Anthropology.net

I’ve just read that Teuku Jacob has died a little over a month ago. Both John Hawks and Tim Jones have covered the news in their blogs. I find some conflicting reports on how old he was, Hawks says he was 76 and Jones says he was 77. When I do the math he was just about month shy of 78. Either way, he was a student of G. H. R. von Koenigswald, and many important specimens, particularly of Homo erectus were under his watch.

Aside from his role as a paleoanthropologist, he was also an activist.

I’m not gonna bad mouth him at this time. If you know anything about his involvement in the Flores hominid debacle, then you know what sort of reputation he has. Here’s how Science remembers him,

“As Indonesia’s “king of paleoanthropology,” Teuku Jacob ruled over a vital collection of hominid fossils. He was a formidable skeptic of the 1-meter-tall “hobbit” remains from the Indonesian island of Flores, arguing that they instead represented a diseased modern human.”

He will be remembered for his work in building the field of paleoanthropology in Indonesia.