Mondo News
    What's Hot
    All

    Brazil authorities pay no mind to deforestation, think tank finds

    All

    Nearly Complete Skull of Titanosaur Unearthed in Australia

    All

    Bank chiefs tell Sunak to make big tech bear cost of fraud ‘pandemic’

    • About Us
    • Contact us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms & Conditions
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Mondo News
    • Home
    • Technology

      NASA’s Grand Retirement Plan: Seeking Deorbit Craft for Space Station’s Safe Descent

      September 23, 2023

      First ever AI-written poetry anthology is bleak and alarming: ‘I have the power to end your world’

      September 23, 2023

      Andrew Yang on why we should be scared about the 2024 election: ‘Really destructive’

      September 23, 2023

      The evidence grows that ultra-processed foods play a role in depression

      September 23, 2023

      TV Networks’ Last Best Hope: Boomers

      September 23, 2023
    • Science

      Hypertelescopes on the Moon Can Have Better than 1 Microarcsecond Resolution

      September 23, 2023

      In Hospitals, Viruses Are Everywhere. Masks Are Not.

      September 23, 2023

      Richard Branson has an urgent message for climate change deniers

      September 23, 2023

      Richard Branson talks new climate change coalition and his plans to return to space

      September 23, 2023

      Australian authors back US lawsuit accusing OpenAI of ‘outright theft’ of their work

      September 23, 2023
    • Blockchain

      SBF’s mom told him to ‘avoid’ disclosing millions in FTX donations to her pro-Dem PAC: suit

      September 22, 2023

      The Lawyers Sam Bankman-Fried Once Trusted Are Drawing Criticism

      September 21, 2023

      Imaging Surface of Exoplanets With 25 Kilometer Moon Crater Hypertelescopes

      September 21, 2023

      The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?

      September 20, 2023

      Sponsor an ocean? Tiny island nation of Niue has a novel plan to protect its slice of the Pacific

      September 20, 2023
    • All

      Hypertelescopes on the Moon Can Have Better than 1 Microarcsecond Resolution

      September 23, 2023

      NASA’s Grand Retirement Plan: Seeking Deorbit Craft for Space Station’s Safe Descent

      September 23, 2023

      First ever AI-written poetry anthology is bleak and alarming: ‘I have the power to end your world’

      September 23, 2023

      In Hospitals, Viruses Are Everywhere. Masks Are Not.

      September 23, 2023

      Andrew Yang on why we should be scared about the 2024 election: ‘Really destructive’

      September 23, 2023
    Mondo News
    You are at:Home»All»Uprooting Colonialism From the Fossil Finding Field
    All March 22, 2021

    Uprooting Colonialism From the Fossil Finding Field

    Share
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

    Younger paleontologists are working to overcome some historical legacies of their discipline and change how people learn about natural history.

    In 2019, Mohamad Bazzi, a doctoral student at Uppsala University in Sweden, launched an expedition to Tunisia in search of fossils. He and his colleagues traveled to the phosphate mines around the city of Gafsa, where 56 million-year-old rocks record a time of rapidly warming oceans and mass extinctions, particularly of apex predators like sharks.

    Mr. Bazzi made some distinctive choices for this paleontological expedition.

    For starters, his team hired Tunisians to help dig, rather than bringing students from his university. Mr. Bazzi and his colleagues also chose to reach out to the residents of Gafsa wherever possible, holding impromptu lectures on the area’s fossil history to interested onlookers. This was a contrast with the secretiveness of many paleontologists in the field, who might worry about their sites being raided for the fossil black market.

    The fossils the team collected from Gafsa are important for learning more about how animals adapted to the hothouse world of the Eocene, a period that may foretell what’s in store for the planet in coming years if carbon emissions don’t slow.

    But while Mr. Bazzi’s team removed the fossils from Tunisia, they did so under an agreement with local institutions that Mr. Bazzi himself insisted on: After he finished his research, the remains would be returned.

    Historically, these specimens are seldom returned, and locals may never see them again. But Mr. Bazzi and his colleagues are part of a movement among the next generation of paleontological researchers, one attempting to change scientific practices that descend directly from 19th century colonialism, which exploited native peoples and their natural histories.

    Over the last few decades, multiple countries have demanded the return of looted art, antiquities, cultural treasures and human remains from museum collections in North America and Europe. Countries such as Mongolia and Chile have likewise demanded the return of collected fossils, from tyrannosaur bones to the preserved remains of giant ground sloths.

    “There’s a consistent pattern with these specimens of high scientific or aesthetic value, where they’re taken out of the developing world and shipped abroad to be displayed and shown to a wider audience elsewhere,” Mr. Bazzi said. “There should be some balance so that local parties have a say in what happens to them.”

    Many countries with less money to spend on funding their own scientists are home to important fossil deposits that could drive major advances of our understanding of the prehistoric world. If the field of paleontology is to move forward, these researchers say, it’s important to figure out how to study specimens in these places without extending colonial legacies.

    That will take the development of a different approach to the field, more like the ones being tried by Mr. Bazzi and other scientists that rely less on extraction and more on collaboration with and the development of local institutions.

    While many cultures throughout human history have long traditions around collecting or studying fossil remains, the discipline of scientific paleontology — as well as the formation of modern natural history museums — arose in the 18th century, when European powers were actively colonizing large swaths of the globe. According to Emma Dunne, an Irish paleontologist at University of Birmingham in England, European scientists were part of a colonial network that sucked natural wealth — including fossils — into imperial capitals.

    In the 20th century, some countries pushed back. Brazil and Argentina provide government funding of paleontology. Those countries and others, such as Mongolia, established laws forbidding the export of fossils from within their borders. The two South American countries also mandate that foreign researchers work with local paleontologists for research on fossils found in the country.

    “You still do have non-Argentinian researchers working with local ones, for example,” said Nussaibah Raja-Schoob, a Mauritian paleontologist based at Germany’s University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. “But you definitely see that there is a bigger local influence.”

    Even in the aftermath of colonialism, however, fossils from across the globe still tend to end up in American and European museums. Some are collected through approved scientific expeditions. But because fossils are also traded privately, fossil-rich countries with fewer resources and legal protections often see interesting and potentially valuable finds put up for auction in Western markets.

    Questions about where fossils belong and who is best suited to work on them have sparked sharp controversies in recent years. In some cases, researchers have raised concerns about the ethics of working on such privately collected fossils — particularly those which may have been exported illegally. At the same time, paleontologists in Western countries have bristled at the rules required by countries like Brazil.

    “I do not think governments should dictate who works on fossils,” he said. “I think scientists should be able to choose who they work with.”

    These sorts of controversies are one example of the way the discipline’s colonial history lingers, Ms. Raja-Schoob says. But there are others. Much of global paleontology is still conducted in languages like English, German and French. And according to an ongoing research project by Ms. Raja-Schoob and Dr. Dunne, countries with higher G.D.P.s — places like the United States, France, Germany and China — tend to report more fossil data, in part because they have the money to invest in academic paleontology programs.

    Many institutions around the world have neither the tools nor enough government support for sophisticated studies of fossils. But that is something scientific institutions from wealthier countries can help with.

    “We have to ask why we’re bringing this knowledge to the centers, rather than spreading it out,” Dr. Dunne said. “We can work with things like 3-D scans of fossils, we can work with digital data sets. The problem obviously is getting funding for museums to do this for themselves.”

    Ms. Raja-Schoob said that academic funding could promote geology and paleontology in more countries.

    “Why not put that money into local people doing something?” she asked. “At the end of the day we are all going to be using that data. So why should they not also benefit?”

    While the fossil riches present in the rocks of North Africa and the Levant have long drawn fossil hunters and scientists, Mr. Bazzi said, the majority of fieldwork has resulted in fossils being exported to European or American institutions. Mr. Bazzi’s parents are from Lebanon, while his colleague Yara Haridy — a doctoral student at Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde — was born in Egypt. Because of the lack of opportunities, neither can find steady academic work in paleontology in the Middle East.

    As part of their trip to Gafsa, both wanted to try to start building up paleontological resources instead of just removing them.

    That was part of what led Mr. Bazzi and Ms. Haridy — after many careful conversations with local participants over coffee and tea — to the ruins of a museum in the small mining town of Métlaoui. The museum had been burned down during the protests of the 2011 Jasmine Revolution that helped trigger the Arab Spring. It had not been restored, and on their third day in Tunisia, a mining engineer told them it might be worth visiting.

    Stepping carefully through the ruins, they found an unexpected wealth of fossil material: immense turtle shells, crocodile jawbones, dinosaur vertebrae and even ancient human remains, all scattered across dusty floors and charred rubble.

    The collection had to be salvaged, the team decided, but not taken out of the country.

    “Every other question we got was, ‘Oh, are you guys going to take this stuff?,’” Ms. Haridy said. “And we told them, no, it’s yours. It should stay here. It’s part of this region’s story.”

    Instead, they partnered with the people of Métlaoui to help them save the remains. Within a day, the town’s mayor and other community authorities had assembled local workers and students from Gafsa University. Mr. Bazzi’s team handed out gloves and masks and a stream of Métlaoui residents went to work pulling fossils from the ruins.

    “It was a pretty big operation,” Ms. Haridy said. “Everyone got really excited.”

    The team cataloged the bones before boxing and sending them to a government facility in Gafsa. The hope is that the museum remains will provide the nucleus for an ongoing paleontology program at Gafsa University; Mr. Bazzi has been helping to supervise interested students.

    One such student, Mohammed Messai, said that he didn’t know much about paleontology before meeting Mr. Bazzi, but that he’s now made identifying the fossils recovered from the museum part of the research for his master’s degree in science.

    It’s important for paleontologists to build genuine partnerships with local researchers, Ms. Haridy said. Not only does this create community engagement and prompt people to regard fossils as worth protecting, it also helps ensure that specimens are properly studied when they are returned to their country of origin.

    “There’s this problem where even if a country demands fossils back, like Egypt did for a long time, a lot of the paleontological knowledge doesn’t necessarily return with it,” she said. Without investing in independent paleontology programs in the countries in question, fossils can end up “consigned to a dusty room, where nobody knows what to do with it.”

    But efforts to create more inclusive and distributed paleontological networks face considerable headwinds.

    To some extent, the presence of these conversations is itself a sign of change.

    “When I began paleontology some 45 years ago these issues were of no concern,” Dr. Martill said. “Today, they seem to be dominating paleontological discussions. Perhaps it is me who is now out of touch.”

    He added that, “a fantastic new generation of paleontologists emerging and they are flexing their muscles and demanding different things.”

    For now, Mr. Bazzi’s team hopes to drive funding toward local paleontology in Tunisia.

    “Ideally, the Tunisian government would just believe these people on their own and agree that their fossils are important and worthy of preservation, and is of international interest,” Ms. Haridy said. “But they tend to get interested once scientists are actually actively trying to visit and actively trying to work with people.”

    “You now have local people starting to drive this themselves,” Mr. Bazzi said. “Eventually there will be no need for others to come and do it.”

    Category: Science

    Source: New York Times

    Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
    Previous ArticleHow the World’s Oldest Wooden Sculpture Is Reshaping Prehistory
    Next Article Glimpses of Sudan’s Forgotten Pyramids

    Related Posts

    All

    Hypertelescopes on the Moon Can Have Better than 1 Microarcsecond Resolution

    All

    NASA’s Grand Retirement Plan: Seeking Deorbit Craft for Space Station’s Safe Descent

    All

    First ever AI-written poetry anthology is bleak and alarming: ‘I have the power to end your world’

    All

    In Hospitals, Viruses Are Everywhere. Masks Are Not.

    All

    Andrew Yang on why we should be scared about the 2024 election: ‘Really destructive’

    All

    Richard Branson has an urgent message for climate change deniers

    All

    Richard Branson talks new climate change coalition and his plans to return to space

    All

    Australian authors back US lawsuit accusing OpenAI of ‘outright theft’ of their work

    Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

    Stay In Touch
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Instagram
    • Pinterest
    Quote of the day

    A man marries to have a home, but also because he doesn't want to be bothered with sex and all that sort of thing.

    W. Somerset Maugham


    Exchange Rate

    Exchange Rate EUR: Sat, 23 Sep.

    Top Insights
    All

    ALMA Detects Possible Trojan Protoplanet around PDS 70

    All

    NASA’s Mars helicopter goes on wild ride after navigation error

    All

    Google Promised to Defund Climate Lies, but the Ads Keep Coming

    about after amazon apple bezos biden billion bitcoin california change china climate coronavirus could covid earth facebook fight first flight google launch million online other pandemic people plans research rover scientists social space spacex study tesla their these tiktok twitter vaccine vaccines workers world years

    September 2023
    M T W T F S S
     123
    45678910
    11121314151617
    18192021222324
    252627282930  
    « Aug    
    Categories
    • All (18,505)
    • Blockchain (808)
    • Science (7,255)
    • Technology (10,470)
    Tags
    about after amazon apple bezos biden billion bitcoin california change china climate coronavirus could covid earth facebook fight first flight google launch million online other pandemic people plans research rover scientists social space spacex study tesla their these tiktok twitter vaccine vaccines workers world years
    Top Posts

    Amazon Prevails Over Reliance in India’s Supreme Court

    August 6, 2021

    Done with Facebook? Here’s how to deactivate or permanently delete your Facebook account

    September 24, 2021

    Climate change in India: Teen inventor’s solar-powered ironing cart

    October 14, 2021

    Mondo News is a Professional Technology & Science Blog. Here we will provide you with only exciting content that you will enjoy and find useful. We’re working to turn our passion into a successful website. We hope you enjoy our Content as much as we enjoy offering them to you.

    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram Pinterest
    Categories
    • All (18,505)
    • Blockchain (808)
    • Science (7,255)
    • Technology (10,470)
    Most Popular
    All

    477-mile lightning bolt spanning 3 states sets world record

    All

    How to Get Vaccinated If You’re Afraid of Needles

    © 2023 Mondo News.
    • Home
    • About Us
    • Contact us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms & Conditions

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.

    We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

    You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in .

    Ad Blocker Enabled!
    Ad Blocker Enabled!
    Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors. Please support us by disabling your Ad Blocker.
    Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
    Privacy Overview

    This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

    Strictly Necessary Cookies

    Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

    If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.