Mika Puspaningrum has very little to do with the original fossils from her native Indonesia, no matter how fascinating she still finds them.

Although she keeps digging, most of the work is done here, she says, pointing to her laptop.

"Sangiran 2", one of the most important finds of Homo erectus, from the former Java, about 1.5 million years old, is kept just a few meters from her desk in the Frankfurt Senckenberg Institute.

Puspaningrum reacts calmly to the question of where they are kept and the debate about returning fossil finds to their countries of origin.

"I'm neutral there."

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Free access to material is important – and she has never had any problems with that, says the 36-year-old paleontologist and geologist.

When she says “material” she means above all data.

Data from finds and the research around it.

“Sharing doesn't have to mean giving everything back.

It also means providing opportunities to work and share the technology,” says Puspaningrum.

Your work in Frankfurt is itself an example of “Shared Global Heritage”.

Puspaningrum is the first Koenigswald research fellow to work at the Senckenberg Institute.

In 2019, the Werner Reimers Foundation, the Daimler and Benz Foundation and the Johanna Quandt University Foundation set up this new scholarship for advanced young scientists from Southeast Asia.

The grant commemorates Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald (1902-1982), a formative researcher in paleoanthropology who was associated with Senckenberg from the late 1960s until his death.

He made his significant discoveries in what was then the Dutch colony of Java, in what is now Indonesia.

"A principle of give and take is exchange"

Thanks to the models being worked on in Frankfurt, Puspaningrum was able to advance her own work.

She deals with the living environment of early Homo erectus in present-day Indonesia.

And above all with how it actually got from one of the many thousands of islands there to the other.

Floating?

Too far.

With rafts?

Hard to prove.

On the backs of large animals, as Friedemann Schrenk, head of the Paleoanthropology section at Senckenberg, likes to point out?

No proof, says Puspaningrum and smiles.

A principle of give and take is exchange, she says, and in her generation there is the opportunity to work internationally.

She has now been able to take advantage of such an opportunity in Frankfurt for a good two years.

Thanks to the support of the entrepreneur Werner Reimers, who was interested in research, not only Koenigswald came to Frankfurt, but also an important collection.

Koenigswald had made amazing discoveries in the early 1930s.

The collection traveled with him via the Netherlands, where he taught, to Frankfurt in the 1960s, when the final phase of his life as a researcher began there.

A considerable part of the Koenigswald fossils are still stored in Frankfurt, as are many other finds.

The debate about restitution has been going on in science and museum politics for some time.

Much was traced back a good 50 years ago, to Bandung and Yogyakarta, long before people thought about post-colonial heritage and shared history.

Mika Puspaningrum also researches and teaches in Bandung.

In 1931, Koenigswald was able to combine his work as a geologist and palaeontologist for the mine construction of the Dutch geological service with his early human research from this town.

A successful record

For Friedemann Schrenk, who himself found something significant in Malawi, a new collection policy is inevitable.

For a long time he has been promoting knowledge transfer, cooperation and "shared heritage".

Punctually on the 50th anniversary of the handover of the collection by the Reimers Foundation to the Senckenberg Institute, Puspaningrum's time there is now coming to an end - unfortunately, as she says.

“The most important thing in these two years was working with so many great scientists.

In our field, you can achieve a much larger picture together.” After more than two years, interrupted by stays at home and made more difficult by the pandemic, she can do a successful one with a publication that is currently being evaluated and two more that are yet to come show balance sheet.

And now, on the anniversary of the handing over of the collection in 1972 and at the same time in commemoration of Koenigswald's round years of birth and death, she was able to present the result of her modeling, which she developed with a network of researchers from different disciplines, from geology to marine research to paleoanthropology.

The brightly colored result is not only reminiscent of Puspaningrum herself of computer games from her childhood: changed parameters result in a new picture of the living environment of early Javanese humans.

Many questions can now be answered.

However, whether Homo erectus actually crossed the sea on the back of an elephant remains unclear for the time being.