German Scientists Bring Fossils into the Computer Age

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,784921,00.html

Visitors are greeted by three skulls with seashells in their eye sockets. On a table behind them, a student completes a detailed drawing of the teeth in a human jaw.

The bone chamber lies behind a simple steel door on the ground floor. Located right next to the delivery entrance of the anatomy institute at Tel Aviv University, what looks like a janitor's storeroom is actually one of the world's largest treasure troves of human history.

Nestled on foam within blue storage drawers are all sorts of crumbling bones, including arm bones, leg bones, wrist bones, ribs, jaw bones, children's skulls and a range of teeth. These are one-of-a-kind fossils that reveal a key episode in the history of the human species.

Paleoanthropologists have excavated the bones of some three dozen individuals from the rocks in caves in northern Israel. What's unique about their find is that the bones come from two different species of man. They indicate that modern man and Neanderthals once lived hardly a stone's throw away from each other.