Dubois first published his find in 1894. Dubois's central claim was that "Pithecanthropus" was a transitional form between apes and humans, a so-called "missing link". Many disagreed. Some critics claimed that the bones were those of an upright walking ape, or that they belonged to a primitive human. This judgment made sense at a time when an evolutionary view of humanity had not yet been widely accepted, and scientists tended to view hominid fossils as racial variants of modern humans rather than as ancestral forms. After Dubois let a number of scientists examine the fossils in a series of conferences held in Europe in the 1890s, they started to agree that Java Man may be a transitional form after all, but most of them thought of it as "an extinct side branch" of the human tree that had indeed descended from apes, but not evolved into humans. This interpretation eventually imposed itself and remained dominant until the 1940s.