Content area
Full Text
Paleontology
A bitter dispute over rights to hunt for fossils in the Tugen Hills indicates that the old way of regulating paleontology in Kenya is in flux
TUGEN HILLS AND NAIROBI, KENYA-Martin Pickford stands in the middle of a long, dry gully lined with tamarind and acacia trees. A light breeze ushers a handful of cottony clouds across the blue African sky toward Lake Baringo, some 20 kilometers to the east. Pickford points with a sunburned arm to a spot on the gully's bank. "That is where we found the humerus," he says proudly. "And just over here, one of the femurs and an upper canine tooth, and further down there, parts of the mandible and the molars." Last October, a team led by Pickford, a geologist at the College de France in Paris, and Brigitte Senut, a paleontologist at France's National Museum of Natural History, found 13 fossil fragments of what they believe is the earliest known ancestor of modern humans. Although scientists are still debating whether the fossils belong to the human family (Science, 23 February, p. 1460), their undisputed age of about 6 million years-roughly the time when genetic evidence suggests that the human line split from that of the chimpanzees-means that these remains could help researchers untangle the increasingly twisted roots of the human evolutionary tree. And just last month, during a 2-week season here at the foot of Kenya's rugged Tugen Hills, Pickford and Senut found several more fossils-including the middle portion of a lower jaw-that they believe also belong to this claimed early hominid, which they have named Orrorin tugenensis.
Such a dramatic find would normally be cause for rejoicing among human origins researchers. Instead, Orrorin's discovery has set off a bitter internecine battle. Pickford and Senut's very right to excavate here has been challenged by some other scientists, most notably anthropologist Andrew Hill of Yale University, who claims that the pair is encroaching on turf his team has been studying since the 1980s. Hill and other researchers argue that Pickford and Senut have flouted long-established rules governing paleontology research in Kenya. Pickford and Senut deny these charges, countering that they have acted legally and followed all required procedures. They maintain that a campaign against them has...