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In 1866, German biologist Ernst Haeckel had proposed the generic name "Pithecanthropus" for a hypothetical missing link between apes and humans.
In late 19th century, Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois was in Indonesia, precisely on the Island of Java, in search for human fossils. In the fall of 1891, he encountered the now famous Trinil skull cap. The following year his crew uncovered a femur, a left thigh bone, very similar to modern human condition. He was convinced he had discovered an erect, apelike transitional form between apes and humans. In 1894, he decided to call his fossil species Pithecanthropus erectus. Dubois found no additional human fossils and he returned to the Netherlands in 1895.
Others explored the same deposits on the Island of Java, but new human remains appeared only between 1931 and 1933.
Dubois's claim for a primitive human species was further reinforced by nearly simultaneous discoveries from near Beijing, China (at the site of Zhoukoudian). Between 1921 and 1937, various scholars undertook fieldwork in one collapsed cave (Locality 1) recovered many fragments of mandibles and skulls. One of them, Davidson Black, a Canadian anatomist, created a new genus and species for these fossils: Sinanthropus pekinensis ("Peking Chinese man").
In 1939, after comparison of the fossils in China and Java, some scholars concluded that they were extremely similar. They even proposed that Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus were only subspecies of a single species, Homo erectus, though they continued to use the original generic names as labels.
From 1950 to 1964, various influential authorities in paleoanthropology agreed that Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus were too similar to be placed in two different genera; and, by the late 1960s, the concept of Homo erectus was widely accepted.
To the East Asian inventory of H. erectus, many authorities would add European and especially African specimens that resembled the Asian fossil forms. In 1976, a team led by Richard Leakey discovered around Lake Turkana (Kenya) an amazingly well preserved and complete skeleton of a H. erectus boy, called the Turkana Boy (WT-15000).
In 1980s and 1990s:
