Rex Dalton reports in this week's Nature on permit problems in Olduvai Gorge:
For 18 years, the Olduvai Landscape Paleoanthropology Project (OLAPP) -- led by anthropologist Robert Blumenschine of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, archaeologist Fidelis Masao of the University of Dar es Salaam and Jackson Njau, principal curator at Tanzania's National Natural History Museum in Arusha -- has collected plant and animal specimens to learn how these early relatives of man lived in the region (R. J. Blumenschine et al. Science 299, 1217-1221; 2003).
Last summer, the OLAPP team was distressed to learn that Tanzanian officials had issued permits to a group led by Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, of Complutense University in Madrid, and Audauz Mabulla, of the University of Dar es Salaam, to dig within the OLAPP region. The OLAPP researchers then found the competing group a kilometre away from their campsite, probing trenches the OLAPP team had dug near the bed where Leakey uncovered 'Zinj', the original P. boisei skull.
I don't know anything about the details of this dispute, but the article seems to tilt toward the OLAPP point of view. It quotes Domínguez-Rodrigo, but doesn't really provide any detail that might support his team's point of view.
The article does provide some details intended to undercut the claims that others claimed they made, but they claim they didn't claim. You follow? Me neither. It's a short he said, he said kind of article that doesn't do anything but flag a "controversy." These kinds of articles always irritate me.
