Estimated to be between 700,000 and 1,490,000 years old, it was, at the time of its discovery, the oldest hominid fossil ever found, and it remains the type specimen for Homo erectus.

Led by Eugène Dubois, the excavation team uncovered a tooth, a skullcap, and a thighbone at Trinil on the banks of the Solo River in East Java.

Other scientific authorities disagreed with him, like Charles Lyell, a geologist, and Alfred Russel Wallace, who thought of a similar theory of evolution around the same time as Darwin.

[2] In October 1887, Dubois abandoned his academic career and left for the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) to look for the fossilized ancestor of modern man.

[5] Having quickly found abundant fossils of large mammals, Dubois was relieved of his military duties (March 1889), and the colonial government assigned two engineers and fifty convicts to help him with his excavations.

[7] Again assisted by convict laborers and two army corporals, Dubois began searching along the Solo River near Trinil in August 1891.

In August 1892, a year later, Dubois's team found a long femur (thighbone) shaped like a human one, suggesting that its owner had stood upright.

Believing that the three fossils belonged to a single individual, "probably a very aged female", Dubois renamed the specimen Anthropopithecus erectus.

[9] Only in late 1892, when he determined that the cranium measured about 900 cubic centimetres (55 cu in), did Dubois consider that his specimen was a transitional form between apes and humans.

[13] In 1927, Canadian Davidson Black identified two fossilized teeth he had found in Zhoukoudian near Beijing as belonging to an ancient human, and named his specimen Sinanthropus pekinensis, now better known as Peking Man.

[15] Franz Weidenreich, who replaced Black in China after the latter's death in 1933, argued that Sinanthropus was also a transitional fossil between apes and humans, and was in fact so similar to Java's Pithecanthropus that they should both belong to the family Hominidae.

[19] Dubois died in 1940, still refusing to recognize their conclusion,[19][21] and official reports remain critical of the Sangiran site's poor presentation and interpretation.

[22] More than 50 years after Dubois's find, Ralph von Koenigswald recollected that, "No other paleontological discovery has created such a sensation and led to such a variety of conflicting scientific opinions.

Some scientists of the day suggested[24] that Dubois's Java Man was a potential intermediate form between modern humans and the common ancestor we share with the other great apes.

[26] In response to critics who refused to accept that Java Man was a "missing link", in 1932 Dubois published a paper arguing that the Trinil bones looked like those of a "giant gibbon".

[37] To preserve the proportions predicted by his theory of brain evolution, Dubois argued that Java Man was shaped more like a gibbon than a human.

[41] Mayr presented his conclusion at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium in 1950,[42] and this resulted in Dubois's erectus species being reclassified under the genus Homo.

Ralph von Koenigswald first assigned Java Man to the Trinil Fauna, a faunal assemblage that he composed from several Javanese sites.

[50] Though this view is still widely accepted, in the 1980s, a group of Dutch paleontologists used Dubois's collection of more than 20,000 animal fossils to reassess the date of the layer in which Java Man was found.

Because the fossils of Java Man were found "scattered in an alluvial deposit" – they had been laid there by the flow of a river – detractors doubted that they belonged to the same species, let alone the same individual.

[8] Judging from anatomical and archeological aspects as well as Java Man's ecological role, meat from vertebrates was likely an important part of their diet.

The plants found at the Trinil excavation site included grass (Poaceae), ferns, Ficus, and Indigofera, which are typical of lowland rainforest.

[64] The control of fire by Homo erectus is generally accepted by archaeologists to have begun some 400,000 years ago,[65] with claims regarding earlier evidence finding increasing scientific support.