Could a Renewed Push for Access to Fossil Data Finally Topple Paleoanthropology’s Culture of Secrecy?
Seasoned paleoanthropologists and graduate students alike milled among them, pausing to examine a cutmarked Neandertal skull from Croatia, the bizarre foot bones of nearly two-million-year-old Australopithecus sediba from South Africa, a rarely seen pinky finger bone from Siberia whose DNA hints at a previously unknown lineage of humans who were contemporaries of our own Homo sapiens ancestors. Although perhaps a curious sight to a casual passer-by, the gathering shouldn’t have been an especially momentous occasion. The attendees were simply scientists attending a professional meeting and sharing data with their peers. This is how science is supposed to work. And yet this 1.5-hour open lab night was arguably the most important event of the entire three-day conference.
Human origins researchers commonly complain about a lack of access to certain fossil specimens for study—a state of affairs that has fueled the discipline’s cloak-and-dagger reputation and hindered scientific progress. The fossil-sharing event at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, along with other recent developments—including a planned shift in Ethiopia’s policies governing access to human fossils-hints that paleoanthropology may finally be evolving.
At the anthropology meeting in Portland, I sat down with John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, who chaired the open lab session, to learn more about how it came to be. Hawks explained that the impetus came in 2011, when Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, donated casts of the recently discovered remains of A. sediba to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. The move inspired the association’s vice president and program committee chair, Karen Rosenberg of the University of Delaware, to propose inviting other researchers and curators to bring casts of other fossil hominins (humans and their extinct relatives) to the meeting and make an event of it.