Discovery of Java Man
An army doctor goes to Java seeking the 'missing link'
The Dutch doctor Eugène Dubois joined the colonial army in order to hunt for human ancestors in the East Indies. In 1891, on the Solo River near Trinil, his workers found a skullcap, and a year later a thighbone. Dubois named the creature Pithecanthropus erectus, the 'upright ape-man'; today the finds are assigned to Homo erectus.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 19th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1914–1918 World War I — 23 years later
Europe
- 1886 Benz's first automobile — 5 years earlier
- 1889 Eiffel Tower — 2 years earlier
- 1889 Van Gogh's The Starry Night — 2 years earlier
- 1895 Discovery of X-rays — 4 years later
- 1905 Einstein's miracle year and relativity — 14 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1869 Tolstoy's War and Peace — 22 years earlier
- 1877 Premiere of Swan Lake — 14 years earlier
- 1895 Popov's radio receiver — 4 years later
- 1905–1907 Russian Revolution of 1905 — 14 years later
- 1908 Tunguska event — 17 years later
Middle East
- 1876–1878 The first Ottoman constitution — 15 years earlier
- 1905–1911 Persian Constitutional Revolution — 14 years later
- 1908 Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman — 17 years later
- 1915 Armenian genocide — 24 years later
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 25 years later
Africa
- 1879 Battle of Isandlwana — 12 years earlier
- 1885 The Mahdists take Khartoum — 6 years earlier
- 1885–1908 The Congo Free State — 6 years earlier
- 1886 The Witwatersrand Gold Rush — 5 years earlier
- 1897 The British sack Benin City — 6 years later
Americas
- 1876 Invention of the telephone — 15 years earlier
- 1879 Edison's incandescent lamp — 12 years earlier
- 1888 Golden Law abolishes slavery in Brazil — 3 years earlier
- 1903 Wright brothers' first flight — 12 years later
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — 23 years later
Oceania
- 1893 New Zealand women win the vote — 2 years later
- 1893 Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom — 2 years later
- 1911 Amundsen reaches the South Pole — 20 years later
- 1912 The death of Scott's polar party — 21 years later
Alive at the time
- Queen Victoria (aged 72)
- Leo Tolstoy (aged 63)
- Dmitri Mendeleev (aged 57)
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (aged 51)
- Thomas Edison (aged 44)
- Nikola Tesla (aged 35)
- Marie Curie (aged 24)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 22)
- Vladimir Lenin (aged 21)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 20)