Comment by w10-1
2 days ago
> "There is no technology, extant or imaginable, that could extract that marvellous secret from her bones"
It's because the inference depends on having data from a very large sample of other finds. It wouldn't matter if there were a single Eve and we found her entire skeleton and extracted the DNA perfectly. We couldn't prove it was Eve without all the other samples, and it's beyond unlikely they'll just show up.
I'm disgusted by the convention that findings are controlled by self-interested glory-seeking finders. These belong to the entirety of humanity and should be treated as such, with utmost care and complete openness and humility. We shouldn't tolerate grave robbers any more than bank robbers. Like banks, archeaologists are fiduciaries of the highest order, and should be selected and managed as such, not like salespeople on commission. If you want to seek abandoned treasure, go elsewhere.
> I'm disgusted by the convention that findings are controlled by self-interested glory-seeking finders
The basic idea makes sense; you spend a lot of time, effort, money, and sometimes personal risk to excavate these things. You should be given a chance to actually benefit from all this work.
But within reason, and obviously here someone abused a common-sense convention in a way that is hard to distinguish from outright bad faith behaviour.
In my opinion, the major failing here is from the university in not stepping in a bit more forcefully to deal with this.
Totally agree about findings. In fact, oppositional researchers should be given the opportunity -- by law -- to refute claims. They should be given 100% access to all the evidence for a period of time.
“It belongs in a museum!” -Indy
... the Graverobber