NEANDERTUMOR: The diseased Neanderthal rib (a) shows clear deterioration of the lattice-like structure inside the bone, while in a modern, healthy bone (b) that structure is intact.COURTESY OF PLOS ONE, DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0064539.g001In the mid-1980s, University of Pennsylvania graduate student Janet Monge and Penn colleague Morrie Kricun undertook a project to X-ray the 900 or so bones of the Krapina collection—Neanderthal remains originally unearthed at the turn of the 20th century a few dozen kilometers north of Zagreb in the former Yugoslavia (now Croatia). For 2 weeks, the team loaded dozens of specimens at a time into individual, form-fitting Styrofoam holders and shuttled them from the Croatian Natural History Museum to the veterinary school in Zagreb, which had made its X-ray equipment available to the researchers. Their goal was to publish a radiographic atlas of the entire collection.
For the most part, the process went smoothly, but there was one X-ray—of an unusually thin and light rib fragment—that appeared “burned out” in the radiographic image, Monge says. Despite using the same amount of radiation as they had for similar specimens, “all of the radiation [went] through the object, rather than being absorbed or reflected by the object, so rather than looking like a bone with white or gray and black sections, it appeared completely black,” she explains. “Immediately we knew something was up with the little fragment.”
The researchers were hopeful that they might be able to lighten the image or increase the contrast to make out some of the bone’s detail, but upon returning to Penn and digitizing the X-rays, Monge had ...
