Word: java
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bright & early next morning, wearing two wrist watches (one set at Chungking time, the other at American E.W.T.), he turned up at the Red Cross Club, known to G.I.s in China as the "Java Dive." Staring at the unmistakable U.S. trappings, Henry Wallace said: "You've certainly created America here. It's swell." Then he stripped down to the waist for a volleyball game between officers and enlisted men, played in a drenching rain. Wallace teamed up with the G.I.s, fell flat on the muddy cement court...
...Java giants, Weidenreich thinks, were not freaks. Taking a fresh look at the thick-boned fossils of such other primitive human beings as Heidelberg Man, Weidenreich now believes that "gigantism and massiveness may have been a general or at least a widespread character of early mankind...
Genesis and many a folk tale notwithstanding, most anthropologists have pictured primitive man as a little fellow somewhere between an ape and a monkey in size. But last week evidence was offered to prove Genesis correct. A Java geologist had dug up bones of prehistoric men bigger than the largest known apes...
...discoverer was Dr. R. von Koenigswald of The Netherlands Indies Geological Survey. No word has come from or of him since the Japanese took Java in 1942. But Dr. Franz Weidenreich of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, piecing together what he had learned of Koenigswald's findings, reported them in Science. He pronounced the discovery the most important in anthropology since Eugene Dubois dug up Pithecanthropus erectus, the "missing link" between men and apes, in Java...
Then he found a still larger jaw, the biggest ever discovered, which was unmistakably human. It was apparently the most primitive truly human fossil ever discovered. Koenigswald named it Meganthropus palaeojavanicus (Big Man of Ancient Java). Meganthropus seemed to have been about the size of a big male gorilla...