Java is a Southeast Asian island with special geoarchaeological significance. Since 1890, geological studies in its eastern part have supported the discovery and interpretation of >100 skeletal fossils of Homo erectus, an extinct human ancestor (Theunissen et al., 1990; Zaim, 2010). There have been no confirmed finds of Homo erectus in other areas of Southeast Asia or Australia.
When Eugene Dubois chose Java in 1890 to search for fossil connections between Homo sapiens and apes, he focused his attention on cave deposits and volcanic-rich sedimentary rocks that were known to contain mammalian bones. He soon found what he called the skeletal “missing link” – Homo erectus (initially named Pithecanthropus erectus) – in excavations at Trinil along the Solo River (Shipman, 2001). The bone bed contain the Homo erectus fossil was a conglomeratic sandstone lens, <1 m thick, that was part of the local bedrock. The lens produced many thousands of teeth and strongly fossilized bones representing...
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Huffman, O.F. (2017). Java (Indonesia). In: Gilbert, A.S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geoarchaeology. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4409-0_181
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