Anthropologists are using electronic ‘fossils’ to piece together hominid
remains from two 400 000-year-old skulls originally discovered in two sites
in Morocco. Software developed by IBM allows the three-dimensional shape
of scattered fossil fragments to be captured on computer, greatly simplifying
the task of reconstruction.
‘Piecing together real fossil specimens is like trying to make a model
aeroplane using a handful of broken pieces coming from several different
kits,’ says Alan Kalvin of IBM’s Thomas Watson Research Center. The package
can produce electronic mirror-images of existing fragments – necessary when
reconstructing both sides of a specimen – and shrink or enlarge pieces from
different fossils to allow for differences in their size.
