On a bright Friday morning last week, a Virgin Galactic spacecraft travelled 88 kilometres above Earth to the edge of space. On board were two Virgin Galactic pilots, an instructor and three passengers — and the remains of two ancient-human relatives that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago in southern Africa.
Everyone aboard VSS Unity — including the hominin remains — landed safely an hour after take-off. But the fossils’ journey has drawn extraordinary rebuke from archaeologists, palaeoanthropologists and other researchers. They say that it was an unethical publicity stunt that put priceless hominin fossils at risk, raising questions about the protection of cultural heritage in South Africa, as a government agency signed off on the mission.
“To treat ancestral remains in such a callous, unethical way — to blast them into space just because you can — there’s no scientific merit in this,” says Robyn Pickering, a geologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Precious bones
Other fossils — including dinosaur bones — have been taken into space on various missions since the 1980s, but these are the first ancient-hominin remains to leave Earth. They belong to Australopithecus sediba, which lived around 2 million years ago1, and the roughly 250,000-year-old Homo naledi. Both species were found near Johannesburg in South Africa by teams led by Lee Berger, a palaeoanthropologist now at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC.
In July, the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) in Cape Town granted Berger an export permit to transport an A. sediba shoulder bone and a H. naledi finger bone to New Mexico, where Virgin Galactic’s spaceport is located, and aboard the company’s craft. The fossils were carried on the flight by Tim Nash, a South African businessman who was one of the passengers.
Berger’s application said that scientific studies might be conducted on the fossils, but that this was not the main aim of the request. “Major media partners will assist in using this once in a lifetime opportunity to bring awareness to science, exploration, human origins and South Africa and its role in understanding Humankind’s shared African ancestry,” it said.
Hellbound and Down 