Experimental Taphonomist

摘要

Dying is easy. The study of how an animal wandering the tundra becomes a fossil underground: That's hard. To familiarize themselves with the mechanics of death and decay, taphonomists study the disintegration of worms, elephants and even humans. Travis Rayne Pickering, a taphonomist and paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, concentrates on big cat kills in Africa. The idea is to create a reference to help figure out whether fossil animals were killed by early humans-a sign of our sophistication-or by predators like big cats.