They are tiny pieces of human bone and skull painstakingly scraped from the arid soil of the world’s most inhospitable places. They include fragments of apemen that are more than four million years old — when our ancestors had scarcely given up life in the trees. Others include relatively recent remains of human beings undergoing the last crucial anatomical changes that now define Homo sapiens.
All are irreplaceable and have become the focus of a major row. On one side, a group of leading palaeontologists is pressing for US academic authorities — the major funders of human fossil hunts in Africa, the birthplace of our species — to give them greater access to other scientists’ finds. They say discoverers of human fossils often take years to describe their work, preventing others from using discoveries to develop their own theories.
But fieldworkers accuse their opponents of trying to steal credit for their discoveries in a bid to sign lucrative book deals and accumulate glory without getting their feet dusty or their hands dirtied in searching for fossils.
This latter point was stressed by Tim White, of the University of California, Berkeley, whose discovery in Ethiopia of the remains of the 4,4 million-year-old apeman Australopthecus ramidus is considered one of the world’s most important fossil finds.
‘We don’t think laboratory workers or book publishers should dictate our publication schedule,’ he says in the current issue of Nature. ‘We are the ones who seek, find, clean, restore and study the fossils and put them into context.’
Now the US National Science Foundation has launched an investigation into setting up guidelines for academics being given access to bones and skulls discovered by other researchers.
‘Palaeontology is not like genetics or physics where you describe a discovery and scientists see if they can repeat it,’ said Professor Leslie Aiello, of University College, London. ‘We rely a lot on bones and being able to study and measure them. They are immensely precious and everyone wants access to them. That is what causes the trouble.’
The present system for describing discoveries operates on two tiers. After making a find, a palaeontologist describes it in a brief paper in a journal such as Nature or Science. Then he or she goes through all the bone fragments and other remains found at the scene and writes a lengthy monograph for a specialist journal in which a complete description of the find is given. This can take a decade or more, often leaving other researchers fuming from lack of data.
As a result, leading academics — such as David Pilbeam, of Harvard University, and Ian Tattersall, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York — are demanding full access to a specimen immediately after initial publication. ‘If you are taking public money to go out and find fossils, you have to make them available,’ Tattersall writes in Nature.
But the idea has infuriated other palaeontologists. ‘It is all right for people like Tattersall,’ said Brenda Benefit, of New Mexico State University. ‘He has no teaching commitments and doesn’t go on field trips. We go to some really inhospitable places where you can get shot at. Then, when we bring our discoveries home, we have to find time in our teaching schedules to do a proper research evaluation. Now they are trying take our glory and data.’
And there is another tricky issue. Americans may have funded many of the world’s main fossil expeditions, but it is the countries of discovery — mainly Kenya and Ethiopia — that own the relics. They may not take kindly to another nation acting as if it is the sole possessor of this key part of human heritage. – Guardian Unlimited Â