Bill Bryson - The Mysterious Biped

Chapter 28, The Mysterious Biped Summary.

Biped:  noun

1. an animal that uses two legs for walking.

In 1887 an anatomist Marie Eugene Francois Thomas Dubois set out to Sumatra, In the Dutch East Indies, with the intention of finding the earliest human remains on earth, At this time no one had ever purposefully set out to find ancient human bones and all bones had been found accidentally.

Around the time of Dubois' assignment in Sumatra, Workmen in a quarry found curious looking bones and gave them to a schoolteacher, Johann Karl Fuhlrott, who was interested and he discovered they were some kind of human. Many people refused to believe that they were ancient neanderthal bones, insisting the bones came from wounded soldiers who fought in Germany 1814. Throughout many different years scientists found different evidence of bones from the neanderthal that showed the evolution of apes to humans, and agreed that at that time it was at least 15 million years ago that apes split to humans which is why the ancient bones these scientists found looked different to the modern humans, some looking more apelike and some looking more humanlike. Through time scientists could see various differences in the bones which showed the species evolving as they had once lived in the forests and with the ice age were forced to leave to savannas where they adapted to stand up right like we do know. Scientists also found new species of bones further back than the neanderthal which they called homo erectus they were thought to have dated back at least 7 million years.