Discover, October 31, 2005
In the past, most of the big news about human evolution came from remote dig sites in places like Africa or Indonesia. In the future, the big news will come from familiar sites closer to home: hospitals. That’s because hospitals are equipped with powerful new scanning machines primarily used to identify tumors, ballooning blood vessels, bone fractures, and a wide range of disorders in people. Those same scanners also make it possible for paleoanthropologists to look inside the fossils of ancient hominids and see things that until now have been shrouded in mystery.