World War II
World War II brought difficulty and danger to von Koenigswald in Java. He managed to hide his fossils from the invading Japanese, and although he, being a Dutch citizen, was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, only one fossil skull was confiscated by the Japanese soldiers. It was presented to Emperor Hirohito but was recovered after the war.
During the war years, Weidenreich's description of Sinanthropus was published. In a borrowed office at the American Museum of Natural History, Weidenreich added to the their earlier work and reviewed the fossil record of human evolution, merging Sinanthropus and Pithecanthropus into a new taxon, Homo erectus, with various geographic sub-species. He published descriptions and assigned scientific names to some of von Koenigswald's discoveries, as he and others presumed that von Koenigswald was dead at the hands of the Japanese. After the war, von Koenigswald worked with Weidenreich at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for eighteen months.
Read more about this topic: Gustav Heinrich Ralph Von Koenigswald
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