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spite what English naturalist Charles Darwin had hypothesised in his 1871 book Descent of Man, many late-19th century evolutionary naturalists postulated that Asia, not Africa, was the birthplace of humankind as it is midway between Europe and America, providing optimal dispersal routes throughout the world (the Out of Asia theory). Among these was German naturalist Ernst Haeckel who argued that the first human species evolved on the now-disproven hypothetical continent "Lemuria" in what is now Southeast Asia, from a species he termed "Pithecanthropus alalus" ("speechless apeman"). "Lemuria" had supposedly sunk below the Indian Ocean, so no fossils could be found to prove this. Nevertheless, Haeckel's model inspired Dutch scientist Eugène Dubois to journey to the Dutch East Indies. Because no directed expedition had ever discovered human fossils (the few known had all been discovered by accident), and the economy was strained by the Long Depression, the Dutch government refused to fund Dubois. In 1887, he enlisted in the Dutch East India Army as a medical officer, and was able to secure a post in 1887 in the Indies to search for his "missing link" in his spare time. On Java, he found a skullcap in 1891 and a femur in 1892 (Java Man) dating to the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene at the Trinil site along the Solo River, which he named "P." erectus ("upright apeman") in 1893. He attempted unsuccessfully to convince the European scientific community that he had found an upright-walking ape-man. Given few fossils of ancient humans had even been discovered at the time, they largely dismissed his findings as a malformed non-human ape. The significance of these fossils would not be realized until the 1927 discovery of what Canadian palaeoanthropologist Davidson Black called "Sinanthropus pekinensis" (Peking Man) at the Zhoukoudia n cave near Beijing, China. Black lobbied across North America and Europe for funding to continue excavating the site, which has since become the most productive H. erectus site in the world. Continued interest in Java led to further H. erectus fossil discoveries at Ngandong (Solo Man) in 1931, Mojokerto (Java Man) in 1936, and Sangiran (Java Man) in 1937. The Sangiran site yielded the best preserved Java Man skull. Jewish paleoanthropologist Franz Weidenreich provided much of the detailed description of this material in several monographs. The original specimens were lost during the Second Sino-Japanese War after an attempt to smuggle them out of China for safekeeping. Only casts rem