Sir

Your News story 'War of words erupts over fossil dig' (Nature 448, 12; 2007) about the conflict between two research teams at the Olduvai Gorge site in Tanzania gives a partial account of the situation. Contrary to what it states, our team never probed trenches that the Olduvai Landscape Paleoanthropology Project (OLAPP) group had already dug.

The article also fails to clarify that in August 2006, a commission including Tanzanian academics and representatives from the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology, the Department of Antiquities and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism declared that there was no scientific overlap between our project and that of the OLAPP group, and that both teams should be allowed to work at the gorge.

Every year erosion exposes hundreds of new fossils that will be lost to science for ever because of the limited power of a single team to undertake proper research along 25 km of deposits spanning 100 m of depth. Twenty-first-century palaeoanthropology must overcome this feudal approach to sites if it is to provide knowledge and preserve the human evolutionary heritage for future generations.