The past held in trust: When fossils become heritage

In the United States, where a fossil is found can determine whether it becomes a public resource or a private commodity. The rest of the world starts from a different premise. I am not a paleoanthropologist. I don’t spend field seasons crawling through caves or applying for permits to excavate protected sites. I am an anatomist and a science communicator. To gain some perspective, I sat down with Dr. Jeremy DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist specializing in the evolution of the first apes (hominoids) and early human ancestors (hominins) at Dartmouth. 

Inside the anthropology department, fossil casts and 3D-printed specimens filled the rooms. Some belonged to species separated from us by millions of years. Others looked familiar enough that it was hard not to search for pieces of ourselves within them.  Casts can travel easily, but they need to come from an original specimen that is far more restricted. That became the starting point of our conversation. DeSilva has spent much of his career working in South Africa, where cave systems preserve an extraordinary record of human evolution. Paleontological material in South Africa is protected under the National Heritage Resources Act of 1999, and fossils are treated as state property.

A visiting researcher can’t simply find a likely site and begin work. Access requires agreements with landowners and collaboration with South African researchers, institutions, and the government. The scientific work takes place inside a set of existing human relationships. That point came up repeatedly while I talked to DeSilva. A cave may preserve millions of years of evidence, but the road leading to it runs through somebody else’s present.

Kenya has its own system. Paleontological research is closely tied to the National Museums of Kenya, and researchers need government authorization to excavate and study important sites. Researchers working on private or occupied land also need permission from the people who live there or hold rights to it.

There is a practical logic to all of this. A fossil can have scientific value far beyond the place where it was discovered but remains part of the heritage of the country that holds it. The discovery, the team, the question of future access; it all gets folded up into the idea that the past belongs to whoever inhabits the present. But the system isn’t always simple, and national ownership doesn’t necessarily mean equitable access.  Museums can restrict specimens. Bureaucracies can slow down the approval process. Institutions can become protective of collections in ways that begin to resemble private collections. East Africa has its own history with this problem, and I will come back to it in the next article.

For now, what interests me most is how different these systems are from the one that allowed Gus to reach an auction house. In South Africa and Kenya, a fossil can cross borders for research without permanently leaving the country that claims responsibility for it. Scientists can work internationally without turning the specimen itself into a commodity

Near the end of my visit to his lab, DeSilva summed up the tension better than I could: “The fossils don’t care where they’re from, but the people do.” He was talking about the hope for more international cooperation, but the line stayed with me.

The species represented by the casts in his lab lived long before Kenya or South Africa existed as countries. They crossed spaces that humans would eventually divide with borders, farms, roads, and property lines. Fossils have no relationship to those boundaries; the people living there do. So do the scientists who come to study them.

That is where the history gets harder. The lines on the map did not appear naturally, but their effect on the people who inhabit the landscape ripples forward through time, a distant echo that still informs policies enacted by governments, museums, and universities that accumulate fossils within.

That is the next part of the story.

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MEET JAMES REED

James Reed has been an active AAA member since 2019. Throughout the years, James has displayed a passion for storytelling as a freelance writer and podcaster alongside his expertise in the anatomical sciences through his role at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. James has worked on other AAA projects such as the popular Anatomy Connected Nightly Newsletter and Member Spotlight Articles.