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 Robert Piggott
Anthropologists have warned听their discipline听will suffer a catastrophe if the government decides that tens of thousands of human remains stored in the UK are returned to their countries of origin.
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Scientists can make many discoveries by studying old bones.
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Should the ancient remains be repatriated or be used for scientific analysis?
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An advisory committee has suggested that scientists should have to seek out the nearest thing to descendents for remains up to 500 years old to get their permission, not only to keep the bones, but before doing any further research on them. Ministers are expected to announce their response in the next few weeks.
At Cambridge University's Department of Biological Anthropology, Professor Robert Foley shows me the laboratory where he and colleagues have worked on bones to map human evolution.
In glass cabinets on the wall are a tiny proportion of the 18,000 separate sets of remains held by the university. In cardboard boxes, brought up from the climate-controlled storerooms, are several others, including the 400-year old skeletons of slender, fleet-footed, hunter-gatherer, American Indians.
Professor Foley fears that if the recommendations of the Human Remains Working Group currently being considered by ministers are followed, much of the evidence he's worked with will be lost.
"It would be an enormous blow," he says,"one would be losing material that is often unique. It's often rare, from populations that are long gone, which no longer exist, so it's a whole part of the human story that would be obliterated and gone forever."
The advisory group said scientists such as Robert Foley should examine how collections like the American Indians came into their possession and seek out any possible living descendents to get their permission to keep them...or to continue to use them in research.
In the absence of living relatives, permission should be obtained from others in the same cultural or belief group. Robert Foley says universities and museums are often unsure exactly where remains came from, and seeking out the nearest thing to descendents would place a crippling burden on researchers.
Not all anthropologists agree however. Marilyn Strathern, Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge, served on the working group and supported its majority report. Professor Strathern says we live in a political era which prefers to enforce best practice rather than relying on the good intentions of professional people. We also live in a globalised world, and cannot deny the same standards to people overseas.
It's also concern about our past treatment of those indigenous groups in far-off lands that has prompted the soul-searching now going on. "We're thinking of the theft of a very brutal nature", says Professor Strathern. "Bodies were dug up from graves, taken off battlefields, butchered on the spot鈥hat's no more or less brutal than what happened here in this country, but that abuse - to borrow a late Twentieth Century term - that abuse does weigh with people and we need to know they are affected by it."
They're doubly affected, the argument goes, if they belong to cultures which believe that the body leaves an imprint on the place it lived. We shouldn't discount such feelings because we in the West have come to care rather less about the fate of the body after death.
But the ruling could come at a sensitive moment. Dr Jay Stock relies entirely on studying bone for his work on the diversification of human beings. All of us, from the Japanese tea-girl to the Pennsylvania coalminer, share a common ancestor in Africa just 150,000 years ago. Dr Stock says scientific techniques to investigate the genetic and chemical makeup of bones are starting to reveal vast new bodies of information. He fears much of the evidence could be buried.
Much of the material in Cambridge - as elsewhere in the UK - was collected by Nineteenth Century explorers, at a time when scientific inquiry was highly valued. Scientists fear the mood may be changing, and that emotional and spiritual interests may take priority over rational inquiry.
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