Written at around 150 AD, Ptolemy‘s Geography first mentions the vast Pleistocene continent of Sundaland. It is a Pleistocene region of Southeast Asia which included the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, and parts of Indonesia. These areas, which are separated by the sea today, were previously one single landmass.
Depiction of prehistoric life in Indonesia. (Photo Credit)
During the Pleistocene there were many glacial periods in which the earth’s climate shifted becoming colder and causing sea water to freeze. The resulting increase in ice formation led to drastic decreases in the sea levels. Subsequently, during warming periods, the ice melted, and sea levels rose by as much as 16 meters.
Between 110,000 to 12,000 years ago the earth entered into a prolonged cold period called the Last Glacial Period. During this time sea-levels fell by nearly 30 meters. This connected the present day islands of Java, Borneo, and Sumatra to mainland Asia and the Malay Peninsula and formed the largest Sundaland mass.
Sundaland dated circa 20,000 Before Present (BP), when sea levels were 116 meters below present. (Photo Credit)
As the earth entered into the Holocene and began to warm up even more, the Sunderland sank into the sea forming the 17,000+ islands we see today.
Sundaland in the Last Post-Glacier Period
Life on Sundaland.
The Last Glacial Period occurred during the Paleolithic and Mesolithic on Sundaland. This was a time when many parts of the earth were populated by multiple species of roaming Hunter Gatherers. Homo sapiens were spreading out of Africa while much of Europe was covered in ice up to 2 kilometers thick.
The inhospitality of Europe during the Last Glacial Period may have pushed Hunter Gatherers into Asia. (Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash).
While Europe was encroached upon by ice, Sundaland was feelin’ pretty cozy. Being on the equator the temperatures were mild. Additionally, there would have been two summers every year. Sundaland was the place to be!
Sundaland the hot spot.
Sundaland is a famous hotspot for many significant paleo-archeological discoveries. The first Homo erectus was discovered by Eugene Dubois between 1891 and 1892, in Java. Shells excavated at the same site have been shown to be some of the oldest shell tools found anywhere in the world.
Museum Purbakala, Sangiran. Indonesia. (Photo Credit)
Furthermore, one of the worlds most significant archeological sites called, Sangiran is located in the Sunderland area. According to the UNESCO world heritage list, “half of all the world’s known hominid fossils” have been excavated from this site.
Sangiran and the surrounding Sundaland area was inhabited for over a million and a half years and remains one of the most important sites for helping us understand our human origins.
Indonesia has revealed some of the most significant finds in prehistory. These discoveries are helping paleo-anthropologists around the world to have a better understanding of our human origins.
Prehistoric Landmasses during the Pleistocene. ( Photo Credit).
Prehistoric Indonesia looked very different from the Indonesian archipelago of today, with it’s estimated 17,508 islands. Changing sea levels in the Pleistocene period transformed the islands into large landmasses like the ones seen above.
1. Homo erectus.
An artist’s rendition of what Homo erectus in Indonesia may have looked like. (Photo Credit -Mark Thiessen/National Geographic)
Homo erectus may have been one of the first hominids to inhabit prehistoric Indonesia. Eugene Dubois discovered the bones of the first Homo erectus at a site called Trinil in Java, Indonesia, between 1891 and 1892. The remains have been dated to between 1 million and 700,000 years old. At the time of discovery they were the oldest human ancestral remains ever found. The fossils were touted as representing the “missing link” between apes and modern humans and inspired many future paleoanthropologists to continue looking for intermediary species.
Found in 2003 on the island of Flores in Indonesia, the remains of the first Homo floresiensis revealed an early hominid that stood just 1.1 m (3 ft 6 in) tall. Nicknamed “the hobbit” for it’s diminutive size, this hominid is thought to have lived about 80,000 years ago.
Artist’s rendition of Homo floresiensis. (Photo Credit)
Some scientists at first believed the relatively short height and small brain of Homo floresiensis may have been due to pathology, or growth disorder in the already discovered Homo erectus species. Extensive research is now pointing towards insular dwarfism—an evolutionary process and condition whereby large animals reduce in body-size over time due to being isolated into a small environment—like the island of Flores. Pygmy elephants on Flores appear to have resulted from the same adaptation. The hobbit is, to this day, one of the most unique hominids ever found.
3. Oldest hunting scene.
In December 2017, scientists reported making the discovery of cave art depicting the oldest hunting scene in Pangkep, Indonesia. National Geographic reports that the cave art was discovered by an Indonesian spelunker named, Hamrullah—who is listed in scientific publications as simply, “unaffiliated”. While the circumstances surrounding this discovery are not totally clear, one this is for certain: the 43,900 year old painting has rocked the cave art world.
A portion of the wall in Maros Pangkep, Indonesia ( Photo Credit)
The painting appears to include several therianthropic figures (part human, part animal) hunting six different endemic mammals. The mammals are thought to be pigs, and dwarf buffalos. The human-like figures appear to be holding long thin objects which might be ropes or spears. The therianthropes suggest that whoever made these paintings had the ability to form imagined thoughts since part human, part animal beings do not exist. Many believe imagination is the basis for religious thinking. This means, the birthplace of religion may not have been in Europe as was previously thought, but perhaps it was in Indonesia.
4. Oldest Portable Art in Southeast Asia.
On March 16th, 2020, a team of archaeologists reported to having uncovered two stone plaquettes which may be the first known examples of ‘portable art’. The plaquettes date to between 14,000 and 26,000 years old.
One of the stones is said to contain a depiction of a water buffalo, and the other, a star, eye, or flower. The plaquettes are comparable in age to the earliest examples of portable art from the Levant and Africa. These are significant, however, because they are the first ones dated to the Pleistocene ever found in Southeast Asia.
Early “art” found in Leang Bulu Bettue in Sulawesi. (Photo Credit – Andrew Thomson)
5. Oldest evidence of shell tool use in the world.
José Joordens, a researcher in the Netherlands, with access to fossil remains taken from Java in the late 1800’s, has discovered deliberate scratch marks on a fossilized shell. This discovery has led many to believe that the scratch marks were created by Homo erectus (found near the shells in the same strata) at Trinil, Indonesia.
Fossilized shell found at Trinil, the site where Eugene Dubois excavated Homo erectus . (Photo Credit)
Furthermore, in an article from the Smithsonian Magazine, Joordens said the shell had been sharpened, “the shell tool has a knife-like edge, so we assume that it was used for cutting and/or scraping”. The sediment in the shells date to between 540,000 and 430,000 years old.
Additionally, cut marks on Pleistocene mammal bones found at Sangrian, Indonesia (one of the most important prehistoric sites in the world) appear to have been made by clamshell tools. These bones have been dated to 1.6 and 1.5 million years ago. With these two types of evidence combined, it can be asserted that the oldest shell tool use in the world occurred in Indonesia.
Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park, Indonesia (Photo by Adrian Hartanto on Unsplash)
Further resources:
Find a list of many notable Indonesian Archeological sites here.
Museum Purbakala in Sangiran, home of the Homo Erectus exhibit in Indonesia where it was first discovered. Fossils for the Homo Erectus type specimen are notably absent. (Photo from Blogpost.)
Warning: This post does not contain photographs of actual human remains, however, some of the links below do.
All great Paleoanthropological stories begin in the past.
A concept first developed by Aristotle to classify organisms based on their ability to move and sense, as well as the temperature of their blood, took root in medieval Europe. Christian followers transformed this idea into what they called, the Great Chain of Being*. A cardinal example of Human Exceptionalism, the Great Chain of Being, placed all forms of life along a continuous chain or ladder. In it’s most simplistic expression, the Christian God sat at the top of the chain, below him were angels, followed by humans, then animals, plants, and finally minerals.
The Great Chain of being was first represented as a ladder called the “scala naturae” (the natural ladder), or “scala intellectus” meaning (ladder of intellect). Liber de ascensu et decensu intellectus of Ramon Llull, written 1304, first published 1512. (Public Domain)
The 1735 classification of Carl Linnaeus, creator of taxonomy, divided Homo sapiens, into continental varieties of europaeus, asiaticus, americanus, and afer, each associated with a different humour: sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic, and paved the way for the idea of Race, and thusly the Eugenics movement. (Photo Credit)
This placement of all life formswithin asupposed natural order was so enmeshed in western society that it also inspired poetry, as can be seen in this passage from the 18th century poet Young,
Look Nature through, ’tis neat gradation all. By what minute degrees her scale extends! Each middle nature join’d at each extreme, To that above it, join’d to that beneath . . . . . . . . But how preserv’d The chain unbroken upwards, to the realms Of Incorporeal life?
The Great Chain of Being was the likely inspiration behind the earliest publication that explicitly used the term “missing link“. Published in 1844, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers, used the words “missing link” to signify gaps in the chain of mankind. These gaps were later described as undiscovered transitional fossils. If found, these metaphorical “links” could fill in the evolutionary continuum from ape to modern human, and finally prove that humans descended from apes.
Obsession to find the missing link was at an all time high; Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Ernst Haeckel all used the term “missing link” in their work, further igniting generations of evolutionary enthusiasts keen to be the first to discover the “dark matter” of the paleoanthropological world. People seemed to know everything there was to know about the missing link―except where to find it.
Eugene Dubois was utterly transfixed by the idea of a missing link and began his search in while stationed in Sumatra, Indonesia as a Dutch army surgeon. In his free time, Dubois worked in Lida Adjer Cave, and quickly discovered a variety of fossilized animals remains, confirming his suspicion that fossilized bone could be found in Indonesia.
Follow modern Paleoanthropologists as they revisit Lida Ajer cave.
Dubois failed to find the missing link and in his frustration claimed, “everything here has gone against me, “in a letter to his friend and director of the National Museum of Natural History. He complained that his workers were “as indolent as frogs in winter”, ( a highly derogatory term used by colonialists throughout the archipelagos to describe indigenous people) and also noted that locals were keeping secret the locations of caves for fear they might be plundered. (Spoiler alert: they were!)
In 1891, after moving to Central Java and setting up an excavation on the shore of the Bengavan River, Dubois finally struck archeological gold; he discovered the oldest hominid fossils (at that time) which would later become knows as Homo erectus.
The location of Trinil, 2 – the type specimen for Homo Erectus, and the corresponding femur found a year later. The two white squares show where the femur (left) and the skullcap (right) were discovered. ( Public Domain )
The vault of a 900 cc skull , a molar, and a femur were all discovered by Dubois between 1891 and 1892, and subsequently given their original name of Pithecanthropus erectus. This name is often translated as upright ape man from, pithec the prefix for ape combined with anthropus, often written as man, and erectus meaning to walk upright. Anthropus, however, simply means human―and the fossils themselves bear no signifier pointing to any particular any sex.
The three main fossils of “Java Man” were found in 1891–92: a skullcap, a molar, and a thighbone, each seen from two different angles might be better known as simply, Java Person. (Public Domain)
Dubois’s discovery was immensely significant due to the notable difference in the skull cap from the typical Homo sapien skull. A Homo sapien skull is globular and lacks a suborbital torus (brow ridge); the fossilized skull vault that Dubois found was long and low, and the brow ridge was large, so that it resembled more closely the skull of an ape, rather than a Homo sapien or modern human.
Meanwhile, the femur looked wholly similar to that of a modern human, suggesting an ape like hominid, who could walk upright―the missing link between Ape and Modern Human.
Dubois published his finds in 1894 claiming the bones―estimated to be between 1 million and 700,000 years old― came from the “missing link”. He wrote that they represented a single intermediary species positioned squarely between apes and modern humans. Critics were reluctant to bestow the title of “missing link” upon them. They believed the bones to be ape or human, but nothing in between.
Dubois spent the next year frustratingly defending his position. Then, in 1895 Dubois left Indonesia for the Netherlands to become a professor of Geology at the University of Amsterdam. Accompanying him on this trip home was his wife Anna, and the set of controversial bones.
Eugene Dubois and his wife Anna Lojenga in 1887 (Photo Credit)
Between 1894 and 1900, many scientists slowly began to come around to the idea that the fossils did indeed represent a missing link, but most continued to reject Dubois assertions that they fit squarely in the middle of the evolutionary scale. In 1900 at the World Exhibition in Paris, as part of one final attempt to assert his claim, Dubois presented a life-size model with a notable even spread of ape and human characteristics; public opinion was unchanged.
Dubois, recoiled into solitude taking his bones with him. He kept them hidden from the scientific community―presumably attempting to preserve his intellectual property rights and avoid further debate. Although Dubois may have felt rejected by his peers, his findings had a monumental impact. Scientists had not totally accepted Dubois theory, but it was still the first time in history that they had begun to accept a possible intermediary species of any kind.
At the Museum Naturalis in the Netherlands there is a exhibit dedicated to Eugene Dubois and his contributions to the field of Paleoanthropology.
Dubois died in 1940, leaving behind a legacy as the first person to go looking for the missing link. His work revolutionized the way in which many think about our human origins, and it has inspired many future paleo-anthropologists to follow in his footsteps. Since Dubois, many more important discoveries have been made such as : Homo heidelbergensis, the Taung skull, Sinanthropus pekinensis and so on.
On January 13th 2020 43,000 articles, manuscripts, books and statues that comprise the Dubois archive were officially added to the Naturalis collection at the Museum Naturalis in the Netherlands. Housed alongside them are Dubois’ most famous finds: the bones of Homo Erectus that he brought back with him from Java. Exactly how or when they made their way to the Museum Naturalis remains a mystery, but one thing is for certain―they are a long way from home!
John de Vos, the retired former curator of the Dubois collection, claims that Indonesia has never shown interest in repatriating the Javanese fossils”. At least, it was never mentioned”, he says in an article from 2019. “I had a counterpart in Indonesia and lots of contacts in high places at the institutions and universities, but it was never the subject of discussion”.
Museums and institutions throughout the western world have often waited for repatriation claims to be filed before they consider taking action. Museums can and should begin the conversations surrounding repatriation instead of waiting for someone else to do it. The process of returning artifacts and human skeletal remains to their places of origin should be at the forefront of all conversations within Anthropology.
Evelien Campfens, from the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, is doing her doctoral research on looted art, and says in an article from Mare Online, “there are special rules for human remains…but it must be done so they can be respectfully repatriated.” **
This author agrees, and strongly urges the Museum Naturalis in the Netherlands to begin the important process of repatriating the bones that Eugene Dubois removed from Indonesia 125 years ago.
Further Resources:
*If you are interested in reading more about the Great Chain of Being and how it influenced early thinkers, scientists, and anthropologists, a free downloadable book can be found here.
**For more information on the subject of repatriating prehistoric remains there is a thought-provoking article which can be found here.
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*If you are interested in reading more about the Great Chain of Being and how it influenced early thinkers, scientists, and anthropologists, a free downloadable book can be found 
Jenny Digs 
