Ethics

Matthew Brush

Anthropology 211-01 Essay

February 18, 2008

Dear Mom,

I want you to know that I arrived over seas safe and sound. I know that you may have been nervous for me to study abroad, especially in the Middle East. However, me coming here may have been the most important thing that I have ever done. I was working with my paleoanthropologist professor, and a group of other students in a dig site that they have been excavating for a while. I have been taught some proper digging techniques and now I am off at my own site. After the first couple days I wasn’t having any luck. However, I have some very big news to share with you. Yesterday, I found a skeleton!

The skeleton was nothing that any of my professors had ever seen before. They helped me remove all the pieces from the ground, and helped me diagram every find. After mapping out the area, we took the bones to the laboratory. We washed away all of the dirt and catalogued every piece. The bones were in fairly good shape. As we observed the bones it seemed as if some of them were broken by unnatural forces. After further study, we ran test on the new bones to try and figure out the time period this organism lived in. We used a test called Carbon-14 Dating to establish a time period that we think it lived. We found out that it lived 120,000 - 50,000 years ago, roughly the same time period as the Neandertals (class notes), and they died off before Homo sapiens hit the scene.

We also found evidence pointing out that this organism may me a hominine. It has a brain size that is a little smaller than ours today and also a little smaller than a Neandertals. The skull was also full of teeth, similar to ours but with a much more wear. We believe that this organism was bipedal. Its long limbs and wider pelvic bone are evidence of that(class notes). After further investigation we found that these skeletons were appearing more and more common with the dead of Neandertals. The broken bones of...