Shin bone can solve early puzzle

A small fragment of bone represents the final piece of a puzzle that has taken academics working on opposite sides of the globe almost two decades to solve.

The ancient fossil is part of a shin bone that was found in 1921 at the Broken Hill mine in Zambia and is thought to belong to a Homo heidelbergensis man, an ancestor of modern human beings.

The bone resides in the Natural History Museum in London, where a staff member cut a small triangular chunk out of it for analysis.

And leading anthropologist Chris Stringer arrived in Canberra on Sunday with it in his carry-on luggage.

He is working at the Australian National University with long-time collaborator Rainer Grun to date the bone using the university's state of the art technology. [...] canberratimes.com.au