European racial ideas also permeated research on human evolution in
which a direct link was made between modern non-state societies still widely
using lithic technology and the earliest human ancestors. In 1863 the British
scholar Thomas Huxley (1825–95) argued that the skulls of modern Austra-
lian Aborigines were similar to those of Neanderthals and suggested that they
were also culturally alike. In a similar vein, in 1869 one of the earlier
researchers on Australian anthropology, the English-born explorer Alfred
William Howitt (1830–1908), after having read Lyell, Darwin, and Lubbock,
stated that:
I have come to the conclusion that the Australian black is a wild man by nature and
you ‘cannot wash a blackamoor white’... These blacks have the minds of children and
the bodies of adults. I think they are indigenous to the soil and date from a period
anterior to the great physical changes in Australian Geology which prevented migra-
tion into Australia of the fauna of the later Tertiary.
(in Mulvaney 1987: 64).National pride and human evolution: the discovery of Java ManThe lack of institutionalization of prehistoric archaeology in most of colonial
Asia did not prevent some individuals understanding their own research as
abetting national and imperial pride and making amazing discoveries to this
end. This was the case of Eugene Dubois (1858–1940), a Dutch palaeontolo-
gist who went to Java in search of the missing link between apes and humans.
His search was inXuenced by the theory of evolutionism proposed by Charles
Darwin in hisOrigin of Speciesof 1859 (Chapter 13) and especially by the
scholar who promoted his ideas in relation to human prehistory, the German
zoologist Ernst Haeckel. In hisHistory of Creationof 1868, Haeckel had
proposed that humankind had originated in Lemuria, a sunken continent
that he located beneath the Indian Ocean. The interest raised by the discovery
of a Pleistocene chimpanzee-like ape in the Siwalik Hills in India in 1878 led
Darwin, Huxley, and Wallace to sponsor explorations in the Sarawak caves
(East Malaysia in Borneo), in particular at the Great Cave at Niah (Sherratt
2002). Although nothing was found there on this occasion (the potential of
the caves was only demonstrated eighty years later), by the time the bad news
got out there was another man in Java, the Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois,
who was also looking for the existence of the missing link in Asia. His choice
of Indonesia was based on the belief, based on the theory of Charles Lyell and
Alfred Russel Wallace (but not Darwin), that the closest ape ancestors to
humans were the orang-utan and the gibbon.
Archaeology of the Primitive 301