Descartes Centre Colloquium on the recent restitution of fossils collected by Eugène Dubois

The recent restitution of the Javanese fossils collected by Eugène Dubois to Indonesia. Reflections and Prospects. 

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois and his excavation team, working on the island of Java, unearthed several fossils deriving from what is now known as Homo erectus. Dubois claimed to have found the missing link between apes and humans, and described it as Pithecanthropus erectus, the upright walking apeman. The announcement of his find caused a worldwide sensation, as it appeared to represent the first pieces of palaeontological evidence for human evolution.

Besides the hominid remains, Dubois’ team found thousands of fossil animal bones at the same location, which enabled a reconstruction of the Javanese fauna among which ‘Java Man’ had lived.

When Dubois returned to the Netherlands, the entire collection of fossils travelled with him, to be deposited in Leiden, where it has been studied by palaeontologists and palaeoanthropologists until recently.

The legality of the transfer of the collection from the Dutch Indies to the Netherlands has been a bone of contention for long years. The Indonesian government made several unsuccessful claims for the return of the fossils to Indonesia as their rightful owner. Last year, however, a committee advised the Dutch government to acknowledge the most recent claim from Indonesia. The government has followed this advice, meaning that the entire collection is to be restituted. The most important pieces, the Homo erectus remains, have already been sent back and are on display for the Javanese public.

In this colloquium, we will look back on this history and reflect on its various aspects, historical and palaeontological. Two historians and two palaeontologists will present their thoughts on the recent course of events.

Abstracts

Jelle Reumer, emeritus professor of palaeontology at Utrecht University and author of De Reuzensalamander: Een Geschiedenis van de Paleontologie (Lias, 2024), will address the question of whether the Dubois collection can be considered as (looted) art or (il)legitimately acquired naturalia. How does the collection’s status compare to similar palaeontological collections elsewhere? Will the restitution act as a precedent and result in a cascade of restitutions by museums in Paris, London, Berlin, etc? And what are the possibilities and caveats of future collaboration with Indonesia?

Gani Jaelani is assistant professor at the Department of History and Philology, University Padjadjaran, Indonesia, and currently a post-doctoral researcher at UMC Utrecht, where he is investigating the legacy of Utrecht Medical School in the Dutch colonies. He will examine Java Man as a scientific object, alongside other human remains taken from colonial territories. These specimens were used to produce forms of knowledge that helped maintain and reinforce the colonial order, particularly through scientific constructions of race. His talk will explore these collections and consider the extent to which they can contribute to contemporary decolonizing efforts. He will also discuss how Java Man has stimulated broader debates about decolonization, especially regarding ownership, repatriation, and the fossil’s significance in Indonesia today. 

Paul C.H. Albers, palaeontologist, is the author (together with John de Vos) of Through Dubois’ Eyes: Stills of a Turbulent Life (Brill, 2009) and the editor of The correspondence of Eugène Dubois (from 1891-1900)  (Noordboek, 2025; open access) which covers the complete correspondence up to and including the years during which excavations in the Dutch Indies took place under Dubois' supervision. It includes letters from friends, his aids in the field, his peers and supervisors. Albers will share his experiences in mining the Dubois archive at Naturalis in Leiden, which began as a search for information relating to some geological aspects of the excavations, but resulted in an annotated edition of the letters.

Robert-Jan Wille, assistant professor of HPS at Utrecht University, supervises two Indonesian PhD students in the NWA-project ‘The many faces of Java Man’, a consortium of multiple Indonesian and Dutch science institutes. He will consider the consequences of the restitution of the Dubois collection for the history of science of colonial field sciences such as paleoanthropology. The collection, including the archive, will now be closer to the site where the collection was excavated, and closer to Indonesian knowledge institutes with a growing interest in the history of science as a discipline. Of course, now European academics will need to travel to visit them. What are the challenges and opportunities for (collectively) writing a history of paleoanthropology that considers the global circulation of knowledge and the historical inequality of knowledge access? How much will we be (better) able to write history from the perspective of local field workers? What has been the role of cultural identity in the history of fossils? Will it also be an important case for other ‘colonial’ and ‘neocolonial’ fossil histories?