9310917 Miller Perhaps the most important advance in archaeology over the past 40 years has been the development of absolute dating techniques, beginning with Carbon-14, which allows for the dating of materials back as far as 30,000 years, and continuing on with Potassium/Argon techniques for much more ancient materials. However, no such dating technique was available that covered the period of our prehistory between 30,000 and 300,000 years ago. Recently, this group of scientists has developed an important and reliable dating technique that covers a good deal of this interval, by using eggshell, especially ostrich eggshell, but now likely generalizable to new materials: fish earbones, the "doors" of gastropods, and so on. They will pursue these applications in this project, as well as expanding the technique to more recent time intervals, and refining it. This project will expand our understanding of the origins of modern humans, currently a very contentious subject.
