Indonesia has asked the Netherlands – the country’s former colonial ruler – to return eight collections of historical artefacts from its museums, including the bones of “Java Man”, the first known fossils of the Homo erectus species from which humans are believed to have evolved.
The artefacts, which are classified as “looted” by Jakarta, include statues from Java’s ancient Hindu kingdom of Singhasari, personal items belonging to an Indonesian national hero, and the bones excavated in Java in the 19th century by Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugène Dubois, which became known as Java Man.
