GoKawiilPrehistoric rock paintings in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia.Credit: Photography by Mangiwau/Getty
Last September, a train pulled out of Surakarta in central Java, Indonesia. On board was Eduard Pop, a palaeoanthropologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, and a specialist in Homo erectus — a hominin, closely related to our own species, that emerged nearly two million years ago and persisted into the era of modern humans.
Fresh from examining H. erectus fossils in the nearby village of Sangiran, Pop travelled by train about 315 kilometres west, through villages and paddy fields, to the Bumiayu district — where he thinks the world’s next major fossil discovery could be waiting.
Bumiayu, once a secluded area at the foothills of the volcanic Mount Slamet, now bustles with archaeologists and student interns. Five months before Pop’s visit, Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) had launched a 67-square-kilometre excavation project in the district. Newly built field stations lined the edge of the excavation site — resembling neat rows of white cubicles from above — equipped with cutting-edge laboratory equipment and air-conditioned accommodation. From there, Pop took a 40-minute drive, crossed the Cisaat river and hiked for two hours through the lush rainforests to examine what he calls “the most complete” rock layers that reveal Bumiayu’s geological history.
Pop, one of the first visiting researchers in the station, says he was excited to join the excavation team not only because the site might host important fossils, but also because “Indonesia is now taking the lead in palaeoanthropology research.” In the past, he says, Dutch scientists would have come to Indonesia with a grant from the Netherlands and a brief instructing them to hire local people to help dig up a site, make discoveries, write papers and leave — a phenomenon called parachute research.
“But this time, it’s the other way around. Indonesia set up this big project and invited people from abroad to participate,” he says. BRIN funded his travel and accommodation, and paid him a monthly stipend.
Sofwan Noerwidi, a palaeontologist who leads BRIN’s Research Center for Archaeometry, says that the Bumiayu project would not have been possible without the massive — and controversial — restructuring of Indonesia’s research ecosystem, which led to BRIN’s creation in 2021. BRIN is an amalgamation of 39 institutions, and some staff members at the superagency say that they are seeing the results of the disruptive policies that led to its formation, including laying off thousands of workers and eliminating some research centres. “We’ve started seeing a more collaborative research climate in Indonesia, especially in archaeology,” says Noerwidi.
Several countries, including the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States, have become BRIN’s research partners, but over the next few years, the Netherlands — Indonesia’s former colonial ruler until the 1940s — will be its main collaborator in palaeoanthropology, the study of the early development of humans.
The long journey of H. erectus
Java, Indonesia’s most populous island (the archipelagic nation comprises more than 1,700 islands), plays a crucial part in palaeoanthropology. During the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million to 11,700 years ago), the island was part of Sundaland, the southeasternmost part of the Asian continent. This was one of the farthest points that H. erectus could reach from Africa. Grasslands, lowland forests and rivers dominated the landscape, creating perfect habitats for hominins and the animals that they hunted. And a tiny fraction of those lives have since been preserved as fossils.
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