The woman who dates Hobbits and giant apes
Once a diving instructor, Kira Westaway is today one of the foremost authorities on hominin migration in southeast Asia. Belinda Smith reports.
At the bottom of a pit dug three metres into a cave floor, Kira Westaway sat on a box, methodically pushing hollow tubes into the surrounding dirt and pulling them out.
It was July, 2003. The cave, named Liang Bua, was nestled in dense tropical jungles on Flores, an island at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago. Less than a year earlier, Westaway was a scuba instructor in Thailand with a successful business. Now she was a PhD student, spending her time scooping subterranean sediment samples. She planned to take the morsels of earth back to Australia to find out how old they were – and, by extension, the age of any artefacts found in the layers.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/archaeology/kira-westaway-the-woman-who-dates-hobbits-and-giant-apes
