The Man who Found the Missing Link: The Extraordinary Life of Eugene Dubois

Pat Shipman¿s latest book is a scientific biography, written like a novel. It tells the story of one of the greatest scientists at the turn of the century ¿ a Dutchman called Eugène Dubois, now largely forgotten, but the man whose discovery of the ¿missing link¿ altered our view of human origins. As a young man, he decided that the most important contribution a man could make to science would be to find the missing link. It would be the proof of Darwinian evolution, then still controversial. He deduced where the missing link should be and found the fossil, now known as homo erectus, in Java in 1891. Shipman uses a fascinating range of letters, diaries and photographs to tell the story of how Dubois¿ life and career exploded across the world in the 1890s.