It is 1887, and the Dutch researcher Eugène Dubois has made every effort to travel to Indonesia. He is a doctor by trade, but he has a boundless fascination with something completely different: the idea that man is descended from the ape, as the English biologist Charles Darwin suggested in the years before. The Dutchman is determined to find the missing link between ape and man.
Dubois gives himself the best chance in Indonesia, where orangutans and gibbons live that bear many similarities to humans. First he searches in caves on Sumatra, then he shifts his field of activity to Java. Together with two corporals of the Dutch genius, and with fifty native forced laborers who do the digging work, Dubois searches on the banks of the Solo River. There he finds a molar in 1891, then a skull cap, and later again a bone of a left femur.
The fossilized bones do not come from an ape or a human. The impossible has succeeded: Dubois has found a new species, the first clear evidence of the evolutionary link between ape and man. He calls his discovery Pithecanthropus erectus, the upright ape-like man. Later, when more fossils are found elsewhere in the world, this Java man will be classified under the genus Homo erectus.
Predatory goods
Dubois takes the fossils of the hominin to the Netherlands, along with about 40 thousand remains of prehistoric animals. All those remains are to this day in the Leiden Naturalis museum. But if it is up to Indonesia, that will soon change. The Indonesian government wants the Netherlands to return a large number of objects that it considers to be looted goods. The Java Man is a striking appearance on the list that the former colony submitted to the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.
On that listwhich was published on Tuesday by daily newspaper Fidelity, there are also all kinds of art and utensils. A kris (dagger) used in a collective suicide in Bali. The complete ‘Lombok Treasure‘, consisting of gold, silver and precious stones captured during the conquest of that island. And the reins of Prince Diponegoro’s horse. He was the leader of the revolt against Dutch colonial rule during the Java War of 1825-1830, in which an estimated 200,000 Javanese were killed.
For Naturalis, that’s a whole exhibition hall has arranged around the Javanese, it is not self-evident that the fossil remains go back to Indonesia. ‘Dubois conducted science according to the possibilities of his time,’ says Corine van Impelen, director of communication at the museum. ‘He had to take the fossils with him to the Netherlands, because he had no comparative material at his disposal in Indonesia.’
Working with Indonesia
According to Van Impelen, fossils are also ‘incomparable’ with art objects. “You might want to display something like a mask somewhere. But these fossils are being actively researched. With new techniques we can learn a lot more, for example about dating. It is important that this research can continue in the future.’
That is also possible in Indonesia, she admits. ‘But it takes a lot. Since the 19th century we have been able to do about building an infrastructure. You can’t just do that. If the Dubois collection eventually goes to Indonesia, we would like to work together to properly store and make everything available there too.’
The Dutch Minister of Culture, Gunay Uslu (D66), will make a decision on the Indonesian request. She has sought advice from the independent Colonial Collections Restitution Committee, which is still in formation and is led by Lilian Gonçalves-Ho Kang You. ‘That committee determines whether objects have entered the Netherlands illegally or not,’ says Jules van de Ven, spokesperson for the Minister of Culture. ‘Actually that is all that matters. Not the art-historical value, or anything else.’
According to Jos van Beurden, who obtained his PhD at the VU on the return of colonial collections, it would be ‘reasonable’ to transfer the Javanese people to Indonesia. “Pickets don’t have to be obtained by force, they can also be things confiscated by missionaries or scientists,” he says. “Dubois just took those bones with him. This was possible because there was a colonial regime, with the structural inequality that goes with it: much happened to the advantage of the powerful, at the expense of the powerless. You can say: Java people come from Indonesia, so they belong there. And then Leiden can get a copy.’
By the way, he notes, for some researchers, accessibility will actually improve once the remains are in Indonesia. ‘Because it is difficult for many non-European scientists to get a visa for the Netherlands.’
Current excavations
Meanwhile, the research on the Solo River continues. Excavations are still taking place today, in which Indonesian and Dutch researchers work in unison. ‘The Java man is still an icon in the history of mankind’, says José Joordens, paleo-anthropologist at Naturalis and professor by special appointment in Maastricht, on the Naturalis-Dubois chair for human-like paleoecology and evolution. ‘There is still a lot to discover. When exactly do these fossils date? Estimates now range between 1 million and 100 thousand years ago. And did the Java people use tools too?’
Today’s expeditions are taking place ‘in the footsteps of Dubois’, says Joordens. With one important difference. ‘Everything we find now stays in Indonesia. By the way, did you know that Eugène Dubois is really a hero there? Every taxi driver knows him. At primary schools, the children are already learning about the evolution of humans and the role of Java people in this. There is actually much more interest in Indonesia than in the Netherlands.’