Mojokerto child

The Mojokerto child, also known as Mojokerto 1 and Perning 1, is the fossilized skullcap of a juvenile early human. It was discovered in February 1936 near Mojokerto (East Java, Indonesia) by a member of an excavation team led by Ralph von Koenigswald. Von Koenigswald first called the specimen Pithecanthropus modjokertensis but soon renamed it Homo modjokertensis because Eugène Dubois the discoverer of Java Man, which was then called Pithecanthropus erectus disagreed that the new fossil was a Pithecanthropus. The skullcap is now identified as belonging to the species Homo erectus. The Mojokerto child has been the most controversial of the early human fossils that have been found in Indonesia. Its date and even the exact site of its discovery have been widely disputed. First thought to be less than 1.00 Ma (million years old), in 1994 it was claimed, based on argon–argon dating, which was then a new dating method, that the skull was around 1.81 Ma old. The authors of the paper, Carl C. Swisher III and Garniss Curtis, argued that this date had wide implications for our understanding of the first human migrations "Out of Africa". In the early 2000s, however, new archival and scientific research identified the precise layer from which the fossil was excavated in 1936 and showed conclusively that the fossil's earliest possible date was 1.49 Ma. The fossilized skullcap was discovered in February 1936 by Andojo – sometimes referred to as Tjokrohandojo or Andoyo – an Indonesian who worked at excavating animal fossils in the Kendeng Hills (Pegunungan Kendeng) in East Java on a team led by Ralph von Koenigswald. Andojo originally believed the skull belonged to an orangutan, but von Koenigswald immediately recognized it as human. He named it Pithecanthropus modjokertensis after the nearby town of Mojokerto, which was then spelled "Modjokerto". Eugène Dubois, who had discovered Java Man in the 1890s and named it Pithecanthropus erectus, wrote to von Koenigswald arguing that if the Mojokerto fossil were indeed human, then it could not be a Pithecanthropus (lit.