Picking away at fossilized skeletons

Picking away at fossilized skeletons



Anthropologist Israel Hershkovitz uses a pneumatic drill on a half-tonne breccia to gently expose the bones of a human who lived between 100,000 and 120,000 years ago. He and a colleague dug the sedimentary block from a cave in central Israel, and realized that it could hide evidence of the earliest known deliberate burial. “I call myself a biohistorian,” Hershkovitz says. “I’m trying to understand human history, not from human artefacts, temples or big walls surrounding old cities, but from bones.” (Nature | 3 min read) (Corinna Kern for Nature)