“A lot of the evidence that comes out of Africa informs us about our origins,” says [palaeoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie]. He bridles at the exclusion of African researchers from many fossil discoveries made on the continent. Parachute science — the practice of Western scientists working in other nations without involving local researchers — still thrives in palaeontology, according a 2024 analysis of nearly 30,000 fossil discoveries published in Science. The study found that many palaeontology papers published in the preceding 34 years have no authors at all from the nations in which the fossils were unearthed.
Follow the latest news and policy debates on sustainable agriculture, biomedicine, and other ‘disruptive’ innovations. Subscribe to our newsletter.
The natural laboratories where we collect many of the fossils that are needed to understand our history are in Africa. But often, when you look at who is collecting and studying these fossils, contributing to the science and telling the story of our origins, you don’t find any Africans. … That’s unfair.
