Theodor Verhoeven

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Father Theodorus L. Verhoeven (1907 - 1990) was a Dutch Catholic priest, missionary and amateur archaeologist who was responsible for significant paleontological discoveries in Indonesia of archaic stone tools in association with the fossils of stegodontids, or dwarf elephants, some 800,000 years old, indicating that islands in Wallacea had been reached by Homo erectus before modern humans appeared there.

Verhoeven studied classics, and later archaeology, at the University of Utrecht. He spent several months in Italy studying excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ostia Tiberia for his doctoral thesis, receiving his doctorate in 1948. He was subsequently sent to the island of Flores in Indonesia as a missionary, where he stayed for 17 years.

In 1950 Verhoeven commenced archaeological work on the island of Flores. In 1957 he discovered the first stegondontid fossils reported from Ola Bula in Flores, along with Lower Palaeolithic stone blades and flakes. In 1965 he found a similar concurrence of stone tools with remains of Stegodon-dominated megafauna at nearby Mata Menge.

[edit] References

Bednarik, Robert G. (2002). The maritime dispersal of Pleistocene humans. [1] Accessed 3 June 2007
van der Plas, M. (2007). A new model for the evolution of Homo sapiens from the Wallacean islands. PalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 1(1): 1-121. [2] Accessed 3 June 2007