Eugène Dubois' unearthing of Java man, near the village of Trinil on Java in 1892, was the first fossil discovery of Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of modern man, and the first deliberate search for man's fossil ancestors. Despite the controversy surrounding his discovery, Dubois worked at his research on the growth relationship between brain and body size and conducted investigations into the climate of the geologic past.

On January 28, 1858, Marie Eugène Francoise Thomas Dubois was born into the family of Jean Joseph Balthasar Dubois and Maria Catharina Floriberta Agnes Roebroeck at Eijsden in the province of Limburg, Netherlands. His birth had been preceded two years earlier by the discovery of primitive human fossils in Germany's Neander Valley, the bones of which were still confounding scientists up to the time of Dubois' own discovery. On October 26, 1859, several months before Dubois' second birthday, Darwin's On the...