Dissection
Human dissections were carried out by the Greek physicians Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Chios in the early part of the third century BC. During this period, the first exploration into full human anatomy was performed rather than a base knowledge gained from 'problem-solution' delving. While there was a deep taboo in Greek culture concerning human dissection, there was at the time a strong push by the Ptolemaic government to build Alexandria into a hub of scientific study. For a time, Roman law forbade dissection and autopsy of the human body, so physicians had to use other cadavers. Galen, for example, dissected the Barbary macaque and other primates, assuming their anatomy was basically the same as that of humans.
Homo erectus
The Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois, inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution as it applied to humanity, set out in 1886 for Asia (despite Darwin's theory of African origin) to find a human ancestor.
In 1891–92, his team discovered first a tooth, then a skullcap, and finally a femur of a human fossil on the island of Java, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Excavated from the bank of the Solo River at Trinil, in East Java, he first (1893) allocated the material to a genus of fossil chimpanzees as "Anthropopithecus erectus", then the following year assigned his species to a new genus as "Pithecanthropus erectus" (the genus name had been coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1868 for the hypothetical link between humans and fossil Apes)—from the Greek πίθηκος ("píthēkos," "ape") and ἄνθρωπος ("ánthrōpos", "human")—based on the proposal that the femur suggested that the creature had been bipedal, like "Homo sapiens".