After 130 years, the famous skull cap from the Gay erectus Back to Indonesia-Together the thigh, the tooth and the roughly 28,000 other objects from the Dubois collection. Minister Gouke Moes (Education, Culture and Science, BBB) announced this on Friday morning in Leiden during a private meeting in Naturalis Biodiversity Center, which now has the collection managed. Marcel Beukeboom, the new director of Naturalis, calls the decision “the right choice”.
More than three years ago, the Indonesian government submitted a request for the return of several natural science and art -historical collections that were considered robbery. On the list of ‘museum objects from the colonial past’ were, among other things, the fossils that the Dutch researcher Eugène Dubois had excavated in Indonesia between 1887 and 1900.
At the age of 29, the Limburg Dubois and his wife and their newborn daughter left for Sumatra, to work there as a doctor in the service of the Royal Dutch Indian Army. But his actual motivation for emigration was elsewhere: he was determined to find the missing fossil link between monkeys and people at his new place of residence. The Gibbons and Orangutans of Indonesia were in his opinion (which would later turn out to be incorrect) more closely related to humans than the African chimpanzees and gorillas.
A year after his arrival, Dubois was transferred to Java, because a skull of a prehistoric person had been found there near the village of Wadjak. He was only 10,000 years old, but he was so convinced of the presence of older fossils that he insisted on a large -scale excavation at the colonial department of education, honorary service and industry.
Forty forced laborers
He was assigned forty forced laborers, who made two startling finds at the end of 1891: a tooth and a skull roof that contained in size between that of a person and a monkey. Dubois had his missing link Found: he baptized the newly discovered kind Pithecanthropus erectus (later: Gay erectus). Later he also found six thighs (five of which were initially considered rods of a deer meadow).
In 1895 Dubois returned to the Netherlands with his wife, now three children and a leather briefcase containing the tooth, the skull roof and a thigh. Eventually the entire collection of 28,000 fossils was housed at the Rijksmuseum for Natural History, the precursor of the current Naturalis.
The previous Naturalis director Edwin van Huis, who retired earlier this month, still emphasized in 2022 NRC That the importance of the Dubois collection both from a museum perspective and from a research perspective was ‘huge’. “Over the years we have built up a successful research group around the collection, and you don’t just move that when the objects go somewhere else – wherever.” For that reason, he argued to make the material more accessible for international research.
Now the independent committee that bent over the return request has decided differently, led by lawyer Lilian Gonçalves-Ho Kang You. The committee is of the opinion that the Dubois collection has never become the property of the Netherlands and that it is likely that the fossils have been removed against the will of the population
The times have changed. Now we give back what is not ours
Moes said on Friday morning in his speech- surrounded by, among other things, a swamp turtle and an axishert fossil from the Dubois collection- that Indonesia “tens of years in vain in the Netherlands has beaten with facts and scientific arguments”. The excavation was based on local knowledge and forced labor, he emphasized. “Nobody thought about what the fossils meant for Indonesia. But times have changed. Now we give back what is not ours.”
After his speech, he handed a letter with the declaration of intent for the return to the Indonesian Minister of Culture Fadi Zon. He calls the decision “the confirmation of our sovereignty and the recovery of our historical narrative. This allows us to correct unlawfulities from the past and show our cultural identity to the world.”
Earlier, other collections have already been returned to Indonesia: this is the sixth time that the Netherlands has returned to the Advisory Committee. Beukeboom emphasizes that Naturalis will do everything to make the refund as smooth as possible. Earlier this month he said to NRC That “we all have to learn to relate to the colonial past. That process is not nearly ready and is of course not limited to cultural and historical collections.”
It is not yet known when exactly the collection goes back and where to go. It is also unclear what will happen to Dubois’s personal belongings, including his leather briefcase and his own molars.
NEW: Give this article as a gift
As an NRC subscriber you can do every month 10 articles Give a gift to someone without an NRC subscription. The recipient can read the article directly, without a payment wall.