Community Support

	From Senator Rodney Ellis
	From Texas Governor Rick Perry
	From City of Houston Councilmember Ada Edwards
	From Greater Houston Partnership President Jeff Moseley
	Dr. Jill Cook
	Dr. Sheela Athreya
	Dr. Trenton Holliday
	Dr. Antonia Foias

Dr. Jill Cook

“We applaud the occasional loan of a rare, fragile masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci as a great cultural benefit. Are human fossils so different? In the museum environment rare, fragile materials are expertly handled by professional conservators in controlled environments so that risks are minimized. These fossils are part of our intellectual, spiritual, political and economic world as much as they are data for an empirical science. As empirical scientists we should also be advocates of the evidence we rely on and strive to find new ways to enthrall and intrigue the public who fund our endeavors...Visitors do not attend exhibitions to see replicas. They want to experience the real thing and it is important to encourage them out of their everyday communities to see the greatest achievements of humanity alongside humanity itself. At a time when globalization goes hand in hand with social fragmentation and intolerance, human fossils have the extraordinary power to remind us of our common origins as we search for new identities in a world of complexity and difference. Human and proto-human fossils from Africa are a particularly potent force in this respect.”

Dr. Jill Cook, Head of Prehistory in the Department of Prehistory & Europe at The British Museum, quoted with permission from British Archaeology.

Jill Cook is Head of Prehistory in the Department of Prehistory & Europe at The British Museum. She joined the museum in 1987 as a specialist curator in charge of the Pleistocene archaeological collections. She has published research on taphonomy, the peri-mortem alteration of human remains (including the Krapina Neanderthals) stone and bone artifacts, Late Pleistocene art and the history of archaeology. As a curator, her research must also have outcomes for the general public through exhibitions, permanent galleries and lectures. She is the curator in charge of Made in Africa, a temporary exhibition of stone tools from Olduvai Gorge which attracted 60,000 visitors in less than three months at The British Museum in 2005. This exhibition then traveled to San Francisco for the opening of the Museum of the African Diaspora and is now on tour in England.