In addition to these new excavations, the team also undertook new analyses of the bone fragments from the old Ranis collection (1932 to 1938 excavations), which are curated and stored at the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt in Germany. This included a study where the bones were examined one by one to potentially identify human remains. “This painstaking work was rewarded by the discovery of several new human bones,” said Hélène Rougier, a palaeoanthropologist at California State University Northridge. “Finding human remains mixed with animal bones that had been stored for almost a century was an unexpected and fantastic surprise,” she added. Further work on these collections is ongoing by Hélène Rougier and researchers from the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt and highlights the enormous value of museum collections.
National Tribune