ABOVE: MODIFIED FROM © MARK GARLICK, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
It’s not unusual for geochronologist Rainer Grün to bring human bones back with him when he returns home to Australia from excursions in Europe or Asia. Jawbones from extinct hominins in Indonesia, Neanderthal teeth from Israel, and ancient human finger bones unearthed in Saudi Arabia have all at one point spent time in his lab at Australian National University before being returned home. Grün specializes in developing methods to discern the age of such specimens. In 2016, he carried with him a particularly precious piece of cargo: a tiny sliver of fossilized bone covered in bubble wrap inside a box.
The bone fragment had come from a skull—still stored at the Natural History Museum in London—with a heavy brow ridge and a large face. It looked so primitive that the miner who had discovered it in 1921 at a lead mine ...
