The man who found the missing link - Pat Shipman

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 Eugene Dubois - now largely forgotten, but the man whose discovery of the 'missing link' altered our view of human origins. Through force of personality, intellect and luck, Dubois pulled off one of the most amazing scientific coups of all time. As a young man, he decided that the most important contribution a man could make to science would be to find the missing link, the extinct form that exemplifies the evolutionary connection between humans and apes. 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 from Dubois' personal collection, friends and enemies to create a story-driven account of how Dubois' life and career exploded across the world in the 1890s. This man's passion and scientific genius engulfed him and his friends' lives in a chain reaction of inspiration and betrayal that orbited around his precious fossils for forty years.