Last September, a train left Surakarta, in central Java, Indonesia. On board was Eduard Pop, a paleoanthropologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, and a specialist in homo erectus – a hominid, closely related to our own species, that emerged almost two million years ago and persisted until the era of modern humans.

Fresh from examining H. erectus After finding fossils in the nearby town of Sangiran, Pop traveled by train about 315 kilometers west, through villages and rice fields, to the Bumiayu district, where he believes the world’s next great fossil discovery could be waiting.

Bumiayu, once an isolated area at the foot of the volcanic Mount Slamet, is now bustling with archaeologists and student interns. Five months before Pop’s visit, Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) had launched a 67 square kilometer excavation project in the district. Newly constructed field stations lined the edge of the excavation site, looking like orderly rows of white cubicles from above, equipped with state-of-the-art laboratory equipment and air-conditioned accommodation. From there, Pop drove 40 minutes, crossed the Cisaat River and walked for two hours through lush rainforests to examine what he calls the “most complete” rock layers that reveal Bumiayu’s geological history.

Pop, one of the station’s first visiting researchers, says he was excited to join the excavation team not only because the site could hold important fossils, but also because “Indonesia is now taking the lead in paleoanthropological research.” In the past, he says, Dutch scientists would have come to Indonesia with a grant from the Netherlands and an assignment instructing them to hire local people to help excavate a site, make discoveries, write papers and leave, a phenomenon called parachute research.

“But this time it’s the other way around. Indonesia created this big project and invited people from abroad to participate,” he says. BRIN funded his travel and accommodation and paid him a monthly stipend.

Sofwan Noerwidi, a paleontologist who heads BRIN’s Archaeometry Research Center, says the Bumiayu project would not have been possible without the massive (and controversial) restructuring of Indonesia’s research ecosystem, which led to the creation of BRIN in 2021. BRIN is a merger of 39 institutions, and some staff at the super-agency say they are seeing the results of the disruptive policies that led to its formation, including the layoffs of thousands of workers. and eliminate some research centers. “We have started to see a more collaborative research climate in Indonesia, especially in archaeology,” says Noerwidi.

Several countries, including the United Kingdom, Japan and the United States, have become BRIN’s research partners, but in the coming years, the Netherlands (Indonesia’s former colonial ruler until the 1940s) will be its main collaborator in paleoanthropology, the study of early human development.

The long journey of H. erectus

Java, Indonesia’s most populous island (the archipelagic nation comprises more than 1,700 islands), plays a crucial role in paleoanthropology. During the Pleistocene Epoch (between 2.5 million and 11,700 years ago), the island was part of Sundaland, the southeasternmost part of the Asian continent. This was one of the furthest points that H. erectus It could come from Africa. Grasslands, lowland forests, and rivers dominated the landscape, creating perfect habitats for hominids and the animals they hunted. And since then a small fraction of those lives have been preserved in the form of fossils.

Paleoanthropology “was born here,” says Noerwidi. Java Man, the first fossil evidence of H. erectusIt was excavated by Javanese workers and identified by Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugène Dubois in 1895, confirming Charles Darwin’s theory of human evolution described 36 years earlier in his book. On the origin of species.

Since then, Southeast Asia’s largest nation has attracted many researchers to study hominids, some of whom have made headlines: one is H. floresiensis in 2003, Nicknamed the Hobbit by JRR Tolkien’s work, due to his small stature.

In Bumiayu, Noerwidi hopes to discover another breakthrough: a hominid fossil as old as the roughly two-million-year-old fossils of several hominid species, all found so far in Africa. Some evidence from other finds suggests that hominids could have been in the area about two million years ago, Noerwidi says.

Unlike the Java Man and Hobbit discoveries, which were fueled by foreign donors, the current expedition is funded by Indonesia and led by scientists from the country. BRIN has allocated $180,000 annually for up to ten years of work in Bumiayu.

Noerwidi and his team managed to convince BRIN’s Research and Innovation Funding Directorate about the importance of the site. In 2020, he and his team reported the discovery of 1.8 million-year-old fossilized femur pieces from what could have been H. erectus^1,2. The find was a promising start to excavation, and the oldest layers of soil at the site could contain even older ones. H. erectus samples.

BRIN funding and new policies

Bumiayu is just one site among many where BRIN is exerting its power in the country’s research sector. But the establishment of BRIN as a super-agency that can manage the country’s scientific funding and conduct research on its own was not without controversy.

The first leader of the new superagency, theoretical physicist Laksana Tri Handoko, had spent years as a researcher in Japan and collaborating with CERN (the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland) when he joined Indonesia’s scientific governance body after new legislation established the BRIN. Under Handoko, the organization laid off more than 1,000 workers, closed offices and moved researchers’ desks to a few centralized BRIN centers.

BRIN has absolute power to manage almost the entire research ecosystem and research funding in the country, and under its funding plan, all researchers (both those at BRIN and those at universities) compete for grants.

Arthur Lelono, director of research and innovation funding at BRIN, says the organization currently manages $112 million in funding, and this has elevated Indonesia’s position in international collaborations. The BRIN-funded Timau National Astronomical Observatory has attracted Australian and South African researchers from the Square Kilometer Array telescope project to discuss possible collaboration, for example.

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

The merger has been a “bureaucratic shortcut,” says Noerwidi, and has brought researchers from all disciplines closer together, allowing ideas to be exchanged more quickly. Its archaeometry research center, for example, is now collaborating with BRIN’s nuclear science division to develop an X-ray fluorescence tool to detect smuggled fossils, which is being tested at airports in Indonesia.