Op zondag 23 oktober 2022 om 20:50:35 UTC+2 schreef DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves:
Indonesia wants Java Man back, committee to investigate claims Society October 18, 2022 The Java man skull cap. ...
A request by the Indonesian government for the return of artifacts not only includes art, but also a number of fossils, including the Java man skull, Trouw reported on Tuesday. The list was sent to culture junior minister Gunay Uslu in July, the ministry
confirmed, but has not been officially shared with the various museums which are currently holding the objects, the paper said. That will have to wait until December when an independent committee chaired by lawyer Lilian Gonçalves will get to work on
investigating the origin of objects requested by former Dutch colonies, and whether or not they can be classed as looted. The Indonesian request includes artifacts such as the reins of the horse ridden by the leader of the Java uprising prince Diponegoro
in the early 19th century and the ‘Lombok treasure’ consisting of gems & gold & silver jewellery currently at Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden.
But it also includes the complete Dubois natural history collection at the Naturalis museum, also in Leiden. Dutch naturalist Eugène Dubois collected some 40,000 fossils between 1987(???--mv) and 1900 in Indonesia, incl. the skull & thigh bone of Java
Man, considered to be a crucial link in human evolution.
Thanks. :-)
One of these fossils were the shell + engraving that Stephen Munro (my co-author in a lot of papers, he stayed a few days at my home then :-)) found in Dubois' collection in Leiden:
Homo Erectus at Trinil on Java Used Shells for Tool Production and Engraving Josephine Joordens ... Stephen Munro cs 2014 Nature 518:228 doi 10.1038/nature13962
The manufacture of geometric engravings is generally interpreted as indicative of modern cognition & behaviour ...
is this innovation restricted to H.sapiens? does it have a uniquely African origin?
Here we report on a fossil fresh-water shell assemblage from the Hauptknochenschicht (HKS "main bone layer") of Trinil, Indonesia, the type locality of H.erectus, discovered by Eugène Dubois in 1891.
In the Dubois collection (Naturalis museum, Leiden, NL) we found
- evidence for freshwater shellfish consumption by hominins,
- one unambiguous shell tool,
- a shell with a geometric engraving.
We dated sediment contained in the shells with 40/39Ar & luminescence dating methods:
max.0.54 Ma ± 0.10, min.0.43 Ma ± 0.05: the Trinil HKS is younger than previously estimated.
Our data indicate:
- the engraving was made by H.erectus,
- it is considerably older than the oldest geometric engravings described so far.
It is at present not possible to assess the function or meaning of the engraved shell,
but this discovery suggests:
engraving abstract patterns was in the realm of Asian H.erectus cognition & neuro-motor control.
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