Theodor Verhoeven

Theodorus Lambertus Verhoeven, SVD, (17 September 1907, Uden – 1990) was a Dutch archaeologist and missionary who made the significant paleontological discovery in Indonesia of archaic stone tools in association with the c. 800,000-year-old fossils of stegodontids, or dwarf elephants, from which he concluded that islands in Wallacea had been reached by Homo erectus before modern humans appeared there.

Verhoeven studied classics and archaeology at the University of Utrecht. He spent several months in Italy studying excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum and Ostia Tiberia for his doctoral thesis and he received his doctorate under Hendrik Wagenvoort in 1948. He was subsequently sent to the island of Flores in Indonesia as a missionary, where he taught at the seminary in Ritapiret near Maumere and stayed for 17 years. At the end of this period he married his secretary and returned to Europe.

In 1950 Verhoeven commenced archaeological work on the island of Flores. He was the first to report on Stegodon remains in Wallacea, though the bones had been known for a long time by locals in Flores, who had created stories to explain their presence. He later identified stegodon remains on Timor as well. 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. In the same year he found much younger (neolithic) human graves, stone tools and Paulamys naso fossils in the Liang Bua caves. He did not publish these findings, but wrote the Indonesian archaeologist R. P. Soejono, who continued the digs in the 70s and 80s and estimated an age of 10,000 years. Further excavations would later reveal the c. 17,000-year-old Flores Man in this cave.

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