The ‘missing link’. The phrase encapsulates an array of ideas: a creature somewhere between ourselves and other apes; eccentric scientists exploring the back of beyond; a deep-seated desire to know where we came from. The expression often guarantees media time for any find, no matter how small. Yet it’s also one of the most divisive areas of human endeavour. With only a small number of human fossils, there are as many ideas about what they mean. You can almost guarantee sparks will fly when a new find is announced, often before the ink

has dried.

In truth, the ‘missing link’ is a dreadfully out-of-date concept.  The term was coined soon after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and the Descent of Man in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The missing link was the hypothetical species between the apes and ourselves. But we now know from the fossil evidence that there wasn’t just one species making the link; there were lots of them.  And yet, as with many old concepts, there is a nugget of truth behind the idea. 

Darwin himself favoured Africa as the likely origin of our species because of our close similarity to chimpanzees and gorillas.  But not everyone agreed.  Based on the observations that gibbons were able to walk upright and that they lived as nuclear family units, German biologist Ernst Haeckel suggested a different location: Southeast Asia.

Dutch visionary Eugene Dubois took up Haeckel’s challenge. Finding he couldn’t get research support to pursue his ideas, he applied for a position as a medical officer in the Dutch army and left his promising academic position in the Netherlands to take his family to Indonesia in late 1887. Starting in Sumatra, Dubois was successful enough to convince the local authorities that he should be released from his medical duties to pursue his research.

In 1890, Dubois relocated to Java due to the better preservation of fossils. Initially he’d focussed his efforts on caves but the amount of fossils discovered were disappointingly few. Switching to low lying areas, Dubois concentrated on where the rivers were cutting away old terraces. These terraces had accumulated over time as sediments washed down the valleys into the river systems, and were considerably richer is fossil remains than the caves Dubois had originally investigated.

In 1893, while co-ordinating a dig on the river bend at Trinil in central Java with two engineers and a crew of labourers, Dubois found a skullcap, a thighbone and a tooth. The skullcap was clearly different to a modern human. It was thicker with a brain volume between the other apes and ourselves. Against all the odds, the ‘missing link’ had been found. Visiting the site today you can still see some of the original excavation trenches.