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Artificial intelligence finds fossil sites

Nature (2011)Cite this article

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Palaeontologists use computer neural network and satellite images to work out where to dig.

Lucy, the famous Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, was found by accident when palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson took a detour back to his Land Rover in Ethiopia in 1974. Such luck will always have a place in fossil hunting, but artificial intelligence now promises to assist, after a team trained a computer neural network to recognize fossil sites in satellite images.

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References

  1. Anemone, R., Emerson, C. & Conroy, G. Evol. Anthropol. 20, 169-180 (2011.)

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  1. Ewen Callaway
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Callaway, E. Artificial intelligence finds fossil sites. Nature (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/news.2011.633

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/news.2011.633

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