Collecting Casts Katerina Harvati | Research Scientist, Human Evolution Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

It’s very wonderful if one can go and see the actual original fossil.

Of course it’s the best thing.

But this is not always possible.

And often, even when you go to see it--I’ve been to see most European fossils

already during--when I was writing my dissertation.

But okay, I can’t go back every time I want to see,

“What did La Chapelle-aux-Saints have on his nose?” or something like this.

It’s very nice to actually have a cast to be able to look at,

and the cast is definitely much, much better than a photograph.

A photograph is better than nothing, but a photograph does not somehow convey

the three-dimensional aspect of the morphology that you’re interested in,

especially if it’s very detailed aspects of the morphology,

such as what we see in the base of the skull.

This is a specimen that’s in Kenya, while this specimen,

the original, doesn’t exist actually, I told you it was lost in the war.

And this one is in Indonesia.

So you could never look at them at the same time.

And one of the most interesting things is comparisons.

For us what we do is compare them, and compare them also by looking at them;

also by measuring them of course.

But in order to see everything at the same time, you can’t do it unless you have a cast collection.