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Prehistoric rock paintings in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia.Credit: Photography by Mangiwau\/Getty<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 a hominin, closely related to our own species, that emerged nearly two million years ago and persisted into the era of modern humans.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 where he thinks the world\u2019s next major fossil discovery could be waiting.<\/p>\n
Bumiayu, once a secluded area at the foothills of the volcanic Mount Slamet, now bustles with archaeologists and student interns. Five months before Pop\u2019s visit, Indonesia\u2019s 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 \u2014 resembling neat rows of white cubicles from above \u2014 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 \u201cthe most complete\u201d rock layers that reveal Bumiayu\u2019s geological history.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cIndonesia is now taking the lead in palaeoanthropology research.\u201d 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 \u2014 a phenomenon called parachute research.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut this time, it\u2019s the other way around. Indonesia set up this big project and invited people from abroad to participate,\u201d he says. BRIN funded his travel and accommodation, and paid him a monthly stipend.<\/p>\n
Sofwan Noerwidi, a palaeontologist who leads BRIN\u2019s Research Center for Archaeometry, says that the Bumiayu project would not have been possible without the massive \u2014 and controversial \u2014 restructuring of Indonesia\u2019s research ecosystem, which led to BRIN\u2019s 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. \u201cWe\u2019ve started seeing a more collaborative research climate in Indonesia, especially in archaeology,\u201d says Noerwidi.<\/p>\n
Several countries, including the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States, have become BRIN\u2019s research partners, but over the next few years, the Netherlands \u2014 Indonesia\u2019s former colonial ruler until the 1940s \u2014 will be its main collaborator in palaeoanthropology, the study of the early development of humans.<\/p>\n
The long journey of H. erectus<\/p>\n
Java, Indonesia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Palaeoanthropology \u201cwas born here\u201d, says Noerwidi. The Java Man, the first fossil evidence of H. erectus, was excavated by Javanese labourers and identified by Dutch palaeoanthropologist Eug\u00e8ne Dubois in 1895, confirming Charles Darwin\u2019s theory of human evolution described 36 years earlier in his book On the Origin of Species.<\/p>\n
Since then, the largest southeast Asian nation has attracted many researchers to study hominins, some of which have made headlines: one is H. floresiensis in 2003, nicknamed the Hobbit after the work by J. R. R. Tolkien, owing to its small stature.<\/p>\n
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Researchers study layers of rock at a Homo erectus site in Java.Credit: Kenneth Garrett\/Danita Delimont\/Alamy<\/p>\n
In Bumiayu, Noerwidi hopes to discover another breakthrough: a hominin fossil as old as the roughly two-million-year-old fossils of several hominin species, so far all found in Africa. Some evidence from other finds suggests that hominins could have been in the area around two million years ago, says Noerwidi.<\/p>\n
Unlike the discoveries of the Java Man and the Hobbit, which were driven by foreign donors, the current expedition is funded by Indonesia and led by the country\u2019s scientists. BRIN has earmarked US$180,000 annually for up to ten years of work at Bumiayu.<\/p>\n
Noerwidi and his team had successfully convinced BRIN\u2019s Directorate of Research and Innovation Funding about the site\u2019s importance. In 2020, he and his team reported the discovery of 1.8-million-year-old fossilized thigh-bone pieces from what might have been H. erectus1<\/a>,2<\/a>. The finding was a promising start for the excavation, and older layers of soil at the site might contain even older H. erectus samples.<\/p>\n BRIN\u2019s funding and new policies<\/p>\n Bumiayu is just one site among many where BRIN is flexing its power in the country\u2019s research sector. But BRIN\u2019s establishment as a superagency that can both manage the country\u2019s science funding and conduct research itself was not without controversy.<\/p>\n The new superagency\u2019s first leader, theoretical physicist Laksana Tri Handoko, had spent years as a researcher in Japan and collaborated with CERN \u2014 Europe\u2019s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland \u2014 when he joined Indonesia\u2019s science-governance body after new legislation established BRIN. Under Handoko, the organization laid off more than 1,000 workers, closed offices and moved researchers\u2019 desks into a few centralized BRIN hubs.<\/p>\n BRIN has absolute power to manage almost all of the country\u2019s research ecosystem and research funding, and under its funding scheme, all researchers (both those at BRIN and those at universities) compete to secure grants.<\/p>\n Arthur Lelono, BRIN\u2019s director of research and innovation funding, says that the organization is now managing $112 million in funding, and this has raised Indonesia\u2019s position in international collaborations. The BRIN-funded National Astronomy Observatory of Timau has attracted Australian and South African researchers from the Square Kilometre Array telescope project to discuss potential collaboration, for example.<\/p>\n Some critics say that the restructuring was misguided. Herlambang Wiratraman, former secretary general of the Indonesian Young Academy of Sciences in Jakarta, says the \u201chighly politicized\u201d move to merge agencies ignored the unique character and research focus of each organization and put too much power in one place. \u201cBRIN has transformed into a worrying overarching scientific authority,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The merger has been a \u201cbureaucratic shortcut\u201d, says Noerwidi, and has brought researchers across disciplines closer together, allowing ideas to be exchanged more rapidly. His archaeometry research centre, for example, is now collaborating with BRIN\u2019s nuclear-science division to develop an X-ray fluorescence tool to detect smuggled fossils, which is being trialled in Indonesian airports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prehistoric rock paintings in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia.Credit: Photography by Mangiwau\/Getty Last September, a train pulled out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":791237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[24034,24033,64,63,2494,1571,1320,1321,128],"class_list":["post-791236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-anthropology","tag-archaeology","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-funding","tag-history","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}