One volcanic island holds half of Indonesia’s people
Java, a Greater Sunda island between the Indian Ocean and the Java Sea, is Earth’s most populous island—about 159.2 million people, roughly 56% of Indonesia. The Australian Plate diving beneath the Sunda Plate raised its volcanoes across about 132,644 square kilometres including Madura.
All those people share just 7 percent of Indonesia’s land, and Jakarta sits on the northwest coast. The island runs about 1,000 kilometres long and up to 210 wide, flanked by Sumatra, Bali and Borneo. Of its 112 volcanoes, 35 remain active; Semeru is the tallest at 3,676 metres, while Merapi is the most restless in the country. The Solo, about 600 kilometres long, rises on Lawu and reaches the sea near Surabaya. West Java’s Parahyangan highlands soak up more than 4,000 millimetres of rain a year, against 900 on East Java’s north coast.
Scholars mostly trace the name to jawa, foxtail millet, from a Proto-Austronesian root; Stamford Raffles instead proposed a Malay word for distant. Sanskrit texts such as the Ramayana call it Yavadvīpa, barley island, Ptolemy wrote Iabadiu around 150 CE, and Mandarin has used Zhǎowā since the Yuan dynasty. Medieval Arabic writers lumped it with Sumatra under al-Zabaj.
Fossils of Homo erectus found along the Solo River are about 1.3 million years old. Occupation stretched from Sangiran, perhaps 1.5 million years back, through Trinil to Ngandong, where Solo Man lived around 117,000 to 108,000 years ago. Later, Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms, Islamic sultanates and the Dutch East Indies all centred here, as did the independence struggle of the 1930s and 1940s. Five of Indonesia’s ten World Heritage sites, including Borobudur and Prambanan, are on the island.
Four main tongues are heard—Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese and Betawi— most people also speak Indonesian, and the majority are Muslim. Rice terraces have been worked for over a millennium, and coffee was first planted here in 1699. Javan tigers and elephants are gone, but Javan rhinos, leopards and gibbons survive in parks such as Ujung Kulon, and more than 450 bird species include 37 endemics like the Javan hawk-eagle.
Source: Java
