Creation pressure

The move to repatriate certain materials held in UK collections follows several years of discussions which ended in legislative changes and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport issuing guidelines on how claims should be handled. At the Natural History Museum this has led to the creation of a special panel to assess the merits of each request. Georgina Mace, a member of the panel, said the decision to allow three months of scientific tests on the Tasmanian remains before their repatriation represented a fair compromise between the desire of the Tasmanians to regain the materials and the wish of scientists to retain them for investigation. " Part of the compromise is that we will try to gain as much knowledge as possible but we are very pleased to be able to return these items to the people who feel very strongly that they shouldn't be here ". The data collection process, beginning this month, will include imaging, measurements, and DNA and isotopic analysis. Researchers say that by applying such techniques, they can use old bones to discern patterns of migration in human communities — who lived, who mixed with whom and when — and even follow the spread of disease. The chemistry of bones will often record how an individual lived — and died. For example, different isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in teeth reveal the diet of a person, with vegetarians displaying a very different isotopic signature to an individual who eats meat or fish. The NHM holds the British national collection of human remains, comprising almost 20,000 specimens. They represent a worldwide distribution of the human population and a timescale of 500,000 years. The majority of the collection (54%) is material from individuals in the UK. But there are hundreds of items which could, and almost certainly will, be subject to further claims for repatriation by indigenous groups in Australia, New Zealand and North America. Several schools in Darwin's home country are using creationist teaching materials condemned by the UK government as " not appropriate to support the science curriculum " , according to recent press reports. The pack sent to schools promotes the creationist alternative to Darwinian evolution in the form of 'intelligent design' and the group behind them said 59 schools are using the information as a " useful classroom resource ". A teacher at one of the schools said it intended to use the …