Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald

Gustav Heinrich Ralph (often cited as G. H. R.) von Koenigswald (13 November 1902 – 10 July 1982) was a German-Dutch

His work on the fossils of Central Java, particularly from Sangiran, led him to claim that the mammalian remains of the area could be assigned to all three levels of the Pleistocene. All Javanese hominid fossils recovered emerged from three major sets of beds:

• Pucangan formation, Jetis beds dated to the Early Pleistocene,
• the Kabuh formation, Trinil beds dated to the
  Middle Pleistocene
  , and
• the Ngandong beds dated to the
  Upper Pleistocene
  .

Von Koenigswald pointed out that these and other fossil discoveries since 1917 contradicted the 19th-century idea that humans had an ancestor with a modern brain and ape jaw, and actually suggested the opposite relationship.^{[clarification needed]} The Java fossils are currently housed in the Senckenberg Museum with the financial support of the Werner Reimers Foundation of Bad Homburg.

In 1937, Von Koenigswald hosted paleontologist Franz Weidenreich's visit to Java to examine recent discovery sites. Also in 1937, Von Koenigswald became a Dutch citizen. In 1938 Von Koenigswald and Weidenreich together announced the discovery of a new skull of Pithecanthropus (P. robustus). Early in 1939, Von Koenigswald took several Javanese hominin specimens to Weidenreich in

World War II

World War II brought difficulty and danger to Von Koenigswald in Java. He managed to hide his fossils from the invading Japanese, and although he, being a Dutch citizen, was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, only one fossil skull was confiscated by the Japanese soldiers. It was presented to Emperor Hirohito but was recovered after the war.

During the war years, Weidenreich's description of Sinanthropus was published. In a borrowed office at the American Museum of Natural History, Weidenreich added to their earlier work and reviewed the fossil record of human evolution, merging Sinanthropus and Pithecanthropus into a new taxon, Homo erectus, with various geographic sub-species. He published descriptions and assigned scientific names to some of Von Koenigswald's discoveries, as he and others presumed that Von Koenigswald was dead at the hands of the Japanese. After the war, Von Koenigswald worked with Weidenreich at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for 18 months.

Netherlands

For the next 20 years, Von Koenigswald filled a Chair of Palaeontology created for him at the

In 1950 he became member, and in 1968 foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[1]

Von Koenigswald studied the relationships between African, Asian and European hominoid fossils attributed to Ramapithecus or its close allies such as