I first went to Java in October of 1998, chasing the ghost of Eugene Dubois. Dubois was the Dutch physician and anatomist who found the missing link there in 1891. He was a genius, a risk taker, one of the most stubborn men in the history of anthropology and the subject of my next book. To Dubois, "missing link" meant the extinct form linking human beings with apes. Because few fossil hominids were known, scientists looked to comparative anatomy and embryology for evidence of human evolution. Dubois was almost alone in believing that the best proof would come from fossils. In 1887, he abruptly resigned his anatomy job at the University of Amsterdam and applied for a government grant to find the missing link. He received instead advice not to place so much stock in "that crazy book of Darwin's." His parents and colleagues condemned his plan as risky, dangerous and sure to be ruinous.
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