When Paige Madison looks back on her time as a postdoc at the Natural History Museum Denmark, it is with a feeling of having been both gaslighted, held down and subjected to micromanagement. She complained to the dean but was dismissed. Here she tells her story.
An article has appeared in the Danish press today, to which I contributed, about the poor working environment there. It was written by Katrine Balch, but here is a roughly translated summary of the major points: Bad working environment at the Natural History Museum: 26 former and current employees report on assault alarms, bullying and…
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Many have now seen the claim put forward that Homo naledi buried their dead. While I’m not here to comment on the evidence put forward in the preprint, or my concerns about announcing a find before it has completed the peer review process, I do want to address a different component of the issue. One…
People are sometimes hesitant to refer to the tiny collection of bones uncovered on the Indonesian island of Flores as the “hobbit.” It is a serious scientific discovery, after all. The steady stream of tourists who visit the cave of Liang Bua, where the discovery was made, is no exception. “These,” I tell them, showing…
One Tuesday in early November 2004, a man carefully packed a small, human-looking skull into a suitcase, descended a staircase, and exited a research center in Jakarta, Indonesia. News of the event quickly spread beyond the archipelago, provoking an international controversy. The skull, along with other bones that had been packed away with it, was…
Grief is a strange thing. It appears at odd moments, attaches to inanimate objects, and becomes entangled with places. There’s a house in Montana, for example, that I couldn’t drive by for years because I received the two worst phone calls of my life there. People process grief differently. Some quietly, some quickly. For me,…
In August of 1908, a fossil human relative was discovered when a pickaxe struck the side of a skull. That fossil, which became known as the Old Man of La Chappelle, was sent to leading paleontologist Marcellin Boule in Paris for analysis. There, Boule described a brutish creature who was crude, unintelligent, shuffling, and hunched…
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“We have a healthy spacecraft,” Alice Bowman announced on the evening of July 14, 2015. Bowman, the operations manager for the New Horizons mission, was commenting on the incredible flyby of Pluto, a flyby that gave humans a closer view of the planet than we had ever seen before. In an interview following the historic flyby,…
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2017 was not an easy year. Many of us found ourselves consistently disheartened and frustrated with the events unfolding around us–so much so that it was sometimes difficult to focus on science. Given those frustrations, how does one write a roundup post celebrating the year? By applauding scientific achievement and discovery, does this diminish the…
Human evolution was a pretty crazy event (or series of events, specifically). One can’t help but wonder, how did a group of tree-dwelling apes evolve into the large-brained, upright walking creatures we see dominating the planet today? On a related note–where did this transformation even occur? This question–the question of where–has a fascinating history. Scientists…
How is it August already?! We’re more than halfway through 2017 and a dizzying amount of paleoanthropology has already happened this year. I can’t think of a better time to look back on some of the incredible discoveries that have been announced so far, so let’s count down my favorites! 5. Alesi. A 13 million-year-old ape…
If you’ve been following along, you know I’ve been detailing the event of “Darwin’s Worst Nightmare” as it unfolded in 1858. First, Darwin received a letter that rocked his world (not in a good way), then he asked his friends to spring into action and help him preserve his scientific priority. Today, July 1st marks the final…
Fossil History 