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  • WHERE I WORK

Picking away at fossilized skeletons

Israel Hershkovitz loves the slow, methodical work of uncovering the secrets that lie within prehistoric human bones.
  1. Josie Glausiusz

    1. Josie Glausiusz is a freelance writer in Israel.

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Anthropologist Israel Hershkovitz during excavations in his lab at Tel Aviv University

Israel Hershkovitz is director of the Dan David Center for Human Evolution and Biohistory Research at Tel Aviv University. Credit: Corinna Kern for Nature

I interview people who lived in the past. I’m an anthropologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, but I call myself a biohistorian. I’m trying to understand human history, not from human artefacts, temples or big walls surrounding old cities, but from bones. They record every important aspect of your life: what you eat, your ailments, your broken hand at age five.

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Nature 581, 112 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01319-3

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