The Human Fossil Record:
A Digital Resource for Research and Education

This archive contains tomographic scans (as well as various types of associated digital data) of fossils from the site of Kromdraai B, South Africa that are curated at the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History. These scans have been produced through a collaborative research and education initiative between the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany) and the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History (Pretoria, South Africa). They were formally published in Skinner MM, Kivell T, Potze S, Hublin J-J (2013) Microtomographic archive of fossil hominin specimens from Kromdraai B, South Africa, Journal of Human Evolution, 64(5): 319-472 and we encourage users to refer to this article for more information about the fossils and scans.

The copyright holder for all digital data (and derivates, such as surface models) associated with this archive is the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History (DNMNH).

Terms of use

Step 1:

Researchers interested in accessing the CT scans should fill out a Digital Data User Agreement Form and email it to curator of the DNMNH (Lazarus Kgasi, lkgasi@ditsong.org.za) with a description of their project proposal and specific specimens and CT data that they wish to use for their project. This process allows the curator to document what projects are being conducted on which CT data, and avoids overlap in specific research goals across current projects. If you do not hear back from Lazarus Kgasi in two weeks please email origins_datarequest@eva.mpg.de.

Step 2:

Upon acceptance of the proposed research project, the curator will issue the encryption password for the requested CT image stack. Encryption passwords are granted to specific researchers and should not be disseminated to third parties under any circumstances. If you have any questions regarding use of any digital data associated with this archive please contact the curator of the DNMNH. All ImageStack files are 'rar' compressed. Please use a archiving utility that can unpack the rar archive format, e.g. WinRAR, 7-Zip.

Step 3:

Inclusion of data in a scientific publication based on the CT scans (and derivative objects such as surface models, images, etc.,) available in this repository requires citation of the following article:

Skinner MM, Kivell T, Potze S, Hublin J-J (2013) Microtomographic archive of fossil hominin specimens from Kromdraai B, South Africa, Journal of Human Evolution, 64(5): 319-472