Paleontologists were affronted to discover that billionaires had sent ancient hominin bones up on a Virgin Galactic spaceflight.
Berger, who is also South African, selected the fragments himself and had them carried by Timothy Nash, a South African-born entrepreneur and space tourist who, asAs one might imagine, the selection of bones from South Africa by white scientists has ruffled some feathers as well.
"As someone who is African and who is based in an African institution, this is basically a perpetuation of the past, very ugly aspects of palaeoanthropological research," Yonatan Sahle, also of Cape Town University, toldThough everything about the bones' inclusion in the Virgin Galactic mission was above board, one of Berger's fellow scientists was surprised the South African Heritage Resources Agency granted the NatGeo luminary's application to temporarily export the...
Rachel King, an archaeologist at the University College London who specializes in cultural heritage policies, said that South Africa has generally been very protective of its artifacts, which makes the inclusion of the"What are regulators for, if they’re going to let someone do this?" King mused. "It’s potentially a pretty big thing, and a pretty big shift."
SAHRA and South Africa's University of Witwatersrand, which stores the bones, insisted in press statements that the risks involved in taking ancient remains to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere were outweighed by the benefits.
"If I document one of South Africa’s World Heritage Sites," the British archaeologist said, "could we then bulldoze it and put up a shopping mall?"
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