Pirogue ornament

This ornament was attached to the bow of the pirogue. Its function was to protect the pirogue and its occupants during navigation.
Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald (1902-1982) was a German paleontologist and geologist who carried out extensive research on fossil hominids, particularly Homo erectus.
From 1930 onwards, his discoveries and studies of the extinct hominids of Java, as well as his studies of other important Southeast Asian fossils, firmly established his reputation as one of the great figures of paleoanthropology in the 20th century.
After the war, Ralph von Koenigswald worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, before taking up a chair in paleontology created for him at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.
Following his retirement from the Utrecht chair, the Werner-Reimers Foundation offered him a position in Germany, at the Natural History Museum of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt.
During his lifetime, he collected numerous objects from Indonesia and Oceania, which were dispersed at the sale of his collection in 2007.

Price: € 9.500