Flaying of Marsyas (Titian) St. Thomas
….he described the species as Pithecanthropus erectus (from the Greek πίθηκος “ape”, and ἄνθρωπος, “man”)…
Pithecanthropus Erectus / Pithecanthropus Erectus:
The Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois, who was especially fascinated by Darwin’s theory of evolution as applied to man, set out to Asia (the place accepted then, despite Darwin, as the cradle of human evolution – see Haeckel § Research), to find a human ancestor in 1886. In 1891, his team discovered a human fossil on the island of Java, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia); he described the species as Pithecanthropus erectus (from the Greek πίθηκος “ape”, and ἄνθρωπος, “man”), based on a calotte (skullcap) and a femur like that of H. sapiens found from the bank of the Solo River at Trinil, in East Java. (This species is now regarded as H. erectus).
The find became known as Java Man. Thanks to Canadian anatomist Davidson Black’s (1921) initial description of a lower molar, which was dubbed Sinanthropus pekinensis, however, most of the early and spectacular discoveries of this taxon took place at Zhoukoudian in China. German anatomist Franz Weidenreich provided much of the detailed description of this material in several monographs published in the journal Palaeontologica Sinica (Series D).
Nearly all of the original specimens were lost during World War II; however, authentic Weidenreichian casts do exist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, and are considered to be reliable evidence.
Throughout much of the 20th century, anthropologists debated the role of H. erectus in human evolution. Early in the century, however, due to discoveries on Java and at Zhoukoudian, it was believed that modern humans first evolved in Asia. A few naturalists—Charles Darwin most prominent among them—believed that humans’ earliest ancestors were African: Darwin pointed out that chimpanzees and gorillas, who are human relatives, live only in Africa.
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