Jesse Martin wondered briefly whether he was up to the challenge. The table in front of him was covered in pieces of fossilised cranial bone. He knew they came from the skull of an ancient creature. But which ancient creature? That was the mystery he needed to solve. “There were more than a hundred tiny fragments, so it was quite hard to get a sense of what it could be,” he says. “The biggest part would have been no bigger than a 50-cent piece.
After all traces of soil were removed, Martin began attempting to connect the pieces, an exercise he likens to doing a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with no reference picture and who-knows-how -many bits missing. Despite the mind-bending degree of difficulty, he felt fortunate. “It is rare that people who are students or early-career researchers get the opportunity to be in the same room as these fossils, never mind work with them.
“We finally came to terms with what we were looking at, and what it meant. It was going to rewrite the story of human origins.”The scepticism was understandable. Despite decades of intensive archaeological exploration, no fossil identified as had been found in southern Africa. And according to preliminary dating at the dig site, the Drimolen skull was two million years old.
Nevertheless, painstaking laboratory work was required to confirm both the classification of the skull and its age. Among the dating techniques Herries used was palaeomagnetic analysis, the study of past variations in the direction of the earth’s magnetic field, as recorded in rocks. This indicated that the geological stratum in which the cranium was found had solidified almost 100,000 years before a reversal in the earth’s magnetic field about 1.95 million years ago.
At Monash University, Justin Adams suspects infighting occurs in many branches of scientific endeavour, though he gets the impression people who trace the human family tree for a living are inclined to clash more heatedly than most. Human evolution is a subject that arouses strong emotions. Also, “there’s a particular breed who ends up in palaeoanthropology”, Adams says. “There are huge egos associated with this.
Like Eugène Dubois before him, Dart took his fossil on tour in an attempt to persuade colleagues of its importance. When morefossils were dug up in South Africa in the 1930s, some of Dart’s critics begin to reconsider their position. His final vindication came in 1953, when so-called Piltdown Man was proven to be a fake, created from pieces of a modern human cranium and an orang-utan’s jaw.
Will cost you double the price to study this degree. Just saying.
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