern paleoanthropology (the science of human origins and evolution), one of the greatest discoverers of human origins. He was much more than just a fossil-finder; he was a scientist of genius.

It takes a brilliant writer to elucidate a brilliant mind, and Pat Shipman -- long hailed as a stellar narrator of the drama of scientific understanding -- here shines as never before. The Man Who Found the Missing Link is an irresistible tale of adventure, scientific daring, tragic disappointments, and a strange and enduring love -- and it is true.

Archaeology - Mark Rose

The Man Who Found the Missing Link is enjoyable to read. Shipman has given us a readable, authoritative biography of a pioneering personality in paleoanthropology.

Journal of American Medical Association - A. Mark Clarfield

Dubois was one of the great physician-scientists of the early part of the 20th century. His fame is rightly based on his discovery of the ancient fossils of Homo erectus. It is clear that his medical and anatomical training served him in good stead in understanding the stories that these old bones could tell. His stories continues to fascinate, bringing back to us not only the history of our profession but that of this complex and fascinating physician.

Baltimore Sun - Frank D. Roylance

Shipman's scholarship is exhaustive, her writing engaging. She is at her most evocative when she describes colonial life in the tropics, and how the proper Dutch - those who survived - were entranced and seduced by the scents, the tastes, the teeming life and languid climate of what is now Indonesia.

Book Magazine

The Man Who Found the Missing Link reads like a wonderful hoax pulled off by one of our bigger-brained novelists. Invent an obscure late-nineteenth-century Dutch anatomist who takes his young wife and daughter to the jungles of what is now Indonesia on a crazed scientific quest. Reduce this proud Ahab of evolution with heat, malaria and punishing isolation, and the anatomist becomes the missing link between ape and man, a hard-headed gibbon who can't see that his intellectual ambition is destroying his family.

But Pat Shipman has photographs of this anatomist, Eugene Dubois, who discovered in a Java riverbank in 1891 and 1892 the fossilized skull, femur and tooth of a medical species he called Pithecanthropus erectus, a being between Neanderthal and human. Shipman also has photos of the bones, as well as of Dubois' family, his colleagues and the site. Dubois returned from Indonesia in 1895 and spent the rest of his life—he died in 1940—arguing the importance of his find. Often physically absent from his family when he was out in the field, Dubois was emotionally estranged back in Holland, where his only true interests were science and his own fame.

Shipman tells Dubois' biography as if it were a novel.

Although Dubois left behind a huge bibliography of essays, letters and journals, they don't wholly substantiate the hundred-year-old conversations Shipman "retells," the characters' inner feelings she "records," or the extreme specificity of settings she "recreates"—all in the contemporary fiction writer's breathless present tense.

Shipman nowhere offers a rationale for her novelistic devices, so I checked the library to makesure The Man Who Found the Missing Link isn't a hoax. Dubois has some inches in the Micropedia, but he may not quite deserve the space Shipman gives him. Had she a novelist's sense of narrative economy, she would have concentrated on the difficulties he braved in his search and would have shortened the book's last third, where she reproduces a lot of repetitive and petty academic wrangling. Ironically, this third is the most believable because it's the most easily documented with quotes from essays and letters, many about Dubois' hiding his fossils from other scientists. Yes, as in some over-determined fiction, the missing link was missing.

The first two thirds of The Man Who Found the Missing Link are high scientific romance. A young genius taken with Darwin's new ideas rebels against conventional thinking and decides to look for pre-man half a world away instead of in European caves. Everything is a hardship. Dubois can't find the right diggers. His wife, Anna, resists adapting to colonial customs. There's always the enervating weather. Yet Dubois persists, keeps collecting despite a stillborn daughter and his wife's breakdown. And when the bones of Pithecanthropus show up among thousands of other bones, the genius recognizes them.

Shipman is very good at supplying women's perspectives on the patriarchal and patronizing Dubois. Anna never forgives him for her miscarriage or for suspecting her of infidelity with Dubois' best friend. One of Dubois' female assistants in Holland is scandalized by the old man's pawing of young housekeepers. And in an irony that seems arranged by a novelist, Dubois' daughter is the only one of his three children to share her father's capabilities and ambition.

In place of Dubois' long, troubled "afterlife" in Holland, Shipman might well have ventured more outside the heads of her main characters to establish Dubois' place in current thinking about human evolution. She credits him with proposing a theory of "evolution by leaps," and with stimulating interest in the relationship between brain capacity and body size, but Shipman doesn't place Dubois in contemporary scientific contexts and doesn't mention any well-known scientists to buttress her case for the importance of Dubois. Sometimes the author seems as single-minded about her subject's fame as he was himself.

On his way back to Holland with the bones of Pithecanthropus in a specially made suitcase, Dubois and his family sail into a vicious storm. The captain orders passengers into the lifeboats in case the ship sinks. Dubois forgets the suitcase and returns to his cabin to get it. Back in the lifeboat, he tells Anna, "If the lifeboat is lowered, you see to the little ones, for I shall have to look after this." The anecdote sums up much of The Man Who Found the Missing Link, including the nature of its protagonist, his conflicts with humans and nature and, in its intimate immediacy, Shipman's method. Used for giant figures such as Newton or Darwin, her method might be inappropriate. But to novelize Dubois was probably the only way to bring this small man back from the missing. His is a fascinating story, whatever its truth.
—Tom LeClair

Publishers Weekly

Dutch scientist Eug ne Dubois is not nearly as well known as his most important scientific contribution. Dubois's 1892 archeological expedition found the first fossil evidence of Pithecanthropus erectus (what we know today as Homo erectus) or Java man. At the time of its discovery, P. erectus was viewed by many scientists as the evolutionary link between the great apes and humans. In a masterful biography with the narrative craftsmanship of good fiction, Shipman, an anthropology professor at Penn State and author of Taking Wing (a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award), demonstrates how Dubois was driven by his ambition and by university politics to leave his placid life as a professor in Amsterdam and move to the East Indies in search of a fossil that would confirm Darwin's theory of human evolution. Shipman depicts Dubois as a troubled genius who consistently put his own desires ahead of his family's needs. In addition, Shipman reveals much of the politics that often swirl around important and controversial scientific discoveries; for example, the dominant thinking of the time dismissed evolution as folly and marked Dubois as a reckless romantic hell-bent on his unpopular mission. Even while using the unorthodox (in nonfiction) techniques of re-created dialogue and interior monologue (both of which appear supported by voluminous research and add to the book's drama), Shipman proves herself a virtuoso of the scientific biography. 64 b & w photos. (Jan. 11) Forecast: This title is nicely complemented by Java Man (Forecasts, Oct. 30), which tells how two scientists discovered that Java man was not a precursor of Homo sapiens but another species co-existing with modern humans. Nonscientists who enjoyed Java Man will also want to read top science writer Shipman's outstanding account of the original Java man discovery. Dual shelving of these two titles may increase sales of both. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Eugene Dubois was a highly intelligent, self-motivated, and driven scientist. Convinced of the validity of Darwin's theory of human evolution, he became obsessed with finding fossil evidence of a transitional form between ape and man to convince the skeptics. He renounced his university position, ignored his family's objections, and enlisted as an army surgeon in exchange for an assignment in Java, where he believed the fossil evidence would be discovered. He found the missing link but paid a steep price for his success. Dubois christened the fossilized skullcap, femur, and tooth he discovered Pithecanthropus erectus and described them in a monograph he published before leaving Java, believing that he had secured his future as a scientist. Instead, he spent the rest of his life defending himself against criticisms. Award-winning writer Shipman (Taking Wing) has done a remarkable job of bringing to life this brilliant and complex man against the backdrop of scientific discovery, battles for prominence, and ultimate vindication. Highly recommended for both academic libraries and public libraries with general science collections.--Gloria Maxwell, Penn Valley Community Coll. Lib., Kansas City, MO Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

New York Times Book Review - John Noble Wilford

[Shipman] is among the best writers who manage to describe science to popular audiences without sacrificing the complexities of the issues . . . Dubois could not have asked for a more capable and understanding biographer.

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The letter comes by the last post on a weakly sunny afternoon in February of 1937. Looking out the window, Dubois searches for the slightest hint of green that he knows will come first to the willow trees at De Bedelaar. It is still very brisk out, not yet warm. The promise of renewal seems cruel when any real hope of it is still far away.

He is slow to realize what has come, it is so unexpected. His mind is not so quick as it once was, now that he is in his eightieth year, although he has not become so vague as his wife, Anna. The servant girl brings the letters in as usual; he sits down at the desk, puts on his glasses, and takes up his letter opener. He carefully inserts the blade into the corner of the flap and slits each envelope neatly. It is his habit to read his letters in order, placing them in a tidy pile before pausing to compose his answers. While he skims the letters, Anna prattles on, unaware that anything of significance is happening. Most of the post is ordinary -- bills, a few letters of inquiry from colleagues or students. When he picks up the last letter, unsuspecting, he is momentarily confused by the two handwritings on the envelope. The hand that wrote his name is crabbed and somehow familiar, but he cannot place it immediately; the other, which wrote the address, is completely unknown to him. When he opens that envelope and sees the tissue-thin paper inside, something stirs in his memory. As soon as he reads the salutation, he knows, as if he has been expecting this letter for years.

He decides that he cannot read it in front of Anna and rings for the servant. "Take your mistress to sit in the back garden for a while," he says to her. He waits until they have left and the room is quiet to unfold the translucent, crinkling pages. He doesn't need to turn over the last page to look for the signature. There is only one person from whom it can have come, only one person in Kediri, in faraway Java, who would be writing him.

"My dear doctor," the letter begins. He always addressed Dubois so, even when they saw each other daily. How long has it been since Dubois heard from him? It must have been forty years. Forty years since his friend called him "My dear doctor." From anyone else, these words might be only a courtesy, an acknowledgment of his professorial status and medical degree. From Prentice they were a term of endearment, an evocation of the intimacy and friendship they shared so long ago.

Kediri February 7, 1936

Dubois folds the letter back up and places it in his lap for a moment. When was the last time someone told him that they loved him? When was the last time that he brought light and happiness into someone's life? He is close to weeping as the memories flood his mind.

To know that Prentice remembers, too -- that the past echoes for him, too -- is sweet, but the pleasure is tinged with sad mockery. He and Prentice are no longer the handsome young men they once were, when they were together in Java. Thirty-four years old! What an age: so young, so hopeful, so naïve. Now Dubois feels old and fat and cold and tired.

Apparently Prentice never made enough money to return to Europe, as he once wished. But maybe he got used to the way of living there in Java, with the warmth and the sunshine and the servants. He had a beautiful nyai, a sweet and quiet native mistress, who looked after him in those years after his wife died. Is she still there, aged but graceful, looking after him even now? Those who come back can't live like that, with servants and large houses with fine gardens. The trouble is that Java could never have been Dubois' home. Even if he had adapted enough to be considered Indische, he would always have been an outsider, born in Europe. As for himself, Dubois couldn't have stayed; his work was here. He is glad to be here at his beautiful De Bedelaar, his own Dutch corner of nature, near Haelen.

Dubois catalogues his possessions in his mind, systematically. He has his house and his garden, his lake, his woods, his birds, his library, his specimens. He does not have youth or hope, or even much ambition, anymore. He does not have Prentice, or anyone who loves him. Prentice was a true companion. They were young together, and so sure, so certain -- and now, no one else remembers but Prentice.

He hears the outer door open and close and knows that Anna has come back into the house. He isn't ready to see her, or anyone else. It is impossible, with so much in his heart and on his face, too, no doubt. How can he explain why the letter has affected him so? He could not let her read it; it would be a desecration. He takes off his glasses and carefully places them in his top pocket; the letter, too, goes there for safekeeping. Then he rises, goes into the hallway, and puts on his felt hat and a loose coat, not bothering to button it properly. He leaves by the front door, walking out slowly toward the bench by the lake. He often sits there in the afternoons; it is a good time to watch the birds and note which ones have returned from their winter farther south. No one will think it strange of him to sit alone there, thinking, for some hours. He lives a solitary life anyway, even though Anna still visits occasionally.

The earth along the path through the beechwood is springy and soft, from centuries of accumulation of fallen leaves and moss. The ground is no longer hard and bare; with his scientist's eye, he notices the few brave plants that are poking their green noses up through the leaf litter. But there are not many yet; it is too early, too cold still for them, he thinks. Nature always has time; she does not hurry. The woods know that life returns, that nothing is ever gone forever. It is a luxury of the young and of plants, to be so certain.

He reaches the bench and uses his sleeve to wipe off a faint skim of frost, leaving a shadow of moisture and dirt on the wool. He sits heavily and removes the letter from his pocket. He unfolds it carefully, but he doesn't read it again right away. He simply holds the pages in his large, soft, liver-spotted hand. His hands were once so skilled; they dissected the finest anatomical structures, drew close likenesses, and even sculpted a figure once or twice; these hands painstakingly removed rock matrix from priceless fossil specimens. Once he was envied for his fine manual skills as well as for his brains; too many scholars, even physicians, were ham-handed and clumsy, needing others to carry out the detailed work. Not him, not then. And now his hands lie gnarled and crooked-fingered in his lap, holding a letter from his past.

To have Prentice suddenly reappear like that, sounding as full of joy and life as always, understanding Dubois' mind better than he ever did himself...it is almost too much to bear. Dubois cannot think clearly. Indeed, he can hardly breathe for the shock of it. It is like having an attack of asthma; his chest is tight. He takes off his hat, crumpling the letter a little in the process. With the other hand, he rubs his bald head, disarranging the fringe of snow-white hair over his ears. It is a gesture he makes often when he is thinking now; it gives him an oddly wild look, like a merganser chick: untamed, startled, perhaps about to try to take flight. After a moment, he puts his hat back on his head for warmth, but carelessly, not setting it straight. He is an old man. He is not concerned with his appearance.

He feels the texture of the letter in his hand and sits very still, looking at the lake, watching for coots and ducks. He is remembering those years in Java, and that companionship. There was never another time like it.

He has achieved everything he set out to, even though all about him scoffed. It was in Java that he became the man who found the missing link: him, Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois. In Java, he met his true destiny and began his true life. The missing link has been the most important thing in his life, as he knew it would be. It was...everything.

But now he realizes what he left behind in Java, something he did not know was of such value. For there has never been another friend like Prentice, never another companion of his heart and mind like him. It was a little improbable, that friendship between the Dutch scientist and the Scottish planter. Their backgrounds were different, their training had little overlap, but they both shared a few important things: burning curiosity, physical vigor, and an urgent need to show what they could do when they were freed from the petty restrictions of small-minded European society.

He turns the facts over and over in his mind, musing. How rarely such a friendship comes into a man's life; he didn't know then that it was his only chance. Then, he only thought of finding the missing link and achieving something important in science. He knew Prentice's companionship was a great comfort, for the Scotsman understood the significance of what Dubois was doing. They had in common that need to do something grand. How could a man bear to live without trying to make his mark in the world? In the end, Dubois accomplished something important, very important. He should have valued Prentice more highly, though; he was too preoccupied with fossils. He didn't know how cold and lonely the years after the discovery would be. The years of his greatest professional accomplishments, the years in which his name and discoveries have become famous around the world, have left him living here, in solitude. He has only the trees and the birds and the lake for company.

He stares at the thin light playing on the water. Sometimes a ripple catches the sunshine, reflecting it brightly enough to make his pale blue eyes water in sympathy.

The light was different in Java: hotter, more merciless, sometimes incapacitating. Sometimes there was so much light that he couldn't bear to be outside, and then he would seek the shade, any meager, pale scrap of shade.

In the forests, the light was dappled, filtered through a thousand tones of green and yellow, and the air was tangible with humidity. It was like a wall that pushed against him at every step. Sometimes it was so quiet that the song of an unseen bird would split the air, like a gunshot, making him jump. And there were those interminable insects, which creaked and popped and whirred like a madman's confounded invention, deep in the forest where no inventors ever strayed, where no books were ever read. There was just forest and green and leaves and more green. Those locusts would carry on and on and on with their rasping noise until that became embedded in his brain, echoing in the rhythm of his breathing. And then they'd stop, leaving a silence so profound that it could wake him out of a sound sleep. Or it might be a pair of long-armed gibbons sitting on a branch bellowing their gurgling, echoing call through the forest, the call that he thought must be heard all the way to Sumatra.

Forest! What a word for it. It was no forest like this beechwood at De Bedelaar. It was another thing entirely, a jungle, a creature in and of itself. In some places, he walked in a cathedral of trees, forest giants that soared above his head blocking out most of the light. In other places, he could not walk because there was so much vegetation. He'd fight his way up the hillsides, sweating and straining up the steep slopes, leading his weary horse, urging the men on, slashing at the alang-alang grass that shredded their clothes and skin. Tiny pieces of alang-alang work their way into the skin, leaving itching, red rashes that take days to heal.

Every night, the routine was the same; Dubois saw to that. Stop, make camp, talk to each man -- not just the engineers -- to find out if any of them had seen anything useful. Then clean the new wounds and blisters and lesions, bandage the worst of them, hope no infections would grow tomorrow. Salve the rashes and insect bites, clean and treat yesterday's sores that were still swollen and red, dose those men with fever. While he attended to the health of the coolies, he'd have one of the engineers assess the supplies while the other sent sound men to get water and firewood. The cook, the kokkie, would be setting up the kitchen and he'd remind her, every night, to boil the drinking water thoroughly before using it. Then Dubois would have a long drink of water, or juice if there was any, and a bath. While he waited for dinner, he'd make notes and consult the map and plan the next day's survey.

Nothing was easy, even with the engineers and all the coolies to do the carrying and the heavy labor. Sometimes he thought they only made more people to look after, until he remembered what it was like to work on his own, packing and unpacking his horse, making the fire, buying the food and cooking it too. Still, he had to do so much himself, all the medical work, all the thinking, all the decisions. No one else knew anything about fossils, and even the engineers didn't know much useful geology. But they went on, they always went on -- looking for caves, looking for fossils, looking for fame and glory, not knowing what he had already found.

He sits on the bench remembering until the sun starts to go down and it grows cold. It is time to go back to the large white house and return to the present. He reads the letter one more time and returns it to his top pocket next to his glasses. As he rises and turns to go, the breeze plays across his face and he realizes that his face is wet. Tears have plunged down the deep crevasses beside his nose and mouth, leaving damp streaks in their wake. He can't go into the house like that; he can't let anyone see. He rummages impatiently in his pockets for a handkerchief, turning out rocks and feathers, a few small bones, a dried bit of fern...He finds only one crumpled, soiled square of linen. Why doesn't he have a fresh one? Why...Oh, it doesn't matter, not really. He wipes his face as well as he can. He last used the handkerchief a few days ago, to wrap up some tiny seedlings he was transplanting, and he isn't certain that the effect will be all that could be desired. It will have to do. Anna will not notice a few fragments of dried leaf or soil caught in the white stubble on his chin.

She never really looks at him these days, anyway. Most of what she sees is long ago and far away. For tonight, perhaps, maybe the two of them will be the same. All that matters to him, too, is long ago and far away now.

And he smiles a little and stumps back toward the house, a solitary, solid man, a little less alone in the last light of the evening than he was the day before.

Copyright © 2001 by Pat Shipman