Nature

Marsha Miller

Marsha Miller

Forty years after she was discovered, Lucy, the world’s most famous fossil australopithecine, just might have a cause of death. In August of this year, a team of paleoanthropologists led by John Kappelman argued in Nature that Lucy died 3.2 million years ago by falling out of a tree. Their conclusion has been met with skepticism among fellow researchers, and Lucy's death-by-tree-fall hypothesis has generated no shortage of debate within the scientific community of paleoanthropology.

But there's a takeaway here that's more significant than the study’s conclusion—this study's approach to sharing data with the scientific community and the public at large. In a move that is in keeping with the growing trend across paleoanthropology and other sciences to open up access to data, the study’s scientists have published CT scans of Lucy’s tibia, femur, humerus, and scapula—all bones they analyzed in their study. Now, they invite colleagues, detractors, educators, and ardent fossil enthusiasts to download and print Lucy’s scans, encouraging audiences to “ evaluate the hypothesis for themselves .”

Why was publishing Lucy’s scans so significant? This paleoanthropology initiative does in some way tie into the broader movement for open access, transparency, and reproducibility in science. But does publishing fossil data actually help create knowledge within the paleoanthropological community?

Historically, discoveries of hominins (fossil human ancestors) are relatively few and far between. Since every scrap of fossil has a role to play in parsing out the human evolutionary tree, paleoanthropology’s methodology depends heavily on access to those fossils in order to go about the everyday business of doing its science. Scientists depend on access to original fossils, access to casts of fossils, and access to the data taken from those fossils. And as a science that is heavily dependent on the significance of new discoveries, access is a crucial aspect of paleoanthropology’s study of human evolution. Without it, scientists are unable to test hypotheses, replicate studies, or verify conclusions—let alone ask any new questions.

Shipping not included

Over the last one hundred-plus years, access to data from fossils has functioned as a means of hierarchical gatekeeping. Those with the fossils—and hence the data—have determined who can see and study which fossils and under what circumstances. Access to fossils has been tightly controlled and, even within the science, it has been criticized as being too political and narrow in focus. (One extreme example from paleo’s early days is the nineteenth century Dutch anatomist, Eugene Dubois. As historical rumor has it, he squirreled away hominin fossils underneath the floorboards of his house to prevent other scientists from being able to see them. If others couldn’t access the fossils, Dubois reasoned, then they certainly couldn’t cook up any conclusions that contradicted his own view of human evolution.)

Historically, fossils have been shared—and published—within the community through a variety of medias. Since an original fossil is so valuable, it simply wasn’t (and still isn’t) feasible to ship an original specimen around the world for others to study. Early 20th century stereoscope plates—a way of “seeing” specimens in 3D—were included as appendices in anatomical studies, like Marcellin Boule’s 1911 Neanderthal tome, L’Homme de La Chapelle. Journal articles about new fossil discoveries included photographs of various hominin fossils; comparative studies included tables that offered readers raw measurements. Creating casts of fossil hominins was perhaps the most ubiquitous and significant means of sharing fossils, and it’s a practice and industry that is still in place.

Today, however, paleoanthropologists are pushing back against this top-down type of data distribution, the decades-held Dubois-esque model of data hoarding. Instead, they champion an “open access” model for distributing data. This open access approach, the movement’s supporters argue, is a way of embracing transparency about their study’s methods and conclusions while also increasing research and public access to fossils.

But agreeing on what to share and how to share it has proved to be particularly prickly. Access to all fossils, all the time, to do whatever one wants with the data—is that the right method? Should downloaders need to be accountable for what they do with the data? And who maintains the data and for how long?

Stan Seibert (who also printed this piece)

Stan Seibert (who also printed this piece)

Sharing is caring

The quest to determine Lucy’s cause of death stretches back almost a decade. In 2007, Lucy arrived in Houston, Texas, to begin a multi-year tour of the United States on loan from Ethiopia. Prior to her arrival, University of Texas at Austin paleoanthropologist John Kappelman arranged with the Ethiopian government and museum authorities to CT scan Lucy in her entirety. The scans were completed in 2008 at UT Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences over a ten-day “around the clock” period.

CT scanning Lucy achieved several things. First, it created a complete and detailed digital archive of the famous fossil. Second, CT scans created a way for scientists to “look inside” a fossil without destroying it to do so. (These incredibly detailed scans can show fractures that would be incredibly difficult to see with X-rays, let alone the naked eye.) Finally, scanning Lucy opened up the possibility of sharing her digital self with a variety of audiences.

Through elucy.org, a person can now apply for a digital copy of the four bones—the femur, humerus, tibia, and scapula—that the research team has posted with permission of the Ethiopian authorities. (One of the scans is that of an early cast of the femur, as researchers feel that’s a better example of the bone pertinent to their research.) Since the scans were posted, they have collectively been downloaded 462 times.

Lucy is just the latest of digital fossil models rapidly making its way across the Internet from research labs to personal 3D printers. Other publicly accessible fossils include the newly discovered species Homo naledi and the AfricanFossils.org project. All these initiatives offer different licensing agreements, include different quality of scans, and reflect the different expectations of researchers and institutions.

African Fossils functions as a digital repository for multiple paleo-sciences—chronicling paleoanthropological and archaeological research in East Africa’s Turkana Basin region. The website, touted as a virtual laboratory, has posted scans of fossils and stone tool artifacts, and the organization maintains an online discussion about East African evolutionary research. It also has meticulously documented its scanning equipment and methodology.

MorphoSource, operated in conjunction with Duke University, has championed the easy accessibility of their website. The group notes that within three months of Homo naledi 3D scans being posted, they were viewed 43,000 times and were downloaded an additional 7,600 times. Historically, it’d be nearly impossible to find any other fossil assemblage that has been seen by so many people, let alone within such a short amount of time.

Challenges

Benefits of this increased access are readily apparent. Prints from 3D fossil scans are popping up across graduate and undergraduate university courses. “At UW-Madison we printed scanned fossils out for teaching, public outreach, and research projects" paleoanthropologist Caroline VanSickle said of her time with UW-Madison’s research group. John Mead, a middle school science teacher at St. Marks School of Texas in Dallas, uses prints in many of his classes. “As soon as Homo naledi went live on MorphoSource, we printed out mandibles for students to examine,” he said. “The science becomes much more real to students when they can handle something.”

This approach is changing a century’s worth of methodological assumptions about access in paleoanthropology, both scientifically as well as publicly. “There’s an appeal of the empiricism that scans and prints offer,” paleoanthropologist John Hawks remarked. “With them, you can easily replicate a study’s methodology and check conclusions. There’s a sense that ‘anyone can see’ what we’re doing as scientists.”

It feels like open access to 3D fossil scans is democratizing the creation of new scientific knowledge. But, as with all methods of data sharing, there are tradeoffs—logistical, intellectual, financial, and social.

Good data collection is a really hard part of science. It requires time, resources, expertise, and patience. It also requires that the data be prepped in order for it to be analyzed. If a group is pressured into releasing data to the broader community without the chance to first analyze it themselves, it doesn’t feel… fair. If scientists have spent their time and resources on collecting data, this argument goes, those collectors ought to be able to keep the data to themselves for at least some period of time, if that’s what they want.

Scientists worry about the life of the data—whether or not there’s a sense of accountability that’s implicit in data once it’s published. If barriers to accessing data are dropped, it’s possible for that data to be inadvertently contributing to bad science. And whether the data is appropriated for out-and-out pseudoscience or whether it’s simply the basis for sloppy analysis, the line between data collection and later use of that data is often blurred, particularly in the public eye.

In addition to worrying about the afterlife of their data, many researchers are concerned about the potential for piracy and commercial use of the scans. Having committed significant amounts of time and grant resources, no one wants to see profit being made off of the fossils. The elucy.org user agreement, for example, requires that those who download Lucy’s scans do not use them for commercial purposes as well as stipulating that elucy.org can ask—“in the future”—what a person has done with the scans.

Moreover, scans of fossils could have the potential of cutting into other economies around the life of fossil hominins, such as the market for fossil casts and physical replicas. For institutions like the Kenya National Museum, casting laboratories are important parts of the museum’s social and scientific fabric. Technicians are highly trained specialists—often from local communities—who fear their livelihoods being printed away, one scan at a time.

Today, there continues to be a multitude of logistical obstacles that stand in the way of “open access” to data. Scanning and posting fossils requires a commitment of time and IT resources to host the data—whether it’s through museums, research institutions, or universities. However, this could be an opportunity to recoup some of the roles lost should more research move in this open source direction. “I would like to see digital curation emerge as a field of specialization,” VanSickle said. “This would be invaluable in helping establish ‘best practices’ for the digital life of data going forward.”

Good science, good policy

There seems to be a growing sense that, yes, “open access” is “good” because it lets researchers accomplish and share so much science. This commitment is breaking down barriers within and beyond the scientific community by allowing more researchers to access fossil data in a timelier manner without having to have the “blessing” or “permission” of those who collected it. But just how the open access of fossils ought to be achieved is still very much a work in progress. Simply saying that scientists should “open everything up” as a standard practice remains disingenuous for now, because that line of thought dismisses the complexity of the social and cultural life of data this community continues to work through.

“At the end of the day, policies about data are the result of decisions that we’ve made,” Hawks argues. “If we want things to be different, we need to choose for that to be the case, and then work on finding ways to implement those new decisions.”

As the expectation for fossils to be more readily available grows within paleoanthropology, researchers will need to strike the balance of accessibility with the costs associated with prepping and scanning the fossils. Whether or not Lucy’s death-by-tree-fall conclusion withstands continued scientific scrutiny, the study is a commitment to transparency in methodology and analysis. Publishing a fossil as famous as Lucy matters all the more in the open access debate because these famous fossils carry cultural cachet that can set expectations and trends in the paleo-community. Lucy’s celebrity means that it has the potential to define the standards for new scientific practices and certainly for what constitutes “good science” just as with the Homo naledi fossils.

The current push to open up access to fossils is changing the paradigms of science that have underpinned paleoanthropology for over a century—and it's largely change for the better.

Listing image by Stan Seibert (who also printed this piece)