Indonesia has long requested the return of the specimen, known as Java Man, and on 26 September, the Dutch government said it would support the “unconditional restitution” of the entire collection.
- At a gathering in Leiden, Indonesian Minister of Culture Fadli Zon hailed the homecoming of Java Man as a “momentous occasion.”
- Indonesian scientists agree. “I was delighted with the news,” says paleontologist Mika Rizki Puspaningrum of the Bandung Institute of Technology, who studied the Dubois collection in Leiden as a Ph.D. student. The repatriation will be “transformative” for research and training in Indonesia, she says.
- “I’m truly thrilled,” adds paleontologist Sukiato Khurniawan, a curator and researcher at CultureLab Consultancy in Jakarta who studied the collection as well.
Other researchers eager to address the legacy of scientific colonialism also welcomed the move—the most significant repatriation of natural history specimens yet.
- “Returning objects and specimens taken from countries is simply the right thing to do,” says Emma Dunne, a quantitative palaeobiologist at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg who studies paleontological ethics. But others worry that the world’s top natural history museums could lose significant parts of their collections if the Dutch decision prompts similar moves.
- “It’s a scary precedent,” says paleontologist Jelle Reumer, a professor emeritus at Utrecht University and former director of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam.
