Studying Skeletons
Now that ICC is over, let's talk about skeletons. I hardly know where to begin. I've spent three years now immersed in skeletons, slowly amassing the information I needed to assess the skeletal similarities of fossil hominins. For most of my career, I was just too intimidated to try this. I'm not an expert in human anatomy. I don't understand anthropology jargon. A person with my lack of training is extremely likely to make foolish mistakes, and I didn't want to make a fool of myself. Then things changed. After years of being frustrated by the "hobbit" Homo floresiensis , I decided to see for just this one fossil form if I could fill in more information in the matrix of skull characteristics I was using. I was surprised to find how accessible it was. Oh, I had to spend a lot of time studying anatomical diagrams and looking up unfamiliar terms, but sometimes the information I wanted was just stated in the scientific papers describin...