java man essay

Java Man and the Discovery of the ‘Missing Link’ in Evolutionary Theory

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The second half of the 19th century was an incredibly exciting and contentious time for exploring the origins of human kind. Darwin’s theory, ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection’ had been published in 1869 and caused an uproar of controversy. It seemed at odds with the Christian account and debate of new ideas coming from the scientific community now reached fever pitch. Could this radical new challenge to the religious creationist line possibly be right?

Having a theory was one thing, but it was up to the scientists to offer (as was their method) conclusive proof. Physical evidence would be needed to fill in the gaps. Darwin had come up with quite a piece sparked by his observations of finches in The Galapagos Islands. Did it add up? One of the first new pieces of evidence which seemed to lend more weight to the theory came in the shape of Java Man.

The Java Man discovery

Java Man is the name given to a set of fossils belonging to an extinct hominin that were discovered on the Indonesian island of Java. The fossils were found towards the end of the 19 th century and were the first known fossils of a species of archaic humans known as Homo erectus . The discovery of Java Man caused much controversy, and for some time, was even thought to have been a hoax. Although the discovery was not taken seriously at that time, Java Man was eventually classified as a Homo erectus , and earned its place in the history of human evolution.

The story of Java Man begins in the 1880s, when a Dutch anatomist and geologist by the name of Eugène Dubois traveled to Southeast Asia. A student of Ernst Haeckel, who in turn was a proponent of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Dubois’ was on a mission to find the ‘missing link’ between humans and apes. He started his work on Sumatra, another Indonesian island. When Dubois heard about the discovery of ancient human bones near Wajak, a Javanese village not far from Tulung Agung, in eastern Java, he moved to that island. Incidentally, the discovered human bones were later identified as belonging to a modern human, as opposed to an ancient one, as previously thought.

The three main fossils of Java Man found in 1891–92: a skullcap , a molar , and a thighbone , each seen from two different angles. ( Public Domain )

In any case, Dubois arrived on Java in 1890, and began his work in August 1891 along the Solo River at Trinil. His ‘team’ consisted of two army sergeants and 50 East Indian convict laborers. In October of that year, a skullcap was discovered, and not long after, a femur, as well as a tooth, was found in the same pit. Using mustard seeds, Dubois measured the cranial capacity of the skull, and concluded that the owner of the skullcap had a small brain. As for the femur, Dubois noticed that it was modern looking, and regarded it as evidence that its owner had an upright posture. Initially, Dubois named his discovery Anthropithecus erectus (meaning ‘erect man-ape’), though later changing it to Pithecanthropus erectus (which translates as ‘erect ape-man’).

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1922 reconstruction of a Java Man skull. The Skull and brain-case of Pithecanthropus, the Java Ape-Man, as restored by J. H. McGregor from the scant remains. The restoration shows the low, retreating forehead and the prominent eyebrow ridges. ( Public Domain )

A predictable rejection

Dubois published his find in 1894, which caused a storm of controversy at that time. His claim that he had discovered the elusive ‘missing link’ met with resistance from both the scientific community and the general public. This experience embittered Dubois, who decided to lock up the fossils in a trunk for the next three decades. This secretive behavior led to some speculation that the Java Man was a hoax. Dubois died a bitter man in 1940, as his discovery had not been taken as seriously as he had desired. Four years later, the remains were examined by Ernst Mayr, an American biologist, and Java Man was re-classified as a homo erectus .

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The locality of the Pithecanthropus find, on the Solo River , near Trinil , Java. The two white squares show where the femur (left) and the skullcap (right) were discovered. ( Public Domain )

Confirmation from further finds

Subsequently, more fossils of homo erectus were found in Java, specifically at Sangiran and Modjokerto, thus providing a better view of this extinct hominin species. According to the entry for Java Man in the Encyclopaedia Britannica , Java Man had an average cranial capacity of 900 cubic cm, and its skull is described as “flat in profile with little forehead”. On the top of the head is a crest, which was attached to powerful jaw muscles. Moreover, Java Man had “very thick skull bones, heavy brow-ridges, and a massive jaw with no chin.” Whilst Java Man’s teeth were similar to those of modern humans, they also had some ape-like features, such as “partly overlapping canines”. Lastly, the femurs showed that Java Man walked upright, and it has been estimated that this species could grow to a height of 170 cm (5 feet 8 inches).

A 1922 reconstruction of the skull of Java Man based on the Trinil 2 find. ( Public Domain )

Finally, it may be said that specimens of homo erectus were also discovered in China during the 1920s and 30s. Although this confirmed Dubois’ theory that Java Man was a species of early human, the Dutchman himself refused to accept it, as he considered the Chinese fossils to be “degenerate Neanderthals”.

Top image: The original fossils of Java Man, National Museum of Natural History, Leiden, the Netherlands. Photo source: Wikimedia.

By Wu Mingren

Athena Publications, Inc., 2005. The Discovery of Java Man in 1891. [Online] Available at: http://www.athenapub.com/13dubox1.htm

Dorey, F., 2015. Homo erectus. [Online] Available at: https://australianmuseum.net.au/homo-erectus

Hays, J., 2013. Homo Erectus: Java Man and Peking Man and Out of Africa Theory. [Online] Available at: http://factsanddetails.com/asian/cat62/sub406/item2581.html

Smithsonian Institution, 2018. Trinil 2. [Online] Available at: http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/fossils/trinil-2

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2018. Java man. [Online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Java-man

Wu Mingren (‘Dhwty’) has a Bachelor of Arts in Ancient History and Archaeology. Although his primary interest is in the ancient civilizations of the Near East, he is also interested in other geographical regions, as well as other time periods.... Read More

Java Man: How Two Geologists Changed Our Understanding of Human Evolution (review)

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Spencer M. Robinson

When the science of paleoanthropology first emerged circa 1856, with the discovery of Neandertal 1, it held considerable promise in unraveling the mystery of human origins. Based on the biological and earth sciences (zoology and geology initially, later incorporating paleontology and paleoecology, as these fields of study developed) and subsuming anthropological theories of human social and cultural evolution, it offered a scientific, systematic approach to an area of research that was often besieged by highly subjective emotionality and political posturing. Although in the intervening one and a half centuries we have made enormous strides in understanding much of the increasingly complex picture of hominid fossil remains, we have, in many ways, failed to live up to that initial promise. This paper directly addresses some of the problems in the current practice of paleoanthropology that are implicated in this failure. There are three primary problems that have prevented paleoanthropology from reaching its full potential. The first problem is a most fundamental one; the lack of basic operational definitions. While the science of paleoanthropology is concerned with unraveling human origins, and mapping out human evolution in time-sequenced phylogenic relationships, after a century and a half we have no solid, fully agreed upon definition of what is human. We do not even have any concurrence on the organization of our own taxonomic family; in the classification of living hominoids, we can’t agree if we are the single binomial in the tribe Hominini, one of two binomials of the tribe Hominini, the single binomial in the subfamily Homininae, or the single binomial in the family Hominidae — for fossil groups it gets dramatically more contentious. It begs the question, how can we even begin to classify fossil finds when we can’t define 1) what uniquely identifies the genus Homo, and 2) how we are related to our closest cladistic brethren? This first problem leads directly into the second problem: classification of fossil finds as personal promotion. One of the principal reasons that there is such lack of agreement on basic operational definitions is that individual researchers simply do not want to give up the murkiness of fossil classification that enables the researchers to make claims to the unique status of a fossil discovery, paving the way to recognition, advancement, and in some cases, fame and celebrity status. As J. S. Jones has so aptly stated, “. . . this [paleoanthropology] must now be the only science in which it is still possible to become famous just by having an opinion” (as cited in Howells 1993, 78). It will be shown that the desire for personal gain is not the least of the reasons why paleoanthropology has failed to fully meet its responsibilities as a science. The third problem is one of focus. Paleoanthropology has been so obsessed with finding the “missing link” and tracing back the origins of humankind, that it is blinded by a narrow and false orientation toward the fossil record, an orientation that places us, Homo sapiens sapiens, at the pinnacle of evolution. In spite of the fact that such a view has long been discredited in Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, this orientation has influenced both methodology and interpretation to a significant degree and is a direct source of much of the confusion and contention that prevails in paleoanthropology. The reason for the prevalence of this orientation lies in the fact that the public at large generally maintains this view, primarily through a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. To make a researcher’s fossil finds revolutionary and exciting to the world at large, paleoanthropologists have traded on this public view as an avenue of self-promotion. This paper explores the problems in paleoanthropology, and suggests a different emphasis in research as a basis of resolution. This paper is a slightly updated version of the original 1998 paper, adding a reference to the Wood and Collard study of 1999. References Howells, William. 1993. Getting here: The story of human evolution. Washington: The Compass Press. Wood, Bernard, and Mark Collard. 1999. The human genus. Science 284 (2 April): 65-71.

AA Argomedo

Frank Huffman , Aart Berkhout , John de Vos

ABSTRACT The Geological Survey of the Netherlands Indies unearthed 14 Homo erectus fossils in 1931–1933 from a single excavation site on Java (Excavation I Ngandong). Survey geologists attributed the hominin discoveries (along with thousands of other vertebrate remains) to a thin, gravelly volcaniclastic stratum situated near the base of a fluvial terrace remnant ~20m above the Solo River. The geologists were present 24 days during the 27-month-long operation, witnessing and documenting only a few human fossils in situ. Moreover, they published limited amounts of detail about the discoveries. Their provenience account is nonetheless substantially corroborated by surviving records. Key materials are presented here for the first time, including the geologists’ photographs of two human fossils in situ and a 1:250 site map from 1934 showing individual Homo erectus discovery points. Calvarial specimens Ngandong I, II, V, VI, and VIII are the five best-documented finds. Each is securely attributable to the basal volcaniclastic fossil bed. In March 1932, geologist W.F.F. Oppenoorth photographed Ngandong V while it was still embedded in the fine volcaniclastic gravel <0.5m from the basal terrace contact. He previously had examined the contexts of Ngandong I and II when only <150m2 of the excavation were open and all vertebrate fossils reportedly were being found in the gravely sandstone comprising the bottom ~0.7m of the sequence. In June 1932, geologists C. ter Haar and G.H.R. von Koenigswald photographed the Ngandong VI in a ~2m x 2m horizontal exposure of the basal volcaniclastic sandstone/fine conglomerate in which marl cobbles and 17 disarticulated non-hominin fossils also occurred. In August 1933, von Koenigswald removed part of Ngandong VIII from the basal bed near where six antler fragments and a Stegodon tusk were found. For the remaining nine discoveries, nothing is revealed in the available material to contradict the basal-bone-bed origin attributed to them by the discoverers. With some of the finds, such as Tibia B, there is virtually no substantiating documentation, while with others, such as Tibia A, it is unclear how the geologists knew about the stratigraphic context. The provenience detail that we present greatly improves the prospects for identifying the Homo erectus stratum at the site and collecting rock and fossil samples useful for radioisotopically dating the hominin, among other purposes. The documentation also substantially strengthens the inference that the hominin assemblage represents individuals who died at approximately the same time and whose remains were deposited at Ngandong within a few months of death. Support for this is provided by the limited amount of pre-burial weathering in evidence on the Homo erectus fossils, the highly delicate bony structures present in some calvarial specimens, and a combination of plastic deformation and sandstone-filled fractures occurring in several vaults—features which evidently represent warpage followed by breakage as the bone dried during burial.

Science, Technology, & Human Values

Venla Oikkonen

The study of ancient DNA (aDNA) has gained increasing attention in science and society as a tool for tracing hominin evolution. While aDNA research overlaps with the history of population genetics, it embodies a specific configuration of technology, temporality, temperature, and place that, this article suggests, cannot be fully unpacked with existing science and technology studies approaches to population genetics. This article explores this configuration through the 2010 discovery of the Denisovan hominin based on aDNA retrieved from a finger bone and tooth in Siberia. The analysis explores how the Denisovan was enacted as a technoscientific object through the cool and even temperatures of Denisova Cave, assumptions about the connection between individual and population, the status of populations as evolutionary entities, and underlying colonialist and imperialist imaginaries of Siberia and Melanesia. The analysis sheds light on how aDNA research is changing the parameters within which evolutionary history is imagined and conceptualized. Through the case study, it also outlines some ways in which the specific technoscientific and cultural entanglements of aDNA can be critically explored.

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Posted on 24 August 2005

Recently I’ve been reading some of Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker essays . One of them that I particularly enjoyed is this one, Java Man , a review of the book The World of Caffeine , by Weinberg & Bealer. I’m totally going to read this now.

“It is not extravagant to claim that it was in these gathering spots [coffeehouses] that the art of conversation became the basis of a new literary style and that a new ideal of general education in letters was born,” Weinberg and Bealer write… …nicotine… moderates mood and extends attention, and, more important, it doubles the rate of caffeine metabolism: it allows you to drink twice as much coffee as you could otherwise. In other words, the original coffeehouse was a place where men of all types could sit all day; the tobacco they smoked made it possible to drink coffee all day; and the coffee they drank inspired them to talk all day. Out of this came the Enlightenment. (The next time we so perfectly married pharmacology and place, we got Joan Baez.)

And not only did caffeine apparently cause the Enlightenment and the development of liberal arts education, it also caused the industrial revolution:

One way to explain the industrial revolution is as the inevitable consequence of a world where people suddenly preferred being jittery to being drunk.

On that note, Gladwell includes this rather revolting recipe for beer soup:

Heat the beer in a saucepan; in a separate small pot beat a couple of eggs. Add a chunk of butter to the hot beer. Stir in some cool beer to cool it, then pour over the eggs. Add a bit of salt, and finally mix all the ingredients together, whisking it well to keep it from curdling.

Gladwell’s conclusion:

The modern personality is, in this sense, a synthetic creation: skillfully regulated and medicated and dosed with caffeine…

Guilty as charged.

Tags: Caffeine , What I'm Reading

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Java Man and the Politics of Natural History

An object biography.

Natural history museums have long escaped postcolonial or decolonial scrutiny; their specimens were and are usually presented as part of the natural world, containing only biological or geological information. However, their collections, like those of other museums, are rooted in colonial practices and thinking. In this article, we sketch a political and decolonial biography of ‘Java Man’, the fossilized remains of a Homo erectus specimen, housed in Naturalis, the Natural History Museum, in the Netherlands. We describe the context of Dutch colonialism and the role of indigenous knowledge and activity in the discovery of Java Man. We also follow Java Man to the Netherlands, where it became a contested specimen and part of a discussion about repatriation. This article argues that the fossils of Java Man and their meanings are products of ‘creolized’ knowledge systems produced by Empire and sites of competing national and disciplinary histories and identities.

1 Introduction

Natural history museums have long escaped postcolonial or decolonial scrutiny and are only now somewhat hesitantly joining the conversation about the role of non-Western objects in Western museums that has hitherto focused on ethnological and art museums. Specimens in natural history museums were and are usually presented as part of the natural world, containing only biological or geological information.

As in other museums, however, the collection histories and the museum presentation of many natural history collections are firmly rooted in colonial practices and thinking. As historians of natural history have shown, the pursuit of natural history was built upon information—knowledge and specimens—gathered from colonial contexts. Natural history also drove imperialism, because it contributed to building the narrative that conquest was necessary and would be profitable (Brown 1996; Drayton 2000). As Nicholas B. Dirks put it, in a wider context ‘colonial knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced by it’ (Dirks 1996:ix). These colonial narratives were also institutionalized in museum displays (Haraway 1984; Carnall, Ashby and Ross 2013; Das and Lowe 2018).

In the mid 1990s, scholars such as Dirks and Bernhard Cohn related this kind of knowledge to colonial state power in the Foucauldian sense (Cohn 1996; Dirks 2001). Since then, however, historians have moved away from the state-knowledge nexus and argue for a more complex understanding of the actual process of this production of knowledge, the role of indigenous agents and informants, and the significance of local knowledge in the formation of scientific knowledge and heritage. 1 For colonial and postcolonial Indonesia, Martijn Eickhoff and Marieke Bloembergen, for example, have argued that even though heritage sites and objects and their accompanying knowledge production were tools for colonial and postcolonial nation-building, they also ‘accommodated alternative imaginations’ (Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2011:409). They therefore propose to follow heritage sites and site-related objects over space and time, to be able to trace the various encounters and meaning-making that took place around them, and the changes and continuities between colonial and postcolonial regimes (Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2020).

A similarly fruitful way to show the stories that the natural museums have omitted in their presentation of specimens is, we believe, to present object biographies of natural history objects. Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appadurai claim that objects can only be understood relationally: as a whole of processes of production, exchange, and consumption, including the persons and events involved. Only then can underlying structures and assumptions be laid bare (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986). Several studies have shown this to be a very valuable approach when applied to objects with a colonial history, whose lives usually include at least one major transition from a non-Western context to a Western museum setting. 2

In this article, we apply a biographical approach to Java Man—the skullcap, molar, and thighbone of a Homo erectus —who is housed in Naturalis, the Natural History Museum in Leiden, the Netherlands, where he is one of the centrepieces. The Java Man fossils were discovered in Dutch colonial Indonesia in 1891 and 1892, in an excavation led by Eugène Dubois (1858–1940). Dubois, a Dutch medical doctor and anatomist with an interest in fossils and evolution, shot to fame with this find and his identification of the fossils as a human ancestor, and spent the rest of his life studying his fossil collection (Theunissen 1989; Shipman 2001). At the time, Dubois named the bones Pithecanthropus erectus , ‘upright going ape-man’; today the bones are considered a Homo erectus specimen. Importantly, for over three decades, Java Man was the oldest human specimen that was ever found. It was not until the 1920s that more ancestors were added to the phylogenetic tree of mankind after finds were made in South Africa (the Taung child), and in China (Peking Man): Java Man was no longer the sole specimen of its kind.

The fact that Java Man and most other humanoid fossils are in a natural history museum today is the result of nineteenth-century discipline formation in these museums. Many colonial expeditions returned with diverse sets of objects, varying from art works and prepared birds to human remains. Over the years, these objects were separated, with the ethnographical objects going to ethnographic museums and the natural objects going to the Natural History Museum. Fossilized humanoid remains such as Java Man, possibly over a million years old, became part of a collection used to study evolution at natural history museums, while human remains of more recent date were seen as better off in collections with a medical anthropological focus such as the Anatomical Museum of Leiden University (Sysling 2016). As a result, some of the mutual colonial history of these collections has been lost. Not all of the scholarship and debate about human remains collected in colonized regions is applicable to fossils too—the Java Man fossils are not someone’s recent ancestor, nor has the living individual of which they are the remains (if it was one individual) suffered under the colonial regime. Both categories, however, have a cultural and political significance, in addition to their biological characteristics, that many museums are hesitant to research and discuss.

A biography of Java Man could consist of many possible storylines. In this article, we focus less on the way these bones have been given meaning in discussions on, and changing notions of, evolution, the missing link, apes, and men, because these aspects of Java Man are already well documented (Theunissen 1989; Shipman 2001). We also pay relatively little attention to their life on display (the fossils have only been on permanent display in the Leiden museum since 1998). Often overlooked, however, is the fact that after Indonesian independence, Java Man became a contested object in a discussion about repatriation that started in the 1950s and only decreased in intensity at the end of the 1970s. We therefore sketch a biography of Java Man in which we show the continuing processes of signification and appropriation, both from the Dutch and from the Indonesian side.

In the following sections, we first describe the context of Dutch colonialism and the role of local knowledge and indigenous palaeontological activity in the eventual discovery of Java Man and related hominid fossils. We then follow Java Man to the Netherlands, where it became a museum object claimed by Indonesia and defended by the Leiden Natural History Museum. We show how both the Dutch and the Indonesians incorporated Java Man into their narratives: the Dutch emphasized that they were both the discoverers of the specimens and, as a European museum, the detached guardians that could safeguard them for the rest of the world. For the Indonesians, Java Man was important to their national and scientific culture.

In this article, we problematize the histories of collecting and knowledge production that emerged in Europe, to undo what Aníbal Quijano calls the ‘coloniality of knowledge’ (Quijano 2007:168–78) and to move the conversation to include natural history collections and museums. With our focus on the provenance of Java Man, the long-contested political ownership of these fossilized remains, and the meanings attached to them in the Netherlands and in Indonesia, we show how they are sites of competing national, disciplinary, and local histories and identities.

2 Indigenous Participation in the Discovery of Fossils

According to Indonesian palaeontologist Teuku Jacob (1929–2007), the history of human-fossil excavation in Indonesia can be divided into three phases: that led by Eugène Dubois in the late nineteenth century; that of the Geologische Dienst (Geological Survey, established in 1922) in the 1930s; and an Indonesian phase after independence (Jacob 1973). These phases can also be linked to where the fossils ended up: those of the first period are in Leiden; those of the second were (and to some extent still are; see below) in Frankfurt, where Ralph von Koenigswald (1902–1982), the palaeontological specialist for the Dutch Geological Survey, moved his collection; and those of the third phase are in Indonesia.

Dubois started searching for fossils on the island of Sumatra. His interest in palaeontology, combined with the suggestion of the influential German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel that tropical Asia may have been the birthplace of mankind, prompted Dubois to join the Dutch Indies army. This enabled him to go on fossil-hunting expeditions every now and then in addition to fulfilling his medical duties. In an article that was also a call for more funding and governmental support, he described the Indies as a virgin territory that held great promise, and he appealed to feelings of national prestige before warning that it would not take long before foreign scholars would also turn their attention to this region (Dubois 1889; Theunissen 1989:38). The article was successful and made it possible for Dubois to extend his research. When his Sumatra finds turned out to be disappointing, he moved to Central Java, where earlier scholars had reported promising mammal fossil finds. There, at the Trinil site, the three fossils were found that Dubois attributed to a man-ape, and later to an ape-man.

In the 1930s, Berlin-born archaeologist Ralph von Koenigswald continued Dubois’s work when he joined the Geological Survey of the Netherlands Indies. The Survey excavated the so-called Ngandong skulls and the Mojokerto child on the island of Java, all known today as Homo erectus fossils. It was only in the context of Dutch colonialism, then, that Dubois and Von Koenigswald were able to carry out their searches: Dutch colonial authorities provided them with a job, the opportunity to conduct scientific research, and the forced labourers to do the heavy work.

These forced labourers, with their trained Indonesian supervisors ( mantri ), brought the finds to the Western scientists sitting in their offices in a nearby city or, in the case of Dubois, at home: he was not up to living in the forest in an improvised hut. 3 The Mojokerto skull was found by mantri Andoyo (later Cokrohandoyo), an experienced geological assistant with technical skills, and identified by Von Koenigswald as early hominin (Huffman et al. 2005). For collecting, Von Koenigswald also depended on Atma, whom he had ‘discovered’ (as he put it) when Atma was working as a gardener. When there was no money, Atma cooked for Von Koenigswald and did his laundry (Von Koenigswald 1956:83).

Both Dubois and Von Koenigswald could only do their work thanks to the efforts of forced labourers but also of the local population and of earlier scholars with an interest in Javanese fossils. One of these earlier scholars was the famous Javanese painter and autodidact Raden Saleh (1807–1880), who received his art education in the Netherlands and had scientific and scholarly interests. When Raden Saleh returned to Java and travelled the island as part of an art tour, he conducted several excavations in which he found fossil mammals. At one dig, he was supported by the son of the patih (chief minister) of Yogyakarta, which shows there was some interests in these finds among the Javanese elite (Kraus 2012:88).

In 1866, Raden Saleh travelled to the area of Gunung Pandan. As his biographer Werner Kraus reports, Raden Saleh may have discovered a good fossil spot there thanks to an earlier book by Javanese traveller Raden Mas Tjondronegoro V , the later regent of Kudus and Brebes. Tjondronegoro wrote how in a village near the Pandan mountain he was shown bones of unusual size that locals attributed to the giant of Arimba, who was killed by the heroes of the Mahabharata (Poerwolelono 2013 [1877]:206; Kraus 2012:86–9). Tjondronegoro himself, an educated aristocrat, did not believe those local legends anymore. According to him, the bones belonged to large animals that were mentioned in age-old stories but that did not exist anymore (Poerwolelono 2013 [1877]:207). As Raden Saleh had promised the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences), of which he and Tjondronegoro were one of few Javanese members, he sent the bones to the Society, after which they ended up in the Natural History Museum in Leiden (Raden Saleh 1867:422–3, 426–9, 433–7, 448–51, and 455–9).

Like Raden Saleh, Dubois, and later Von Koenigswald, could not have done their work without the directions of the local population. The local population in Central Java was well aware of large and odd-shaped bones found in their paddies and surroundings. As they told European scholars around 1900, they called them balung buto or tulang raksasa (giants’ bones) and considered them to be the bones of giants that once battled against each other. 4 The population believed (and still do) that these bones of their ancestors had healing qualities, and they used them as talismans (Sulistyanto 2003; Handini 2015). An Indonesian booklet produced by the paleontological Sangiran Museum in 2010 argues that in fact ‘the legend of the mythical Great War [of the Mahabharata] had been able to direct the researchers towards their great discoveries’, thereby countering the Eurocentric scientific perspective (Widianto and Simanjuntak 2010:111).

Von Koenigswald also relied on Chinese pharmacists in Batavia (nowadays Jakarta) who sold fossils as medicines, and he used the local population in Sangiran to find fossils. To encourage them to bring in fossils, he paid them one cent or half a cent for an ordinary tooth and ten cents for skull fragments (Von Koenigswald 1956:52–4, 96 and Sulistyanto 2009). The Sangiran people continued to use their skills in identifying fossils after Indonesian independence: Teuku Jacob mentioned that Sangiran was a promising site but presented special problems, because thanks to these local collectors, prices of fossils were much higher than at other sites (Jacob 1973:476).

In their letters and publications about the excavations, Dubois, Von Koenigswald, and other scientists described these people—on whom they heavily depended—only in passing or very judgementally (Von Koenigswald 1956:52–4). In their research notes, Von Koenigswald and his colleague W.F. Oppenoorth (1881–1965) mention their mantri Samsi and Panudju during the 1931–1936 excavations just in passing: ‘young natives, who had been in training to become mantris’ (Sulistyanto 2009:57–80, especially 64; Von Koenigswald 1956:96; see also Huffman et al. 2010:22). Dubois was less matter of fact. The letters he wrote to his two European sergeants overseeing the 1889 excavation are full of complaints. His workers were ‘indolent as frogs in winter’ during the month of fasting, were often insubordinate, ‘concealed’ finds from him, and bribed their overseers. Furthermore, the forced labourers ran away, were ill, and misbehaved. 5 Von Koenigswald also complained about his ‘commercial brown friends’ in Sangiran breaking large fossils into smaller pieces because they received money for every part they brought to him (Von Koenigswald 1956:97). Jacob later mentioned the same problem and added that local people did not always report the exact finding spots for fear of losing their potential sources of income (Jacob 1973:476). This reveals how Indonesian science inherited certain colonial practices but without the colonial worldview Dubois expressed.

Dubois’s writing here shows a ‘colonial gaze’ (Pratt 1992)—the colonial superior observing the colonized without any concern for their situation and without any danger of reciprocity, given the asymmetric relation of power. Many Western writings today still focus on the Dutch protagonists of the story and continue the silence on the pivotal role of local informants and scholars in the discovery of Java Man and other fossils. It shows how the story of the discovery of the fossil was adapted for a Western readership, a story in which Java Man came to be featured as a Dutch national scientific trophy.

3 Java Man and Indonesia’s National Narrative

When Eugène Dubois returned to the Netherlands in 1895, he took the Java Man fossils with him as his personal possession. He kept the fossils in a safe at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, where he had become a curator, but became very protective of them, refusing his colleagues access to the fossils for many years. They later moved to Leiden (Shipman 2001). There, the fossils became contested objects after the transfer of sovereignty from the Netherlands to Indonesia in 1949. The question of the restitution of cultural objects was raised during the Round Table Conference in the summer and autumn of 1949 at which the two countries reached agreement on sovereignty. A draft cultural agreement was signed that included an article stipulating the return of cultural objects (Legêne and Postel-Coster 2000; Van Beurden 2017:144–9; Drieënhuizen 2018). Among themselves, Dutch officials thought repatriation could be undertaken as a goodwill gesture that would improve the Netherlands’ public image and also allow the Dutch to maintain a cultural presence in Indonesia (Scott 2017, 650–1; Scott 2019).

The issue of restitution of cultural objects was pressed above all by Muhammad Yamin, Member of Parliament and later minister of education and culture of the Indonesian Republic. In 1951, Yamin pointed to the great number of objects of invaluable scientific and cultural importance for Indonesia that remained overseas. Among the objects that, according to Yamin, should be returned to Indonesia ‘in the interest of the Indonesian nation and its people’ were several fossilized skulls and human remains found in Java by Eugène Dubois. 6

Yamin was an important figure in the postcolonial attempt to build up the new nation by mobilizing and uniting Indonesians behind new narratives. This was a challenge, since Indonesia was a typical product of colonialism and had not in fact existed as a unified region before the arrival of the Dutch. Yamin’s new national history for Indonesia emphasized the greatness of Indonesia in precolonial times and minimized the influence of colonial rule. According to Henk Schulte Nordholt, Yamin was ‘the main architect’ of this new narrative of Indonesia’s past. 7 By insisting on the repatriation of historical and cultural objects, Yamin and his compatriots resisted the Dutch version of the past and claimed and appropriated a new historical perspective (see also Lyons 2002:116).

The Java Man fossils fit neatly into this new national (Java-centred) narrative of pre-colonial domestic greatness. The fossils were considered highly important for the new nation state, as they served as scientific proof that Java was the oldest island in the world and the place where the origins of mankind could be localized. Objects such as the fossils highlighted the precolonial past and Indonesia’s importance for the world.

Yamin’s other argument for claiming the fossils had to do with the importance of the pursuit of science in Indonesia. In addition to being cultural objects, Yamin pointed out, they were ‘priceless for the prehistorical and anthropological sciences’ and were crucial for higher education and scientific study in Indonesia. 8 After independence, Indonesia faced the task of educating a new generation of students and rebuilding the scientific institutions that had been left depleted with the departure of the Dutch and after years of revolution (see, for example, Pols 2018). The fossils—found in colonial Indonesia by local workers supervised by Western scientists, and brought to Europe as the discovery of those Western scientists—symbolized a scientific imperialism that impeded scientific progress in Indonesia and that was fiercely condemned by Yamin.

The role of the politician Yamin shows that the restitution claims in the aftermath of Indonesia’s independence should be understood as a political act: the restitution of objects was considered a step towards the recognition of Indonesia as an independent and equal nation with a definite, distinct, and deep-seated history and identification. By stressing the importance of restitution, Yamin invested the claimed objects with historical and political associations that would inspire the national historical imagination and turn them into national symbols and ‘the essence of the nation’: its cultural patrimony (Barkan 2002:22). This need of Indonesia to assert its political and social identity through these narratives of ownership was something that the Netherlands was unable or unwilling to understand. Dutch officials, perhaps unsurprisingly, found Yamin’s statement ‘unsympathetic’ and ‘provocative’. 9

The Dutch stand was not very different from that of other imperial countries, although we are not aware of other humanoid fossils that were found before independence, taken to the West and claimed so soon after. Broken Hill Man was found in 1921 in (then) Rhodesia and has been claimed by Zambia from the Natural History Museum in London, but this was more recently (Musonda 2013; see also Staniforth 2009). When Peking Man was discovered in 1923–1927, agreements were made between Western scientists and the Chinese government that all fossils would remain in Chinese ownership (Schmalzer 2008).

The Dutch reluctance to hand over the objects, and the fact that in the 1950s Dutch academics continued to scour Indonesia for fossils, 10 confirmed Indonesia’s opinion of the Netherlands’ undiminished cultural imperialism. The Dutch, on the other hand, clung to the idea of the universality of science while at the same time considering science ‘a uniquely European product’ (Somsen 2008:361). The Netherlands and Indonesia were unable to come to a mutual understanding on the complete agreement of 1949, and in 1954 it was terminated. The fossils, in this period, had become more and more politicized, drawn into postcolonial power struggles brought about by differing conceptions about what decolonization actually entailed.

4 Java Man as Universal Scientific Heritage

Although in the Netherlands people gradually became more critical of the Dutch colonial past, in the 1970s the return of Indonesian objects remained a controversial topic in political debates. After several years of no communication, 1968 saw the signing of a cultural treaty between the Netherlands and Indonesia that included a clause opening the door for ‘consultations’ about Indonesian cultural objects in the Netherlands. Pressure from Indonesia ensured that the question remained on the Dutch agenda during the 1970s. In the early years of that decade, as Cynthia Scott has shown, there was a ‘markedly concerted effort by Indonesian officials to press the matter in the media and at meetings with Dutch foreign ministry and cultural officials’ (Scott 2017:662). With respect to cultural objects this had some success: in 1970, the palm-leaf manuscript Nāgarakrtāgama was returned to President Soeharto of Indonesia on the occasion of a visit to the Netherlands. A Dutch–Indonesian meeting to discuss the issue of the repatriation of cultural objects was held in Indonesia in 1975 and led to an agreement in which the Dutch declared their willingness to return such items. As a result, in 1978, the Buddhist statue Prajñāpāramitā was presented to the Museum Nasional Indonesia (National Museum of Indonesia) in Jakarta on its bicentennial anniversary. While Indonesians spoke of the ‘return’ of these cultural objects, the Dutch insisted on using the word ‘transfer’. 11

With regard to the Dubois collection, all that was announced was an investigation into its ownership (Van Beurden 2017:114–5). The claim for the fossils’ return had its own spokesperson in Teuku Jacob. 12 Jacob was the most important Indonesian palaeontologist of his generation, and he had received his education in the Netherlands. He had completed a PhD in Utrecht with Von Koenigswald and was now a professor at the Universitas Gadjah Mada ( UGM , Gadjah Mada University) in Indonesia and dean of the Faculty of Medicine. In the 1980s, he would become the rector of UGM . 13 In Jacob’s research, he situated Dubois in a narrative that led to independent Indonesian palaeontology: Dubois’s finds were seen as the first phase of the discipline’s development (Jacob 1973). In relation to possible repatriation he, like Yamin, argued that the bones were of great value for academic research in Indonesia. Perhaps because this argument was the most important to him as a researcher, he made no reference to the ancient Javanese past or the greatness of Indonesia, as Yamin did.

While in the 1950s the voices had come mainly from the Indonesian side, this time the director of the Natural History Museum in Leiden, Willem Vervoort, made sure his own counterarguments were heard. In the Dutch press Vervoort called the Indonesian claims ‘madness’, 14 and said that ‘if we start to return scientific finds, we might as well organize a sale’. 15 He also sent concerned and emotional letters to the Dutch Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work when he was informed of Indonesia’s claims, saying that he would do his utmost to counter the proposed ‘mutilation of his institute’, to make sure these fossils would stay at the museum, where they belonged, both legally and scientifically. 16 From Vervoort’s point of view the fossilized remains had been obtained legally and were thus the rightful property of the Dutch state.

The Dutch state itself was not so sure that the remains legally belonged in the Netherlands. Already in the 1930s there had been a dispute about whether the fossils were owned by the Dutch state or by the colonial government in Batavia. In 1931, Head of the Geological Survey of the Netherlands Indies A.C. de Jongh argued that the Dubois collection belonged in the Indies, because Dubois had been employed by the colonial government. The question of why the collection was not in the Indies was then also posed in the colonial advisory body, the Volksraad (People’s Council), but the question was never answered satisfactorily. 17

After the 1975 Dutch–Indonesian meeting, the question of legal ownership again caused headaches for Dutch civil servants and lawyers, as can be concluded from the numerous memorandums on exactly that question. Now they also discussed whether the agreements related to the transfer of sovereignty included any relevant provisions, and whether international treaties applied, such as the Unesco treaty of 1970 on the protection of cultural property. 18 Officials concluded that even if it was the case that the Dutch state was ‘not or not completely’ the rightful owner of the fossils, it was likely that the rights of ‘others’ could also not be proven and the case was already time-barred. 19

The Natural History Museum also argued that the remains belonged in the Netherlands scientifically: they could serve the international scientific community better from there than from elsewhere, because the institution was well known internationally. This was and still is an often-heard argument from Western museums, best known from the British Museum’s position on Greece’s calls for the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles (Greenfield 2007:41–96). Vervoort, the director of the museum, apparently did not consider Indonesian scientists as part of that international community. 20 He added that if the fossils were ‘ceded’ to Indonesia, ‘this very valuable material will in fact no longer be used scientifically’. 21 Among the resources that Leiden had and Yogyakarta or Bandung did not, he suggested, were facilities for photography and plaster-casting, and X-ray equipment. 22 Another argument Vervoort adduced was that Indonesia had a very good collection of fossils itself.

A further line of reasoning was based on a narrative that separated scientific from cultural heritage. Vervoort argued that the fossils in the Dubois collection had nothing to do with the Dutch colonial past. 23 Scientific heritage, he wrote, should not be discussed with emotional and nationalistic arguments, but only with detached scientific interest. According to him, the issue had become a ‘question of sentiment’ in Indonesia. 24 However, he argued, emotional arguments that were valid for ethnographical objects did not hold for fossils. 25 Historians of science have by now shown repeatedly that such insistence on the detached objectivity of scientific views, claims to universality, and assumptions about the scientific state of another country masked what were in fact protective, nationalistic, and Eurocentric considerations (Adas 1989; Golinski 1998; Somsen 2008).

The investigation of the legal ownership of the fossils never led to a clear outcome or renewed discussions with Indonesia. In fact, the Dutch state kept Indonesia at bay. 26 Robert Hotke, director general of cultural affairs at the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, who had been the chairman of the 1975 meeting in Indonesia, informed the civil servants who worked on the case that he wished for the fossils to stay in the Netherlands. 27 A 1979 memorandum argued that the Dutch were very probably the rightful legal owner. This was followed by a note stating that the whole ownership discussion was a ‘smokescreen’ ( uitvlucht ) in any case, a clear indication that the Dutch were strategically delaying the issue. 28 In another handwritten note in the archive, one civil servant writes to another that Vervoort should have kept quiet. 29 By publicly showing his dismay, he had only added fuel to the fire.

The Netherlands have never handed back any fossils, but in the second half of the 1970s a victory for Indonesia came from an unexpected quarter. In 1975 and 1978, Teuku Jacob received the Ngandong skulls and the Mojokerto Child from his then Frankfurt-based mentor Von Koenigswald. These specimens were Homo erectus fossils excavated on Java in the 1930s, near the village of Ngandong and the town of Mojokerto. 30 Von Koenigswald had always considered them his own property: he had taken care to protect them during the Japanese occupation of Java, and the fossils had travelled with him from Java to the United States, then to the Netherlands, and from there to the Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum Frankfurt (Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt) in Frankfurt, where he was invited to run a department devoted to palaeontology (Tobias 2010:268–9). An official argument for the return of these objects, and not of other skulls at Senckenberg, was that these specimens were dug up by the Netherlands East Indies Geological Survey and were ‘protected and safeguarded with great personal risk during the time of the japanese [sic] and in the difficult period afterwards by Dr. and Mrs. von Koenigswald and some neutral friends’. 31 This argument was obviously drawn up for the occasion, as it marked the difference between these skulls and others that Von Koenigswald did not return to Jacob and that he had excavated when he no longer worked for the Geological Survey.

5 Java Man at the Museum in the Netherlands and Indonesia

The Java Man fossils stayed in the Netherlands, and there have been no official claims or diplomatic discussions since the 1970s. This is probably due to a combination of factors: firstly, several objects, including (most but not all of) the Lombok treasure, were returned in the 1970s; and secondly, thanks to Von Koenigswald’s donations and the excavation of the very complete skull of Sangiran 17 in 1969, Indonesia in fact already had a very good collection of hominid skulls. However, Indonesian academics such as the palaeontologist Iwan Kurniawan of the Bandung Museum of Geology have continued to advocate in the press for the fossils’ ‘homecoming’. 32

In Leiden the fossils remained out of sight of the public, the only objects in the collection to be kept in a safe. 33 It was only in 1993 that the fossils were put on display, for the centennial exhibition to mark their discovery. 34 The exhibition did not mention the ownership debate. However, in a reflection on the exhibition several years later, curator Mary Bouquet called the exhibition both an opportunity and an embarrassment, because the fossils were ‘clearly out of context in the Netherlands’ (Bouquet 1998:159).

Five years after this exhibition, and after more than fifty years in the museum’s collection, the Java Man fossils were finally put on permanent public display: first in an open, green safe made by the Lips company, and later in a bulletproof glass case that curator of the Dubois collection John de Vos devised. It was placed among other fossils of extinct animals. As in many other natural history museums, ‘nature’ past and present was represented in a way that obscured its entanglement with the human world. At Naturalis, this meant that there was no place for stories about colonial collectors and their go-betweens, or about the political skirmishes between Indonesia and the Netherlands. Raden Saleh shows up in the museum’s database as a finder of fossils but, unlike Martin or Dubois, has no specimens named after him. 35 In the museum’s 2003 catalogue, Dubois again takes centre stage as the sole finder of the skull in Trinil (Smolenaar 2003:13). In 2008, on the 150th anniversary of Dubois’s birth, Naturalis launched an exhibition called ‘Dubois, Ontdekker van de Aapmens’ (Dubois, discoverer of the ape-man). 36 Again, the attention was focused on Dubois alone. When the museum reopened in 2019 after a major renovation, the fossils came back in the spotlight as the only original objects (together with an engraved shell) in a gallery that presents them as diamonds in a treasure chamber.

Java Man and Dubois also have a place in Indonesia’s museums and their narrative of palaeontology. Near Trinil, where Java Man was found, a small museum with displays on palaeontology was officially opened in 1991, and there is a much larger museum in Sangiran, the site of many of the later Homo erectus fossil finds. This site became Unesco World Heritage in 1996 (Widianto and Simanjuntak 2010:105). A modest museum was created at the site in 1988, and a larger museum was opened by the president in 2011. The Sangiran museum, and since 2005 also the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta, does pay attention to Dubois but also celebrates Raden Saleh, who is seen as the ‘founding father’ of Indonesian palaeontology ( bapak pionir paleontologi ). 37 The museum in Sangiran shows all the aspects of human evolution, including casts of ancestor skulls, and its message suggests both pride in the fact that so many hominid fossils were found in this place and an awareness of their universal value. While the emphasis on Raden Saleh in both museums is an effort to move away from a solely Western perspective and a continuation of Yamin’s nationalist framing of the fossils, Sangiran’s narrative also fits neatly with Unesco’s universalizing discourse (Smith 2006).

The above comparison shows that while both museums, in Leiden and in Sangiran, now emphasize the universal value of the fossils, Leiden pays most attention to the man who introduced them to the scientific world, and Indonesia to the locality that produced the fossils. Leiden thus overlooks the coloniality of Western knowledge-making practices, and both museums obscure the political sensitivity of the objects in the light of decolonization.

6 Concluding Thoughts

We have sketched a political biography of the human-fossil collection known as Java Man, taking a decolonial approach that challenged the discourse of colonial power and unearthed knowledge that has been pushed aside and buried. This biography has highlighted the importance of the knowledge of local informants and Indonesian specialized overseers in the making of scientific discoveries that were claimed by European men. This did not end with decolonization. The fossils’ long contested political ownership and representations reveal the endurance of Eurocentric perspectives in the Netherlands, whereas Indonesia steered away from these by presenting a nationalized version of the place of Java Man in history. In Leiden the fossils symbolized Dutch state-of-the-art colonial scholarship, whereas in Indonesia the hominid fossils were turned into national symbols that belonged to the culture and history of all Indonesia and had to return to within the physical boundaries of that country.

All these processes are of course linked with personal and institutional, colonial and national identity formation. Figures such as Dubois and Von Koenigswald built their reputation around these objects and also considered themselves the rightful owners; and in the postcolonial era Java Man was appropriated by nationalistic politics in Indonesia, and by a universalistic science discourse in the Netherlands—which was in fact similarly nationalistic and protective of its scientific reputation. Whereas in Indonesia the colonial past was banished to the margins and national achievements were emphasized, in the Netherlands imperialism continued for a long time to be considered ‘efficient but judicious imperial management’, with scientific benefits for all mankind (Gouda 1995).

The current territorial approach in Indonesia is debatable, given that there is no direct historical connection between the hominids and present-day Indonesians. Equally debatable is the Dutch interpretation of the country’s role in colonial Indonesia. Museums and the Java Man fossils are not unpolitical objects with universal meanings but the products of postcolonial histories, nationalist politics, and discourses of power. Natural history museums belong in decolonization debates as much as other museums with colonial collections. Critical reflection on the histories of these museums and the scientific disciplines they are associated with is a promising avenue for future scholarship and will also provide the necessary material for museums to draw on in their displays and presentation and in the formulation of their viewpoints on ethical issues such as repatriation.

See, for example, Baber 1996; Chambers and Gillespie 2000; Watson-Verran and Turnbull 1995; Schumaker 2001; and Wagoner 2003. For natural history, see Pols 2009 and Montero Sobrevilla 2018; see also http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/slavery-and-the-natural-world.html (accessed 3-2-2021).

Legêne 1998; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Alberti 2005; Dahlbom 2009; Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2020.

Letter from E. Dubois to F.A. Jentink, 17-10-1889, cited in Theunissen 1989:40. See also Albers and De Vos 2009:9 and Huffman et al. 2010:5.

‘De Selenka expeditie’, De Sumatra Post , 14-7-1908. For a comparable case in India, see Van der Geer, Dermitzakis and De Vos 2008:71–92.

Letter from E. Dubois to F.A. Jentink, 17-10-1889, cited in Theunissen 1989:40.

Aneta morning bulletin, 2-4-1951, National Archives of the Netherlands ( NA ), The Hague, Archief van het Ministerie van Koloniën en opvolgers (Archive of the Ministry of Colonies and its Successors) 2.10.54, 1684. See also ‘Eis tot teruggave cultuurgoederen’, Algemeen Indisch Dagblad: De Preangerbode , 17-3-1954.

Schulte Nordholt 2004:3. See also Van der Kroef 1958:352–71, especially 353; Noer 1979:249–62; Wood 2005; Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2011:405–36, especially 407.

Aneta morning bulletin, 2-4-1951, NA , 2.10.54, 1684.

Letter from the Department of Communications of the High Commissioner in Indonesia, to Ministry of Union Affairs and the Overseas Territories, The Hague, 16-4-1951, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Colonies and its Successors 2.10.54, 1684.

See, for example, a letter from a geologist in Bandung to G.H.R. von Koenigswald, warning him that Indonesians were increasingly hostile towards Western researchers. Letter from a geologist in Bandung to G.H.R. von Koenigswald, 23-10-1952, Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum Frankfurt (Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt) Von Koenigswald Archive.

Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2015:53; Van Beurden 2017:144–9; see also Report of the Dutch delegation regarding cultural collaboration between Indonesia and the Netherlands, 10 to 22 November 1975, NA , Archieven van de Ministeries voor Algemeene Oorlogvoering van het Koninkrijk, en van Algemene Zaken ( AZ ): Kabinet van de Minister-president (archives of the Ministries of War and of General Affairs, Cabinet of the Prime Minister) 2.03.01, 9221.

Associated Press article, no date, NA , Archief van het Ministerie van Cultuur, Recreatie en Maatschappelijk Werk (Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work) 2.27.19, 1425. See also ‘Indonesië: Aapmens terug’, Haagsche Courant , 17-9-1977, copy in NA , 2.27.19, 1425 and ‘Indonesië wil van Nederland beenderen aapmens terug’, Leeuwarder Courant , 17-8-1977, p. 35.

‘Obituary: Influential paleontologist T. Jacob dies at 77’, The Jakarta Post , 19-10-2007.

‘Bericht in Leiden met verbijstering ontvangen. Indonesië: Aapmens terug’, Haagse Courant , 17-9-1977.

‘Indonesische professor eist pronkstuk van Leids museum op’, De Telegraaf , 20-9-1977, p. 5.

Letter of W. Vervoort to R. Hotke, director-general of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work, Leiden, 2-3-1976, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, Deliberations between the Netherlands and Indonesia on the collection M.E.F.T. Dubois, 1977–1979, 2.27.19, 1425.

A.C. de Jongh, ‘De collectie-Dubois’, N.R.C. 13-1-1931, copy in NA , 2.27.19, 1425; letter from the Minister of Colonies to the Minister of Education, Art and Science, NA , 2.27.19, 1425; ‘Collectie Dubois en het Geologisch Museum Bandoeng’, De Locomotief , 6-2-1931 and ‘De collectie-Dubois blijft toch in Holland. Ofschoon ten onrechte’, De Locomotief , 24-3-1932.

E. Hartkamp-Jonxis, ‘Enige kanttekeningen bij de wijze van verwerving, overbrenging naar Nederland, plaatsing en eigendom van de collectie-Dubois’, 23-6-1977, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425; Memo W.A. Panis to head consultant for museums, no date, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425.

Short memorandum on the meaning of the skulls of Pithecanthropus and Wadjak, 12-2-1976, Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425.

Confidential letter from W. Vervoort, director of the Rijksmuseum Natuurlijke Historie, to R. Hotke, director-general of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work, 2-3-1976, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425.

W. Vervoort, Aide-mémoire concerning the Dubois collection and the remains of the ancestors of mankind (Pithecanthropus and Wadjak) in that collection, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425.

Confidential letter from W. Vervoort, director of the Natural History Museum in Leiden to R. Hotke, director-general of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work, 2-3-1976, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425.

‘Indonesië: Aapmens terug’, Haagsche Courant , 17-9-1977, copy in NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425.

Confidential letter from W. Vervoort, director of the Natural History Museum in Leiden, to R. Hotke, director-general of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work, 2-3-1976, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425.

Letter from R. Hotke, director-general of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work, to W. Vervoort, director of the Natural History Museum in Leiden, Leiden, 22-3-1976, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425.

Memo by Th.J. Meijer to the head of the Main Section B of the Central Department Legislation and Legal Matters, 10-8-1977, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425.

D.G.C.Z. to W.A. Panis, 18-1-1979, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425.

Scribbled note to or from W.A. Panis, NA , Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, 2.27.19, 1425.

For the Ngandong skulls, see Huffman et al. 2010:1–60.

Official document noting that Teuku Jacob, on behalf on the Indonesian government, had received the Homo Modjokertensis skull, 13-9-1979. Signed by Jacob, Von Koenigswald, and two representatives of the Embassy of Indonesia, the Senckenberg Research Institute, and the Natural History Museum Frankfurt, Von Koenigswald Archive.

Destyan Handri Sujarwoko, ‘Most pre-historic human fossils kept in Netherlands are Indonesian’, Antara News , 30-4-2016.

‘Resten “Java-Mens” uit Leidse museumkluis’, Nieuwsblad van het Noorden , 26-3-1993.

Most newspapers said that the centennial exhibition celebrated a hundred years since the fossils were discovered; in fact 1893 was a hundred years after Dubois’s telegram to the Netherlands which revealed the find to the Western world.

Diverse fossils found by Raden Saleh around Solo between 1865 and 1867 are registered by the names of the European scientists who studied them: Elephas hysudrindicus Dubois, 1908 or Stegodon trigonocephalus Martin, 1887 . See https://bioportal.naturalis.nl/ (accessed 3-2-2021).

The exhibition was held from 7 July until 6 October 2008.

‘Raden Saleh: Pribumi Perintis Paleontologi’, Geomagz , June 2013, https://geologi.esdm.go.id/assets/media/content/content-geomagz-vol-3-no-2-tahun-2013-.pdf (accessed 8-3-2021).

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Nationaal Archief (National Archives of the Netherlands), The Hague

– Archief van het Ministerie van Koloniën en opvolgers (Archive of the Ministry of Colonies and its Successors) 2.10.54

– Archieven van de Ministeries voor Algemeene Oorlogvoering van het Koninkrijk, en van Algemene Zaken ( AZ ): Kabinet van de minister-president (Archive of the Minister of War and of General Affairs, Cabinet of the Prime Minister) 2.03.01

– Archief van het Ministerie van Cultuur, Recreatie en Maatschappelijk Werk (Archive of the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Work) 2.27.19

Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum Frankfurt (Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt)

– Von Koenigswald Archive

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Dispute Over Java Man Raises a Question: Who Owns Prehistory?

An Indonesian claim against a Dutch museum has pushed the debate about restitution into the realm of the natural history museum — where it hasn’t been much of an issue until now.

A skull cap belonging to Java Man, on display at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. The ancient remains are believed to belong to Homo erectus, a “missing link” between humans and apes. Credit... Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

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By Nina Siegal

Published Nov. 9, 2022 Updated Nov. 10, 2022

LEIDEN, the Netherlands — Ancient crocodile jaws, the cranium of a primeval water buffalo and a million-year-old turtle shell are just a few of the fossils that fill long metal shelves in a depot of Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a popular natural history museum in the Netherlands.

Neatly ordered cardboard boxes contain thousands more fossils, with labels such as Rhinoceros sondaicus (Javan rhinoceros) or Sus brachygnathus (extinct wild boar), under the title “Collection Dubois.”

All told, Naturalis owns about 40,000 prehistoric objects collected in the 19th century by the Dutch physician and anatomist Eugène Dubois from the banks of the Bengawan Solo, a river in Java, and at other digs in Indonesia, which he shipped back to the Netherlands.

The highlight of the Dubois trove takes pride of place in the museum: Java Man, the first known specimen of Homo erectus, long considered a “missing link” between humans and apes, is part of a popular display on human evolution. A skullcap, femur and molar appear to float in a vitrine in a central hall, next to a representation of what Java Man might have looked like.

But the remains are not just a museum centerpiece, they are also the focal point of an international restitution battle.

Indonesia wants the femur and skull fragment back. Or rather, it would like to start with the return of those pieces, but ultimately it wants the entire Dubois Collection. The claim is just one part of a larger Indonesian request for objects from several Dutch museums, but it is by far the most contentious.

While art museums have been grappling since the 1990s with claims that they hold or display looted Nazi art , and ethnographic museums have faced repatriation claims from African nations and Indigenous people worldwide, the Java Man case pushes restitution into the realm of the natural history museum — where it hasn’t been much of an issue until now.

It also asks a new question: Who owns prehistory?

The Dubois artifacts are from a time before human civilization, before the Earth was divided into countries, so they can have no true national affiliation. They aren’t linked to cultural traditions or artistic practices of any specific society, and they can’t be identified as anyone’s ancestral remains.

Yet they were removed by a European scientist during a period of colonial domination with which much of the Western cultural world is now trying to reckon. Historians say that Dubois used forced laborers for his digs and that some of them died while working for him; the museum accepts those accounts. The argument for restitution rests on the idea that Naturalis’s ownership of the collection is based on colonial power.

Indonesia has requested the collection’s return before: The first time was immediately after it gained independence, in 1949. Museum administrators argued at the time that scientific finds were universal heritage, rather than national patrimony; they also argued that the fossils would not have been discovered without Dubois’s initiative. For years, the institution has maintained a “finders keepers” attitude that is considered increasingly problematic.

In response to the claim, the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science is setting up a commission to weigh in on the matter, a process that could take months, said Jules van de Ven, a ministry spokesman. “What’s important to the Dutch government is: How did it get into our state collection?” he said. He added that if the committee determined that “we took it without buying it, and it wasn’t a gift, then we will return it. The scientific value of a certain artifact to a collection is not part of the restitution debate as far as the government is concerned.”

Naturalis’s deputy director, Maaike van de Kamp, said in an interview that the museum would follow the ministry’s advice, but she added that the impact of returning the Dubois Collection would not be limited to her museum, or to the Netherlands, but would affect “the full international scientific field.”

“Large parts of our natural history collections here, and also throughout the world, were collected during colonial times,” she said. “That’s just a fact. The question is: With this changing perspective, how are we going to now look at those collections?”

Bonnie Triyana, a historian who is the secretary of Indonesia’s repatriation committee, said that it was not so simple just to look past the circumstances in which many fossils were acquired. It was “the colonial context,” he said, that allowed Dubois “to take this collection away so easily from where it belongs.” Seventy-seven years have passed since Indonesia gained sovereignty, he said, adding that the two countries can now coordinate scientific activities as equal partners.

The debate about whether Java Man belongs in Naturalis or in the National Museum of Indonesia in Jakarta — which currently displays a reproduction of the fossils — fits into a larger process known as the “decolonization of museums.”

In 2017, President Emmanuel Macron of France pledged to make the return of African cultural artifacts a “top priority” for his administration . While France has been slow in living up to Macron’s promise, with just a few headline-grabbing restitutions , his statement nonetheless prompted other European countries to respond to repatriation requests, leading to some important returns, such as Germany’s gradual restitution of Benin Bronzes to Nigeria .

While Nigeria argued that the Bronzes represent its cultural patrimony from recent centuries, it is harder for countries to argue for the restitution of prehistoric objects without looking at the specific circumstances around their removal.

In 2020, the Zambian government renewed a claim for Rhodesian Man, a 250,000-year-old fossilized skull discovered in 1921. The skull, which is a rare specimen of the human ancestor Homo heidelbergensis , was discovered in a zinc mine in the former British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia, which achieved independence as Zambia in 1964; the fossil is now in the Natural History Museum in London. Zambia argues that it was removed illegally.

This summer, the State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe, in Germany, announced that it would return a 110-million-year-old dinosaur fossil to Brazil, where it was unearthed about a decade ago, because it was removed without proper export permits and documentation.

Those cases are only the tip of the iceberg, said Wiebke Ahrndt, president of the German Museums Association, who helped Germany formulate a set of rules for handling objects acquired during colonial times. “The topic of archaeological objects from colonial contexts is something quite new,” she said, “but it’s a growing issue.”

Countries seeking restitution of items that can be considered scientific, biological or part of natural history may face extra difficulties with their claims, said Alexander Herman, director of the Institute of Art and Law in London. “Items of scientific importance can be examined and cared for anywhere,” he said. “They don’t have to be in a particular nation state. In that sense, there is an argument to be made that the importance to the country of origin is less clear.”

Pieter ter Keurs, a professor at Leiden University who studies museums, said that cases like the one involving Java Man should not be decided on legal matters alone.

“There’s a moral and ethical side of the issue,” he said. “Dubois himself didn’t find these objects; he used forced laborers,” he added. “At the time, what Dubois did was considered legal, but by today’s ethical standards, we say, ‘You can’t use forced labor.’ Yes, it’s a judgment from nowadays about the past, but that’s what’s constantly going on now.”

The Dubois Collection is just one entry on a list of eight that the Indonesian government wants the Netherlands to repatriate. The list became public last month, when an Indonesian official shared it on a slide during a lecture at a museums conference in Bandung, Indonesia.

A Dutch scholar attending the conference remotely, Fenneke Sysling, snapped a photograph and shared it on Twitter . A news item then ran in the Dutch newspaper Trouw , leading to more articles, and a great deal of public controversy. “Robbery is robbery,” an opinion column in the NRC Handelsblad newspaper said. A group of historians, writing in the newspaper De Volkskrant , called Naturalis’s response to restitution claims “deplorable.”

Sysling, a historian of science and colonialism at the University of Leiden, who co-authored a scholarly paper on the provenance of the Dubois Collection, said it was a good thing that the debate about restitution had expanded to include prehistorical objects.

“There is an artificial divide between natural history museums and all the other museums,” she said, because the natural history museums have considered their collections above the fray of politics.

“This is an entirely new category in this debate,” she added. “It targets a museum that has so far had nothing to do with repatriation discussions, which means that all kinds of scientists will have something to say about it. ”

An earlier version of this article misstated the last name of Naturalis’s deputy director. She is Maaike van de Kamp, not Maaike Romijn.

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Malcolm Gladwell's 'Java Man' Analysis Paper Example

The cultural embedding of caffeine.

Malcolm Gladwell has used a rhetoric and satirical approach to present his views regarding the extent to which caffeine is embedded into the present culture. Gladwell has created a strong foundation to his arguments by making essential references to the historical accounts to highlight the current position on caffeine conception, which he boldly refers to being 'drugged' in the infusion. The main idea of Gladwell's argument is the extent to which the consumption of caffeine is blurred by the historical analogies and superstitions that have created the 'superficial' personalities and tendencies. According to the author, the myths have contributed to the existing narrations regarding the usefulness of coffee and tea as opposed to the psychological and physiological fundamentals that explain the biomechanisms associated with the intake of caffeine. Gladwell argues that the orchestrated and celebrated mythical mysteries remain a fallacy when subjected to theoretical critique (Gladwell 334). From the essay, one can easily be carried away with mentions in the essay of major philosophers and scientists who depended on the 'drug' to make revolution a reality during the pre-war and post-war periods. Gladwell questions the extent to which such assumptions could be deemed as precise and I concur with his sentiments.

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Blurring the Lines

Gladwell makes a significant point when he downgraded the comparison between tea and coffee based on a binary list. I agree that when one is seeking to understand the implication on caffeine and the extent to which the consumption of coffee and tea is embedded in the culture, it is important to consider the metric representations of the content and how the beverages are prepared as opposed to gender-related labels or binaries. In fact, a cup of coffee cannot be compared to a cup of tea because the two beverages contain different caffeine levels. According to Gladwell, a cup of coffee contains one hundred to two hundred milligrams of caffeine while a cup of tea only amounts to a range of forty to one hundred. Similar sentiments have also been echoed by medical practitioners. According to Myoclonic a clear comparison in line with the caffeine content between tea and coffee cannot be clearly achieved based on other factors such as origin, brewing time, and processing method (Myoclinic n.p). However, the content of coffee is considerably higher than tea; nevertheless, this presents another dimension that Gladwell presented regarding the number of cups consumed, which if regularly neglected.

Psychological and Physiological Biomechanisms:

Moreover, the psychological and physiological biomechanisms are equally essential when assessing the consumption of coffee and tea. It is possible to consider addiction as culture or ritual to cover overdependence behavior (Gladwell 332). Gladwell pointed out how many people are focused on the ritual and gender-related binary lines with limited concern on how caffeine affects the metabolism of the body. While moderate doses of coffee or tea are essential and enhance body metabolism, excessive conception and addiction impair some aspects of cognitive acuity (Nehlig 2). Moderate consumption enhances vigilance, digestion process, and cognitive alertness; however, excess caffeine affects the disturbs sleep and increases anxiety. I agree with Gladwell that when these significant physiological facts are not considered, then one could fail to understand the risks associated with excessive consumption of coffee and tea or fail to strike the balance on when it is needed and when it should be avoided. While no serious health complications have been documented, but there is a critical essence when the discussion shifts from rituals and comparisons to physiology and psychological implications of beverages containing caffeine.

Beliefs, Culture, and Sociological Changes

I also agree with Gladwell regarding the role of beliefs and culture and its impact on sociological changes. Mythical rituals and beliefs have formed the baseline for several behaviors among individuals. The high level of coffee, tea, and cocoa consumption is one of the examples where tales have played a key role in keeping a culture in the limelight regardless of the historical transitions. By Gladwell relating the popularity of caffeinated beverages to rituals and beliefs, he critiqued the extent to which the behavior could be linked to any logical theoretical background. Such phenomena have been witnessed with fast foods, canned meat, and beer. Gladwell highlighted how coffee was associated with the middle class rising but at the same time the evolution of this myth ended up to elevate coffee as the drink of the aristocrats. Another scholarly work that mimics the sentiments of Gladwell regarding the role of culture in propelling a behavior is the research by McDonald and Topik. The two authors argued that culture is equally essential to economics and determines and shapes how luxury goods are positioned in the society based on the stratified alignments especially for consumables (McDonald and Topik 1). In fact, I have been a subject of coffee rituals where I have always considered taking coffee with friends as a class-related behavior.

Furthermore, another argument that was fascinating in the essay was the issue of synthetic personalities. Gladwell calls this analogy the construction of chemical slaves (Gladwell 333). The biomechanism of caffeine contained in coffee and tea enhances the cognitive abilities when moderately consumed (Song and Liu 4). However, such behaviors have ushered the dependency among individuals who consider a cup of these beverages as a powerful charm of the day. The use of drugs to improve the metabolic process is a common practice in medicine; however, when abused, addiction and other disastrous implication could be witnessed. A similar case is evident with coffee and tea where one becomes addicted. Gladwell makes a joke with this effect in his essay by alluding that "we'd set the world back a month" without coffee and tea (Gladwell 333). According to Gladwell's arguments, Paul Erdos, Richard Feynman, and Timothy Leary have linked their achievements to a cup of coffee each time they were handling a critical task. In such a case, one could entirely link intelligence or achievement to a cup of coffee, which fuels the ritualistic tendencies and create feeble intelligent beings relying on a cup of coffee or tea to make a difference. While physiological evidence links moderate consumption of coffee and tea to enhanced cognitive alertness, it should not influence one's intelligence and output to the extent of becoming a 'superficial' nerd.

Breaking Away From the Caffeine-Based Lifestyle

Based on the scope of Gladwell's essay breaking away from the caffeine-based lifestyle is not a straightforward affair. The culture is rooted into the society practices such that even a legal action cannot intervene as seen in the futile attempted ban of coffee restaurants in London by Charles II in 1676 (Gladwell 332). Currently, coffee and tea shops are key landmarks in urban settings. A culture that started in pre-war found its way through the post-war revolution errors and today, it is part of the meeting, workplace, and social events rituals. In fact, Gladwell claims that those expecting to break away from this addiction should question their personality without coffee or tea. Such a statement is true because cases, where people have been incapacitated when they withdrew from coffee or team, are common. However, the primary goal should be on the advantage of moderate consumption, which comes with essential metabolic advantages (Gladwell 334).

In conclusion, Gladwell was concerned with how caffeine became part of the culture regardless of the historical timeline. In his essay, he questioned the magnitude of mythical narrations that exists and are justifying the addiction and overdependence on beverages containing caffeine. Amid the beliefs and bibliographical accounts, Gladwell was able to critique and create awareness on how multitudes have ignored the physiological reality associated with the intake of tea and coffee only to focus on antiquity narratives and culture. I agree with the author because overdependence on caffeine-based beverages and the escalating debates regarding coffee and tea have entirely been anchored on the rituals, culture, and beliefs emanating from self-proclamations or inherited historical accounts. The reality of synthetic personalities because of addition is another strong postulate that the author presented in the essay. In fact, breaking the addiction will require the answer to one critical question: what will one become without the coffee and tea after indulging in the rituals for an extended period? Nevertheless, it is important to focus the discussion of the psychological and physiological implication of caffeine rather than the tea versus coffee arguments since 'caffeine is caffeine' regardless of the source and form.

Works Cited

Gladwell, Malcom. Java Man: Caffeine Coffee. (2013). Print.

Mayoclinic. Nutrition and healthy eating: In-depth overview of caffeine. (2015). Web.

McDonald, Michelle and Topik, Steve. Culture and Consumption: National Drinks and National Identity in the Atlantic World. England: New Hall, Cambridge. (2006). Print.

Nehlig, Astrid. Physilogical effect of coffee and human health: A review. Cahiers Agricultures, 21(2), 197 - 207. (2012).

Song, Ni and Liu, He. Multiple Effects of Caffeine on Physiology. MOJ Cell Science & Report, Volume 2 Issue 4. (2015).

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Living reference work entry
First Online: 17 July 2018
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Russell L. Ciochon 2 &
O. Frank Huffman 3

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Introduction

“Java Man” is the informal name given to Pleistocene Homo erectus inhabitants of Java. The fossil discoveries on the island include the first for this extinct species, which is now known to have been widely distributed across the temperate and tropical zones of the Old World (see “Homo erectus ”). Today, more than 100 skeletal specimens have been attributed to this species from localities in Central and East Java (Fig. 1 ; Indriati 2004 ). No other confirmed specimen of Homo erectus is known from elsewhere in Southeast Asia; however stone tools indicate the presence of early hominins on other islands in Southeast Asia suggesting a wider distribution of Homo erectus (see “Insular Southeast Asia in the Lower Paleolithic ”).

The Java Man ( Homo erectus ) fossil localities described in the text: Ngandong (Ng), Mojokerto (Mo), Sangiran Dome (Sg), and Trinil (Tr); Song Terus cave (St) has Paleolithic artifacts but no Homo erectus fossils. (After Huffman et al. 2012 . © Frank...

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Bettis, E.A., A.K. Milius, S.J. Carpentier, R. Larick, Y. Zaim, Y. Rizal, R.L. Ciochon, S.A. Tassier-Surine, D. Murray, Suminto, and S. Bronto. 2009. Way out of Africa: Early Pleistocene paleoenvironments inhabited by Homo erectus in Sangiran, Java. Journal of Human Evolution 56: 11–24.

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Ciochon, R.L., Frank Huffman, O. (2018). Java Man. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_712-2

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Java Man: Caffeine Essay Example

Pages: 4 (902 words)
Published: August 20, 2018
Type: Essay

Java Man: How Caffeine Created the Modern World

It is almost unbelievable how things in the modern world had humble beginnings. Some of the magnificent buildings, practices, hobbies, nations, careers, as well as philosophies, were once ideas in someone’s mind. That person then made it his personal dedication to actualize the dream and make it a reality knowing that what your mind can conceive, and your heart believes, then you can achieve. The good book advises the human population to respect humble beginnings and Jesus, Son of God, even went ahead and gave the parable of the mustard seed that is minuscule in size yet sprouts big trees. The mustard seed's small size makes it very hard to imagine the tree that it is capable of producing but well, that;s just how it is. This essay is going to focus on the origin of caffeine

and how Gladwell uses historical detail and humor to support his observation on the caffeine-powdered culture of the American people.;

The first and most vivid historical detail that Gladwell uses is the history of Coca-Cola. By illustrating the humble beginning of Coca-Cola and its current popularity, Gladwell alludes this to caffeine. Coca-Cola is most people;s favorite beverage. However, very few people know its history. The first Coca-Cola came up in the late nineteenth century. It was formerly called as Pemberton;s French Wine Coca with ingredients such as caffeine, alcohol, coca and cocaine. Due to social pressure, some components were dropped such as wine and coca in that order. The remaining ingredients were used to come up with the traditional Coca-Cola beverage which was the mild version of coffee and preferred choice for

children. However, the power of advertisement saw this simple recipe to the levels of perfect universal beverage it is today. Coca-Cola was popularized as children;s caffeine, the ads used it to brand and sold this locally drink. Haddon Sundblom was the commercial artist responsible for marketing Coca-Cola to what it is today. In a Santa Claus outfit holding a bottle of Coke, in one way or another, he managed to convince the world that in his hand was the miracle mixture that refreshes.;

Secondly, Gladwell uses various people;s perspective on caffeine in history and how this came to shape American caffeine-powdered culture. She explains that the cultural adaptability of drugs is the primary reason they have always thrived besides being prohibited. The secret lies in how people perceive it, the layman;s knowledge of the drug. For instance, marijuana is affiliated with relaxation; cannabis is known to reduce fatigue and raise spirits. In that school of thought, even the most demonized drugs are viewed in some favorable light. Caffeine came to a rise in popularity because of the aspect that people considered it. First, coffee was regarded as the drug of choice for the intellects. Anyone taking coffee was perceived to be an intellect or an artist which were and still are prestigious titles to hold. Of course, some cultures associated coffee with discipline, and an example is King Gustav II of Sweden who sentenced a murderer to consume coffee until he died. Those who preferred tea to coffee had the aspect that it was toxic and led to undesirable characteristics such as hardheadedness, promiscuity, indulgence and psychopaths. The society started developing divisions into those who take

coffee versus those who prefer tea.

Use of Caffeine Synopsis

The journal begins by giving a brief history of the famous Coca-Cola beverage and explaining how it came to be. Like many great things, the traditional and much-romanticized drink had a very humble beginning. Thanks to the commercial artist called Haddon Sundblom who made adverts and marketed the brand in his red Santa Claus outfit pushing it to the stratosphere. The article goes on to explain that the reason behind drugs being very convincing as cultural acceptance and adaptability. A brief history of caffeine showed that the drug was perceived differently by different people. Whereas some associated it with intellects, some thought it invoked unacceptable behaviors that were both immoral and unethical such as promiscuity and hardheadedness.;

At some point, the society was separated into tea takers and coffee takers, which was all too puzzling because that was a very superficial basis for division. The fact that there are so many foods and beverages makes it even more confusing and borderline absurd. For instance, if that were the case, then people would be classified into tuna eaters and salmon eaters or based on how they liked their eggs; scrambled or boiled. The author then clarified the behavior associated with coffee consumers to be scientific as opposed to mythological. For instance, those who claim that coffee is a male drink while tea is for women because of the myths associated with the coffee stand corrected. The woman;s body takes a considerable amount of time to clear caffeine from their system, and this is the scientific explanation why it is not advised.

In the twentieth century, though, caffeine;s use has significantly

increased, and people are exploiting its ability to deprive its users of sleep. Demanding professions such as law and medicine have turned its students and workers into machines who ought to stay woke more than they should be. They have resorted to using caffeine to support this lifestyle.

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Java is the best programming language Essay

I consider Java as the best programming language due to its small language vocabulary, portability and simplicity. Java has a small and regular vocabulary; a programmer can easily master and grasp .Any computer program written in Java can run and execute on any operating system hence compatibility with all operating systems.

Java was developed and released in 1995, much later after C and C++. As such it tends to solve some of the shortcomings cited in C and C++.For instance, it uses Javadoc, a documenting system that develops a systematic and organized method for documenting codes (Pawlan 1999).

It also uses Byte code verifier which enhances correctness and security of the compiled code hence reducing the number of runtime checks. This implies that with the knowledge of Java, one can comfortably take up programming tasks in C and C++ or any other language. Java is also purely object oriented, easy to interpret and has high execution performance. This makes it simple and easier to work with. For this reason, Java is sometimes referred to as “a powerful yet easy to learn and work with language” (Pawlan 1999).

Java is the most widely used programming language by web developers for both simple complex programming tasks. Due to its much simplified user platform, most people tend to have a general notion that Java cannot be used to create much complicated web applications due to its simple platform.

This is not true since most programmers use Java to write complex programs in a simple way easy that is to follow and interpret. Java was developed to write more complex programs in a simpler language. Even the most complex and sophisticated programs look so simple in Java making it hard to realize their complexity (Lindholm & Yellin 1999).

It is considered flexible; due to incremental development in terms of object- oriented features, coupled with Java’s simplicity, it is possible to rapidly develop applications and easily change them at will. This offers much freedom to the programmer to make changes to the program whenever he deems fit to do so.

It has the ability to develop robust and secure programs. It is also used to break down and portably distribute some complex programs. These features, together with its simple user platform, have made it find extensive application in programming tasks.

Java is the best in compilation and execution speed. Initially, most developers avoided using Java in more complex tasks due to its slow speed. Much effort was put in place to improve its speed and as a result, today, Java speed is comparable to C or C++ for equivalent tasks. With this speed, plus its improved performance characteristics, it is the best programming language (Gosling & Joy 2005).

Consequently, in modern programming, speed does not majorly rely on the language used, but also on the memory card capacity and processor speed. Java therefore, enables a programmer to write codes which compile fast and have few runtime checks using Java than in any other programming language. In this line, Java does not only offer a fast compilation process, but also better programs, with few errors and which can be run on any operating system.

Basing on speed, simplicity and the extent of application; Java no doubt, is the best programming language. It is so simple to use, with a user friendly language vocabulary and so fast in compilation these have made it the widely used language in programming. Its improved features regarding the aforementioned aspects make it more preferable than any other programming language. Hence, Java is the best programming language.

Works Cited

Gosling, James and Joy, Bill . The Java Language Specification . Boston: Addison – Wesley. 2005. Print.

Lindholm, Tim and Yellin, Frank. The Java Virtual Machine Specification . Boston: Addison-Wesley. 1999. Print.

Pawlan, Monica. Essentials of the Java Programming Language .1999. New York: McGraw. Print.

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Rick Scott's one-man rally for Trump exposes GOP abandonment

There has been remarkably little public support for donald trump during his first criminal trial, by heather digby parton.

There have been a lot of raised eyebrows over the fact that with the exception of one appearance by his son Eric, Donald Trump's family is not present to support him at his criminal trial in Manhattan. Normally you would see the wife and the adult kids lined up behind the defendant to show a united front, even if the subject at hand was uncomfortable. There really isn't such a thing as a pleasant criminal trial but it's something that is commonly done and I would certainly have thought that it would be wise in this case, since he's running for president and all. It would have been especially useful to at least see Melania and Ivanka playing the trad-wife and loyal daughter, suggesting by their presence that their man can do no wrong in their eyes. They're supposed to be Republicans, after all.

Why MAGA hasn't turned up to support him in his moment of need when there always seems to be a few thousand who like to go to his rallies is a mystery but it clearly has Trump feeling down in the dumps.

But how could they? Everyone knows that his cultivated image of a wealthy playboy who wined and dined beautiful women like he was some kind of matinee idol is another one of his lies. This man had a casting couch routine more in the mold of a creepy Harvey Weinstein than a glamorous Tony Stark and they know it.

Trump is intensely frustrated over the fact that because of the judge's gag order, he is no longer allowed to verbally assault and threaten the witnesses or the jury. But since the judge told him this week that he will have no choice but to jail him for contempt if he violates it one more time, he's managed to keep it together and confine his insults and threats to the judge, the prosecutors and Joe Biden. But you can feel the tension in Trump when he makes his frequent forays into the strange echo chamber hallway where he rants about the proceedings and reads clippings from Fox News personalities saying the trial is a travesty.

One can imagine how the thought of going to jail petrifies him. This is a man who has been pampered his entire life. His elaborate morning ablutions with the hair and the make-up routine alone make any kind of imprisonment unthinkable. But he really, really wants to go after Stormy Daniels, so much so that he had his lawyers ask the judge to lift the gag order for her specifically since she is now finished testifying. (The judge said no, that he was preserving the integrity of the court.)

For Trump this goes against every fiber of his being, as was not so coincidentally conveyed to the jury yesterday afternoon when one of his book publishers testified and was asked to read aloud some passages from his books, including this charming commentary:

"For many years I've said that if someone screws you, screw them back. If somebody hurts you you just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye."

Trump will just have to let his allies in the right-wing media do that for him for the moment — and they are more than eager to comply.

It's doubtful that Trump wanted his family to be there to hear all these sordid details in person anyway. But he reportedly was quite upset that his political allies weren't in attendance during the first two weeks of the trial. According to NBC News , he whined "no one is defending me" and pouted over the fact that there wasn't a big crowd of protesters outside . He lied about that, of course, and said on camera that there were hundreds of people blocked from protesting.

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He actually called for his followers to come to the trial on his Truth Social platform — “GO OUT AND PEACEFULLY PROTEST. RALLY BEHIND MAGA. SAVE OUR COUNTRY!” — but other than a dozen or so kooks, they haven't shown up. From the very beginning of his legal travails he's issued threats that his people "won't stand for it" saying as far back as 2022, “If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had … in Washington, D.C, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt."

Why MAGA hasn't turned up to support him in his moment of need when there always seems to be a few thousand who like to go to his rallies is a mystery but it clearly has him feeling down in the dumps. So now he's got some of his employees, political cronies and right-wing media personalities attending the trial to give him a little boost.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who Politico r eports hangs around Trump as much as possible, was among the first to heed the call. Also showing up despite having much more important things to do were campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita along with advisor Boris Epshteyn and Natalie Harp, who t he New York Times describes this way:

Called “the human printer” by colleagues, Ms. Harp often carries a portable device so she can quickly provide Mr. Trump with hard copies of mood-boosting news articles and social media posts by people praising him.

That's just pathetic.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter , Crash Course.

The lawyer who has lost several cases for Trump but who defends him vociferously on TV, Alina Habba, has appeared in the courtroom. And on Thursday former judge and current Fox News member of "The Five," Jeanine Pirro was in attendance. The big name of the day, however, was Florida Senator Rick Scott who went the extra mile and held a press conference where he compared Trump to himself:

Scott's company paid $1.7 billion in fines to settle charges of rampant Medicare fraud, at the time the largest ever imposed, and Scott has previously said , “I take responsibility for what happened on my watch as CEO.” Today he says he's a victim of the deep state.

The ambitious senator is said to be angling for the VP slot or Senate majority leader and he knows that whining like a five-year-old about being victimized is the quickest way to Donald Trump's heart. Scott's the first contender to be there in his time of need and I'm sure Trump noticed. If the rest of them haven't figured out by now that job one is defending Dear Leader and singing his praises then they'd better just take their names off the list right now. Look for the whole crew to traipse up there over the next few weeks. Donald Trump needs cheering up and nothing makes him happier than lackeys begging for his favor.

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Heather Digby Parton, also known as " Digby ," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Revisit Congress Avenue in 1914, where revelers in cars crowd out horse drawn buggies

You don't have much time before Father's Day, which falls on June 16 this year, to match the magnificent gift given by a Texas man, originally from Marlin, who came close to immortalizing his father.

Jack Robertson, 81, uncovered a treasure trove of old Texas documents, essays, letters, photos and other ephemera in a box of memorabilia that had belonged to his father, Rupert Robertson (1895-1968).

A University of Texas professor emeritus of accounting, Jack recognized the historical value of Rupert's descriptive essays written for his English classes at UT from 1914 to 1916, as well as the evidence from his military service during World War I, when Rupert was a balloonist.

Since the elder Robertson starred on the Marlin high school track team and earned his track letter at UT in Austin, his son Jack wanted to preserve his father's writing at the university's Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, a marvelously eccentric museum and archive tucked into the north end of Royal Memorial Stadium.

Terence "Terry" Todd, the late director of the Stark Center, and his wide, Jan Todd, current director, welcomed Rupert's personal papers, many from more than 100 years ago.

"Terry asked me to include a biography of my father, so independent researchers could add the personhood of the author to the context of the stories," Jack says. "Ten months and 62 pages later, I delivered the biography."

You read that right, the dutiful son produced a biography of his father that weighs in at 62 single-spaced pages, which, while short of being a book, is much more than a bio sketch.

I can't pretend to have read every word of this opus, but combined with Rupert's own writing, the world of Texas in the early 20th century became incrementally clearer to me through this gift from Jack Robertson.

A choice essay on Austin from Rupert Robertson

In 1914, Rupert Robertson wrote the following essay about a night on Congress Avenue, one of many he executed for English classes at UT. Note the keen details as Rupert's attention wanders — through various sentence structures — from one sensation to another. This was a time when most of the city's commercial traffic and entertainment venues were concentrated on Congress, but before the Paramount Theatre opened as the Majestic Theatre in 1915.

This particular personal anecdote — and others like it from all over the state — is available digitally to the public at thestoryoftexas.com through the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum as part of the "Help Us Tell the Story of Texas" project.

"The rain is coming down slowly, and it wets the street so that it glistens under the big arc lights like a large mirror.

"The red and yellow drays are bespattered with mud. The streetcars, automobiles and other vehicles are rumbling down the street with such a terrible drum that I would think I was by myself if I could not see the throng of people moving up and down the street.

"Some are gazing at the beautifully lighted show windows which contain various shades of the latest styles of clothing; some are on the inside of the store purchasing articles, and some are looking at the red, white and green moving picture signs, and debate with themselves whether to go in or stay outside and parade the street with the "mob."

"The crowd is composed mostly of university students, but they are not in a hurry tonight. This is unusual, because as a general rule, these fellows are restless, and always go with push and vim wherever they are. But the college spirit is here, for every now and then I hear the jolly laugh of some young man at the joke or remark of one of his companions.

"Boys and girls in couples, clad in their grey and brown rainproof garments, are present in great numbers. There is an air of happiness and success among them as they go down one side of the street and come up the other; the thought of the green-back English book and the brown cloth-covered mathematic text is left behind and forgotten.

"The crowd is divided into groups which represent different fraternities, clubs and various other organizations. Each individual bunch has a characteristic of its own. The Rusticusses wearing big hats, the Phi Gamma Deltas grey mackinaws with a blue stripe, the Sigma Nu's ties, and the other organizations have some similar distinction.

"The rest of the crowd is compiled of town girls and boys; brown (Mexican American); Negro men and women; and a great part of the Jewish population. Here and there, and at every corner, I see a policeman watching the crowd as a cowboy on horseback watches a herd of cattle.

"The street is as crowded with vehicles as the sidewalks are with people. Along the curbing are many automobiles with their radiators pointing toward the crowd and the rear ends toward the middle of the street. At intervals are found horses and buggies, but not many because automobiles are rapidly taking their place.

"Then there are the candy vendors in their dingy clothing, selling brown peanut and pecan candies. The popcorn man has his wagon driven close to the curbing, and is selling chewing gum, peanuts and pink popcorn. The whole scene has an atmosphere of relaxation and freedom in spite of the gloominess of the weather."

Rupert Robertson the athlete

"After starting the biography," Jack Robertson writes, "I needed to continue to the end."

Rupert Cook Robertson was born March 31, 1895 in the rural town of Kosse, Texas (pop. 500) in southern Limestone County. His father, Charles Onward "C.O." Robertson was born in Alabama in 1867; his mother Martha Adeline "Mattie" Price Robertson, was born in Blue Ridge in Falls County in 1872.

Rupert was known as a "city boy" in Kosse, where his family owned a general store, but he spent much time on his grandfather's Price's farm in Falls County, where "all activity revolved around the fields and seasons."

Even in the early 20th century, rural Texas remained closer to the rhythms of the 19th century. "His transport was shoe-leather and horse-and-buggy," his son writes. "His water came from a well. His sanitation was the outhouse. His entertainment was outdoors with family and friends."

Socially, this was the "segregated South," with scant interaction between the races, other than the employer-worker relationships, Jack reminds readers.

Rupert was not the only Kosse native to make it big in sports. David E. "Kosse" Johnson Jr. starred as a halfback on the Rice Institute team during the 1950s and was drafted by the Green Bay Packers.

Another nearby exposure to big-time sports: Pro baseball teams — such as White Sox, Cardinals, Reds, Athletics and Giants — held spring training camps in nearby Marlin, which attracted flocks of tourists because its mineral water that promised reputed healing properties.

Rupert attended Marlin High School from 1912 to 1914. He lived in a boarding house operated by his Aunt Clara Belle Price. Even today, one can walk by blocks and blocks of sizable Victorian and farmhouse-style homes in Marlin.

Since his father disapproved of football, Rupert ran track. State high school track meets were held at UT's Clark Field beginning in 1905. The big four regional teams were Belton, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas. According to University of Texas Interscholastic League records, Marlin competed strongly from 1910 to 1915, and the school earned the top spot in 1914. As usual, Rupert won individual and team medals. (Jack's documents on these events are startlingly detailed.)

When Rupert entered UT in 1914, Austin was home to about 30,000 people, and 2,300 of those were members of the university's student body. His freshman class, for which he served as secretary-treasurer, counted 674 members.

Rupert said he wanted to study business in order to take over the family general store in Kosse. Jack always imagined that his father was recruited for his track skills, but he also turns up evidence of family and friends who had attended UT, and would have supported Rupert collegiate aspiration. He belonged to that generation of Texans whose families had survived pioneer life in the country and saw brighter horizons for their children in the cities and through higher education.

Rupert joined an athletic fraternity, Sigma Delta Psi, as well as Kappa Alpha, which includes among its brothers athletes who were Rupert's friends. Sports were already big on campus and getting bigger. Folks like Billy Disch, L. Theo Bellmont and Clyde Littlefield led what was becoming a dominant college power in football, basketball, track, tennis, gymnastics, wrestling and soccer — Rupert played wing on the soccer team. In track, he did well in high hurdles, mile relay and other events.

Life in the military and its aftermath

UT sports hollowed out, however, once the U.S. entered World War I on April 6, 1917. Athletes were among the first to enlist and the campus opened military training centers, which were later badly stricken by the flu epidemic in 1918-1919.

Rupert enlisted in the Army on Aug. 5, 1917 in Houston. Much of what he wrote about his first months is fairly anodyne but still illuminating about Austin and San Antonio, where he trained at Camp Travis, during the war. (For instance, Rupert did not pause his habit of dating campus beauties.) After basic training, he was assigned to Fort Omaha, Nebraska, on March, 26 1918 to enter the balloon school. He qualified to be a spherical balloon pilot.

Rupert's family expressed concern whenever the press reported balloon any accidents and explosions, but young man made it through two years in the corps unscathed. He skipped the flu, too, at a time when the military was among the hardest hit sectors in the U.S. by the pandemic. Aug. 30, 1918, Rupert was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Air Service. After a series of service flights, he was honorably discharged on Aug. 11, 1919 with bronze victory button.

The rest of Rupert's young adult life was spent working in real estate, insurance and various other Kosse businesses, as well as farming citrus fruit and working for firms in the Rio Grande Valley, Corpus Christi and California. In the Valley, he met and married widow Lois Lucille Rose Bartlett; they produced Sara Ellen Robertson Moore and Jack Robertson.

Rupert suffered from various medical conditions, including diabetes and depression, some of them traced to his military service. Lois taught school and the family eventually moved to Marlin, where Jack grew up. A good deal of the remaining personal history consists of Jack's childhood memories of his family while growing up there. (We'd need another column or two to do that part justice.)

Rupert died Jan. 10, 1968 at age 72.

Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. He can be reached at [email protected]. Sign up for the free weekly digital newsletter, Think, Texas, at statesman.com/newsletters, or at the newsletter page of your local USA Today Network paper.

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