TRINIL
LOCATION
Gravels of the Solo river, some 10 km W of Ngawi,
central Java, Indonesia.
DISCOVERY
Excavations of E. Dubois, September 1991 (Trinil l),
October 1891 (Trinil 2), August 1892 (Trinil 3),
October 1892 (Trinil 4); collectors for E. Dubois,
1898 (Trinil5) and 1900 (Trinil6-9).
MATERIAL
Isolated upper right and left molars, probably not
hominid (Trinil 1 and 4); adult calotte (Trinil 2);
complete femur (Trinil3); isolated lower left premolar
(Trinil 5); partial femora (Trinil 6-9).
DATING AND STRATIGRAPHIC CONTEXT
There has long been controversy over the dating and
the exact geological context of the Trinil hominids. It
has, for example, been claimed that the excavators em-
ployed by Dubois dug down through both what is now
recognized as the Kabuh Fm and the overlying terrace
deposits without distinguishing between them, and
that the fossil fauna from the site-the type “Trinil”
fauna-thus became mixed (Bartstra, 1982a). At the
same time, de Vos et al. (1982) declared that the Trinil
fauna is actually older than the Djetis fauna that was
thought by von Koenigswald (1934) to have preceded
it. Such dramatically different biostratigraphic read-
ings (and these are only two of many) have been the
source of major disputes, as have differences over
lithostratigraphies. There is no space here to review all
of these arguments (see instead discussions in Bartstra,
1983, Leinders et al., 1985, Day, 1986, and Theunissen
et al., 1990). For present purposes, it is sufficient to
note that most observers seem provisionally satisfied
with a lower Kabuh provenance and an early Middle
Pleistocene date for the Trinil 2 skullcap, at least
(although early doubts persist about the stratigraphic
association of the skullcap with the Trinil 3 femur).
Fission-track dates of between about 0.8 and 0.7 Ma
reported by Suzuki et al. (1985) for middle and upper
Kabuh samples, plus K/Ar dates in the same range re-
ported from the Kabuh by von Koenigswald (1968)
and Jacob (1975), also point toward the conclusion
that the Trinil hominids are more than 700 Ka old,
but less than I Ma. The matter remains to be settled
definitively, however.ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXT
None from the original excavations. Bartstra (1982b)
suggests that alleged tools recovered in the Selenka
excavations across the river are not true artifacts.
Indeed, he has denied the association of artifacts with
Homo erectus anywhere in Java except (perhaps) for
Sambungmacan.PREVIOUS DESCRIPTIONS AND ANALYSES
Dubois (1892) made the Trinil 2 calotte the holotype
of his Anthropopithecus erectus, and later (1894) of