The Jawbone
November 22nd, 2007 by Steve Bowbrick
This is more like it. This is how I saw it going. It’s gladiatorial, man! Roo brings some Kiwi comedy, Dan comes back with Aussie solar power, I sneak in a bit of calypso and Russell parries with pies. Ouch! Take that! Biff! And now, in the blue corner (ding ding): palaeobiology! Crunch!
Scientists are so cute: their enthusiasm, their optimism, their belief in the absolute necessity of their task. This show about the effort to date a human jawbone found in Torquay in the 1920s is presented by a sort of scientist double-act: Doctors Tom Higham from the Oxford Radiocarbon Unit and Roger Jacobi from the British Museum (their almost-comic interactions are priceless).
The show could serve as a case study for the psychopathology of the scientist (they interview a bunch of other scientists too so it’s a mini-festival of scientific enthusiasm). The subject matter is mind-blowing too: the first ‘British’ Neanderthal? Extracting DNA from 37,000 year-old bones? Brilliant.
The show’s press release has some useful background, the kind of stuff that’s not always provided, including the name of the producer, Martin Kurzik - a man whose decision (I assume) to entrust the programme to actual scientists and not to a professional presenter was a stroke of genius (MP3).
The pic, which shows the actual jawbone, is from Torquay Museum.
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