Kind: captions
Language: en
something really big happened in a cave
in south africa
in the fall of 2013. paleoanthropologist
lee berger
led a team in the extraction of over
1200 ancient hominid fossils which
promises to revolutionize our
understanding of human origins
as the specimens were excavated they
were shared live with the whole world by
a small army of tweeters and bloggers
it's a way of doing science that earlier
generations of paleoanthropology
could never have imagined people
wouldn't
show their fossils there was a sense
that people who made discoveries were
somehow
very special beings and there was almost
a club that you had to belong to
actually see the next and as a graduate
student i was deeply offended by that
and i i swore at that time that if i
ever got in a position to do something
about that i would
the discovery in south africa was
burger's chance of trying a different
approach
we're sharing this with not only
scientists around the world live but
every human being on the planet who
wants to join this expedition
the idea that you can make a discovery
and do your research and keep it to
yourself
for a decade or more and go through this
slow process of publishing
i don't think it's as productive as it
could be and while there's
pitfalls to the open access approach i
think that it's a it's a great
step forward certainly using this media
and
sharing so much information is somewhat
new i think
for archaeology anthropology
paleoanthropology
but it's incredibly exciting
paleoanthropology may never be the same
again