‘This time, it’s the other way around’: how Indonesia is reclaiming the science of human history

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.

Palaeoanthropology “was born here”, says Noerwidi. The Java Man, the first fossil evidence of H. erectus, was excavated by Javanese labourers and identified by Dutch palaeoanthropologist Eugène Dubois in 1895, confirming Charles Darwin’s theory of human evolution described 36 years earlier in his book On the Origin of Species.

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.

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.

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’s scientists. BRIN has earmarked US$180,000 annually for up to ten years of work at Bumiayu.

Noerwidi and his team had successfully convinced BRIN’s Directorate of Research and Innovation Funding about the site’s 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. erectus^1,2. The finding was a promising start for the excavation, and older layers of soil at the site might contain even older H. erectus samples.

BRIN’s funding and new policies

Bumiayu is just one site among many where BRIN is flexing its power in the country’s research sector. But BRIN’s establishment as a superagency that can both manage the country’s science funding and conduct research itself was not without controversy.

The new superagency’s first leader, theoretical physicist Laksana Tri Handoko, had spent years as a researcher in Japan and collaborated with CERN — Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland — when he joined Indonesia’s science-governance body after new legislation established BRIN. Under Handoko, the organization laid off more than 1,000 workers, closed offices and moved researchers’ desks into a few centralized BRIN hubs.

BRIN has absolute power to manage almost all of the country’s research ecosystem and research funding, and under its funding scheme, all researchers (both those at BRIN and those at universities) compete to secure grants.

Arthur Lelono, BRIN’s director of research and innovation funding, says that the organization is now managing $112 million in funding, and this has raised Indonesia’s 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.

Some critics say that the restructuring was misguided. Herlambang Wiratraman, former secretary general of the Indonesian Young Academy of Sciences in Jakarta, says the “highly politicized” move to merge agencies ignored the unique character and research focus of each organization and put too much power in one place. “BRIN has transformed into a worrying overarching scientific authority,” he says.

The merger has been a “bureaucratic shortcut”, 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’s nuclear-science division to develop an X-ray fluorescence tool to detect smuggled fossils, which is being trialled in Indonesian airports.