Can using these multiple techniques help to unify theories of human evolution?
In the early days of paleontology and molecular anthropology, there was a lot of conflict between the two approaches, because both were incomplete. The fossil data set was limited, and the sequence analyses were based on very few examples and methods. But now, more and more, the methods are getting to the point where we can compare things, and the additional thing added into here is the ability to take molecules out of fossils. Obviously that’s been done with DNA, and now we’ve done it with sialic acids, and we would suggest that maybe we could look at more molecules, even though fossils really effectively rot away and lose a lot of their organic material, there’s a field of people that know how to study these things and there are molecules in fossils, and others are extracting different kinds of molecules, so I think all these techniques are coming together. What prompted you to meet with the interdisciplinary group of scientists about human evolution? I actually got interested in wha
