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Alarm raised over return of human remains

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

16 May 2003 - The Independent (UK) - Leading scientists said yesterday that their research would become practically impossible if the Government sanctioned the return of human bones and other museum exhibits to their countries of origin.

Some native groups in Australia and America have asked Britain to return human remains which have become part of museum collections used for research into forensic science, anthropology and human origins. A government report by a committee of experts is due to be published this summer and is expected to recommend limited repatriation of some human material such as bones, teeth and hair samples.

But three specialists said repatriation would ruin many of Britain's most invaluable collections and make it difficult or impossible to continue important studies into an array of subjects from the nature of Neanderthal man to the identity of a modern-day murder victim.

Chris Stringer, professor of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, Robert Foley, director of evolutionary anthropology at Cambridge University, and Richard Neave, a forensic artist at the University of Manchester, said it was essential that museum collections be kept intact. Dr Foley said they feared the issue had been addressed in such a way that the scientists' case had not been put across adequately.

Studying ancient bones and other human remains had helped to explode the myth that mankind is split into biologically distinct and indivisible races and had aided the understanding of diseases such as syphilis, Dr Foley said.

Professor Stringer said his colleagues in Australia could not study human remains in their own country because of laws stipulating the reburial and destruction of Aboriginal bones. If Britain followed suit studies in Britain would also stop. "We would have to give up research," said Professor Stringer.

Cambridge University has about 18,000 human specimens and about 500 of these could be at immediate risk of repatriation, said Dr Foley. At the Natural History Museum, only about half of its collection of 20,000 human samples comes from Britain and 2,000 could be sent back straight away.

Professor Stringer said scientists were worried about what the Government's Working Group on Human Remains would recommend. "It is a very diverse group and we worry that it will come to the simple answer of following the US and Australia and specimens will end up being lost for ever," he said.

Dr Neave said: "It would be folly to let a lack of understanding of science cloud our judgement to the extent that future generations will be deprived of these collections."

Source: The Independent (UK)

Letter to the Editor of The Independent

by Professor Paul Turnbull

20 May 2003 - The Independent (UK) - Sir: Professor Stringer claims that his colleagues in Australia cannot study human remains because of laws stipulating the reburial and destruction of Aboriginal bones ("Alarm raised over return of human remains", 16 May 2003). This is not an accurate summary of the situation here in Australia.

Federal and state laws do not require the reburial and destruction of ancestral remains. They recognize the rights of indigenous Australians to determine the fate of their cultural heritage. Research has not stopped. It now must be conducted within ethical frameworks that acknowledge the rights of indigenous Australians to approve and direct research on remains.

Where non-indigenous scientists have accepted these conditions, research continues. Of course, this means that scientists now have their research goals shaped in collaboration with indigenous communities, much as research in other areas of science is subject to community standards.

This is the real nub of the issue, and it would be far more constructive if opponents of the repatriation of Australian remains sought to explore ways of working with indigenous communities rather than continually implying Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples are ignorant of science.

Paul Turnbull
Professor of History
James Cook University
Queensland
Australia

Source: The Independent (UK)

Research fear over return of human bones

By Clive Cookson, Science Editor

16 May 2003 - Financial Times (UK) - Plans to return human remains from museums and study collections to their ancestral owners would be a disaster for research in fields from forensic medicine to anthropology, scientists warned yesterday.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which is responsible for Britain's museums, is due to publish the findings of its working group on human remains this summer. Researchers told a meeting in London they feared the outcome would be increased pressure to "repatriate" bones to indigenous peoples.

Legislation in the US and Australia had led to the loss of many important collections, they said.

Professor Chris Stringer, an expert on human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, was concerned that the working group contained no scientist working with ancient bones.

He said: "We fear it may take a view that does not take account of the science and come to the simple solution of following the US and Australia so that specimens will end up being lost forever."

The researchers said the loss of human remains had been particularly serious in Australia. Almost all study collections had been returned to Aboriginal communities who had buried or destroyed them, Prof Stringer said.

"Some Aboriginal bones have been smashed to pieces and buried under concrete to put them out of the reach of science," he said. "Scientists in Australia have no collections left to study in their own country so they have to come to us for our material."

Dr Robert Foley, director of evolutionary anthropology at Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, said the issue of human remains was "deeply emotional".

The debate was coloured by ill feeling over Britain's colonial past and the way some remains had been removed from ancestral burial grounds. Dr Foley said some native American and Aboriginal groups had made claims on human remains excavated from their lands that could not have come from their ancestors. "These collections are an important part of human heritage as a whole," he said. "We can do far more now as scientists than we could in the past. Scientific techniques are always changing."

Source: Financial Times (UK)

Folly to give back ancient bones, say scientists

By David Derbyshire, Science Correspondent

16 May 2003 - The Daily Telegraph (UK) - Handing over Britain's extensive museum collections of ancient human bones and fossils to aborigines for burial or cremation would be "folly", leading scientists said yesterday.

Under plans being considered by a Department of Culture, Media and Sport working party, indigenous Australians and Americans could be given the right to claim any human remains stored in British universities or museums for "repatriation". The proposals have angered scientists, who claim future generations would be deprived of vital research material.

In Australia, a similar repatriation law has devastated research into human evolution, they say. Many fossils have been destroyed, while Australian academics wanting to study ancient bones must now travel to London.

In America, a row over the 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man has divided scientists and Indian tribes. Even though the ancestors of the native Americans involved in the row moved to the area of the find only a few hundred years ago, they have won a claim to bury the remains.

Britain's museums and universities store thousands of human remains, including many from former colonies.

Dr Robert Foley, director in evolutionary anthropology at Cambridge University's Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, said the debate was sensitive and involved a clash between scientific rationality and deeply held cultural beliefs.

The remains were vital for research, he said. By using the diverse collections, scientists had been able to explore the origins of mankind, and explode many myths about race and ethnicity.

As new technologies emerge, the remains will yield more information. Researchers have recently extracted DNA from 30,000-year-old Neanderthal remains - a feat that would have been regarded as impossible 10 years ago.

"It's not just the techniques that change, but the questions that we ask," Dr Foley said. "Future generations may well regret that their ancestors have been buried and lost."

Cambridge has about 18,000 human specimens, including several hundred from Australia. The Natural History Museum has a similar collection. Prof Chris Stringer, the museum's head of human origins, said 2,000 samples could be subject to repatriation.

Source:The Daily Telegraph (UK)

Science argues to keep bones

By Jonathan Amos

16 May 2003 - BBC News Online - The repatriation of human remains currently held in UK museums and universities to indigenous peoples around the world will do immense damage to science.

That is the claim of leading researchers who fear many hundreds of specimens that hold vital clues to our evolutionary past could soon be dispersed to be reburied, burnt or even smashed up.

The scientists have been speaking ahead of a report due to be published this summer by a working group that will recommend changes to the legal status of human material held by UK institutions.

The scientists are campaigning against the adoption of legislation already passed in Australia and the US which has seen thousands of specimens handed over to Aboriginal communities.

"These collections are central to what we do; if we have to hand some of this material over it will be tragic," said Dr Robert Foley, an anthropologist from the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge University.

"There is enormous interest in human evolution; huge interest in how modern humans came out of Africa and spread across the world. These bones help us understand that."

Colonial past

Indigenous groups - principally Aboriginal Australians - believe the collections are an affront to their customs. They say they should have every right - legal and moral - to repossess the material.

"Documentation shows that way back during colonisation, Aboriginal people objected to the removal of much of this material in the first place," Lyndon Ormond-Parker, a researcher on Aboriginal cultural affairs, told BBC News Online.

"A lot of it, they believe, was stolen. As part of their spiritual beliefs, they think this material should now be returned to be laid to rest in peace."

The UK collections - like the 18,000 specimens held in Cambridge - comprise a range of material from locks of hair and individual teeth to whole skeletons.

Most of the remains date back beyond 1850; some are tens of thousands of years old. Although much is of UK origin, a great deal comes from abroad. Several hundred specimens - perhaps a thousand or more - could become the focus for repatriation claims from Australia and the US.

Scientists say that by applying modern analytical techniques, they can use the bones to discern patterns of migration in ancient human communities - who lived where, who mixed with whom and when.

The chemistry of the bones will very often record how an individual lived - and died.

Comparative study

For example, different forms, or isotopes, of carbon and nitrogen atoms in teeth betray the diet of a person, with vegetarians displaying a very different isotopic signature to an individual who eats meat or fish.

But to those who study the evolution of the human species, it is the scale and variation of the collections which allow them to do the all- important comparative research.

Professor Chris Stringer is from the Natural History Museum, which has the largest bone collection in the UK. He told BBC News Online: "I study Neanderthals but to do that I need to know how varied modern humans are.

"To answer that central question of whether Neanderthals were a separate species from us, I need a measure of how varied the modern human population is."

And this point was echoed by Richard Neave, a medical artist at Manchester University and an expert on facial reconstruction, whose interest concerns applications in modern forensic science.

"These collections give us the opportunity to study a wide range of different ethnic groups," he said.

"One has to look at more than one sample - that's crucial. In the event that you have a decomposed dead body, perhaps in bits, to reconstruct the facial features, the soft tissue features, you have to have a very good understanding of the skull and you only get that from looking at lots and lots of specimens."

Organ scandal

In the US, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Nagpra) has seen a steady erosion of collections. Claimants decide the future of the bones, whether to rebury or destroy them, or to keep them available for study.

Rumours and leaks suggest the working group, under the chairmanship of Professor Norman Palmer, will be sympathetic to the idea of repatriation.

Some UK collections have already been returned voluntarily - by the Royal College of Surgeons of England and the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, for example.

But the scientific arguments to resist a UK Nagpra may be hard to sell at the moment, especially in the aftermath of the Alder Hey scandal, in which it emerged thousands of children's organs from post mortem examinations had been stored at the Liverpool hospital without the proper authorisation.

The scientific community came out badly from the affair, its arguments about the need to retain body tissues for research appearing cold and aloof.

'Complex issue'

Nonetheless, the community will be looking to retain as much of the ancient human archive as possible.

"If this material were repatriated and kept available for science - that would at least be something," Dr Foley said.

"But the other fear is that even if we don't lose much material we could be tied up in masses of bureaucracy establishing where every single item is. We simply don't have the funding for that."

Professor Stringer added: "This is a complex issue. There are legitimate claims for repatriation. But there is a spectrum - from skeletons that can be linked to living people to at the other extreme remains that have no kinship links with living people.

"We have to consider whether we need blanket legislation or whether we need to consider each individual case on its merits."

Mr Ormond-Parker says the scientific case has been largely overstated; many of the specimens have very little research value, he argues.

"There is a compromise that will satisfy all parties.

"In some cases where material has been returned, there has been agreement between the community and the institution concerned, and scientists have had to obtain the informed consent of the community before undertaking research.

"This is the way ahead but in the first instance, museums must be open and honest about what they hold in their collections and they must have curatorial polices that give Aboriginal communities the proper respect."

Source: BBC news online

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