The story of Eugène Dubois, the man who proved Darwin right. Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois (28 January 1858 - 16 December 1940) was a Dutch adventurer and paleoanthropologist. He earned worldwide fame for his discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus (later redesignated Homo erectus), or 'Java Man', at that moment in time a missing link between humans and apes. Although hominid fossils had been found and studied before, Dubois was the first anthropologist to embark upon a purposeful search for them.