Boning up on human evolution

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"On one hand, we're explorers of lost worlds," says White, preparing to spend the fall at a bare-bones campsite in a dry, rocky rift 180 miles northeast of Addis Ababa. "On the other hand, we're forensic scientists. We don't have a lot of clues left from what happened in prehistory, so we have to assemble those clues from the fragmentary fossil record and study each one very intensively to extract as much information as we can."