Gustav Heinrich Ralph Von Koenigswald - Java

Java

Von Koenigswald's teacher Ferdinand Broili had good contacts with the Dutch geologists K. Martin and R.W. van Bemmelen. Through these contacts Von Koenigswald could join the Geological Survey of Java as paleontologist in late 1930. Financed in part through the Carnegie Foundation, he began a systematic survey of the country. von Koenigswald made his most significant finds in this area of Asia between January 1931 and 1941. At age 33, he announced the discovery of a juvenile calvarium from Mojokerto and assigned it to Pithecanthropus erectus. This identification was criticized by the respected paleontologist Eugène Dubois, but von Koenigswald did not change his identification. Between 1937 and 1941, a number of important hominid specimens emerged from Java. One of von Koenigswald's assistants brought him a piece of a Pithecanthropus skull in 1937. Unfortunately, an offer to pay for additional fossils by the piece led to specimens being broken into splinters by native helpers. One skull cap, the first Sangiran calvarium, was an exact duplicate of Dubois' Pithecanthropus calvarium. Other well-known fossils include the Sangiran B mandible, Sangiran 4 including the well-known maxilla with the diastema, and the 1939 and 1941 jaws assigned by von Koenigswald to Meganthropus paleojavanicus.

His work on the fossils of Central Java, particularly from Sangiran, led him to claim that the mammalian remains of the area could be assigned to all three levels of the Pleistocene. All Javanese hominid fossils recovered emerged from three major sets of beds:

• Pucangan formation, Jetis beds dated to the Early Pleistocene,
• the Kabuh formation, Trinil beds dated to the Middle Pleistocene, and
• the Ngandong beds dated to the Upper Pleistocene.

von Koenigswald pointed out that these and other fossil discoveries since 1917 contradicted the 19th century idea that humans had an ancestor with a modern brain and ape jaw, and actually suggested the opposite relationship. The Java fossils are currently housed in the Senckenberg Museum with the financial support of the Werner Reimers Foundation of Bad Homburg.

In 1937, von Koenigswald hosted paleontologist Franz Weidenreich's visit to Java to examine recent discovery sites. Also in 1937, von Koenigswald became a Dutch citizen. In 1938 von Koenigswald and Weidenreich together announced the discovery of a new skull of Pithecanthropus (P. robustus). Early in 1939, von Koenigswald took several Javanese hominin specimens to Weidenreich in Peking, China. Comparing the Sangiran and Choukoutien hominids led the two scientists to conclude that the specimens were closely allied. They decided to abandon the genus Sinanthropus, combining all the specimens into the earlier-named genus Pithecanthropus. Later, Pithecanthropus was incorporated into the genus Homo as Homo erectus.