Do you mean why didn’t they fight? Probably they did. Chimpanzee tribes are highly aggressive, early hominid tribes probably were as well. Human level intelligence didn’t suddenly evolve, it was a gradual transition.

> "There is no technology, extant or imaginable, that could extract that marvellous secret from her bones"

It's because the inference depends on having data from a very large sample of other finds. It wouldn't matter if there were a single Eve and we found her entire skeleton and extracted the DNA perfectly. We couldn't prove it was Eve without all the other samples, and it's beyond unlikely they'll just show up.

I'm disgusted by the convention that findings are controlled by self-interested glory-seeking finders. These belong to the entirety of humanity and should be treated as such, with utmost care and complete openness and humility. We shouldn't tolerate grave robbers any more than bank robbers. Like banks, archeaologists are fiduciaries of the highest order, and should be selected and managed as such, not like salespeople on commission. If you want to seek abandoned treasure, go elsewhere.

Look like teeth marks.

The marks could be scouring marks from the wind, I think. From the description in the article, these fossils have basically been sandblasted out of their sandstone matrix over time, so if there's a dominant wind direction small irregularities in the fossil could probably quite easily develop into this kind of parallel markings.

While we don't really know how many biological processes work, we have a pretty good idea how the basic mechanics of life work. The discovery of "something akin to DNA fingerprinting that lets people discover ancestry" would be the type of major discovery that would completely upset our understanding of things. Such a discovery would have to be consistent with all the evidence we already have (and is explained by our current understanding) while simultaneously introducing entire new concepts.

Not strictly impossible of course, but very few things are impossible in the strictest sense. For all practical purposes, given our understanding of the world, "there is no imaginable technology that could do this" is correct.

As a story arc for a forthcoming film? Sure. But I'm reminded of the comp sci aphorism: physics advanced by standing on the shoulders of giants.. CS by standing on each other's toes.

In a way, yes.

OTOH, they seem like the sort of odious, dysfunctional elites who the French claim to have purged back in the 1790's.

> Science needs more ...

From my read of the article, those big personalities were lording over a pretty dysfunctional and toxic workplace. At least from the expendable juniors' PoV.

If they can't admit when they're wrong and start sabotaging people's careers over it, it's not advancing science.

I know someone who worked for the archaeologist who uncovered the then-oldest human tools in the Americas (the first pre-Clovis finds, IIRC).

He was ... unusual. My friend once spent an entire day hiding in their car at the worksite, because he was onsite that day, and they forgot to bring duct tape to cover their shoes. Shoes had to be fresh-wrapped in duct tape to prevent anything modern from dropping out of the treads onto the excavation floor.

You can ask lots of logical questions... "Why didn't they just...?" Answer: because the famous archaeologist was a nutbag, and controlled the worksite as his own personal absolute fiefdom. OTOH, if someone ever found a miniscule piece of glass at the 15,000YA level in that dig (as an example), his reputation would strengthen the dating.

That being said... his success was undeniable. Could he have done it, AND been less of a nutbag? Probably. But we don't live in Dr. Strange's multiverse.