206241 Dubois is a main belt asteroid. It was discovered by the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking

Near Earth Asteroid Tracking

Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking is a program run by NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory to discover near-Earth objects. The NEAT project began in December 1995 and ran until April 2007.-History:...

 team on November 24, 2002 at Palomar Observatory

Palomar Observatory

Palomar Observatory is a privately owned observatory located in San Diego County, California, southeast of Pasadena's Mount Wilson Observatory, in the Palomar Mountain Range. At approximately elevation, it is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology...

. The asteroid was named after Dutch

Dutch people

The Dutch people are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United...

 anatomist, surgeon and paleontologist Marie Eugène François Thomas Dubois (1858–1940) was the "founding father" of palaeoanthropology. His dedicated search culminated in 1891 with the discovery of the first Homo erectus fossils in a bank of the Solo river near Trinil, Java. The name was suggested by M. Langbroek.