The Resume

(January 28, 1858-December 16, 1940)
Born in Eijsden, Netherlands
Birth name was Marie Eugene Francois Thomas Dubois
Anthropologist
Discovered the remains of ‘Java Man’ in the Dutch East Indies (1891)
Named the species Pithecanthropus erectus
Java Man was later reclassified as Homo erectus

Why he might be annoying:

He used convicts for labor in his digs.
When an initial scientific consensus emerged that Java Man represented an extinct side branch in human evolution instead of a link between apes and humans, he became so bitter that he locked his fossils away for over two decades.
He refused to accept the evidence that Java Man and the later discovered Peking Man were members of the same species.
A paper in which he suggested that Java Man resembled ‘a giant gibbon’ (1932) was widely misinterpreted as Dubois retracting his claim that Java Man was a link between apes and humans.
Fellow anthropologist Arthur Keith commented that his theories ‘were so firmly held that his mind tended to bend facts rather than alter his ideas to fit them.’

Why he might not be annoying:

While earning his medical degree, he taught anatomy at two art schools.
He was the first anthropologist to deliberately search for fossils of early humans. (All previous examples, such as Neanderthal Man, had been found accidentally.)
Since the Dutch government was unwilling to fund his search, he joined the army in the Dutch East Indies as a military surgeon.
His proposed name for Java Man, Pithecanthropus erectus, was used as a song title by jazz great Charles Mingus, and tends to prompt less adolescent tittering than ‘Homo erectus’ does.

Credit: C. Fishel

Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

• 19th Century Scientists
• 20th Century Scientists
• C. Fishel's Profiles [Series 70]
• I Died in 1940 (Ranked: 82)
• I Earned a Doctorate
• I'm Dutch
• Known By a Middle Name
• Profiles 45001-45250 (Ranked: 45185)
• Scientists
• Teachers
• We Died on the Same Day (Ranked: 19401216)

Year In Review:

For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
In 2023, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
In 2022, Out of 5 Votes: 0% Annoying
In 2021, Out of 7 Votes: 71.43% Annoying
In 2020, Out of 4 Votes: 75.00% Annoying