Overwhelmed Archaeologists Struggling To Keep Pace With Glut Of Early Humans Thawed Out By Climate Change

OXFORD, ENGLAND—Noting that the steady rise in global temperatures was beginning to have a significant impact on their work, anthropologists at Oxford University told reporters Tuesday that they were struggling to keep up with the abundance of early human remains being thawed out due to climate change. “It seems like every other day a hunter in North Canada or some unsuspecting hikers in Siberia are stumbling across the perfectly preserved remains of a 2,000-year-old human ancestor emerging from melting glaciers or receding permafrost; we can barely keep up,” said lead researcher Adam Daly, adding that as climate change has become more severe, his team has had to take drastic measures to fast-track some of their processes, such as performing CT scans on more than one mummified carcass at once and skipping hair analysis altogether. “We don’t even get excited anymore about anything potentially groundbreaking because it just means more work for us. Any satchels of prehistoric tools are just thrown into a drawer now; we have something like a hundred ancient hammerstones we’re never going to get around to analyzing. We even stopped giving the earliest human ancestors we find names. What’s the point?” At press time, Daly added that his only hope for clearing some space was to pawn off as many skeletons as he could onto the British Museum.

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