Yusra (pictured left) was a Palestinian woman who worked under Dorothy Garrod, a British paleoarchae

Yusra (pictured left) was a Palestinian woman who worked under Dorothy Garrod, a British paleoarchaeologist (pictured right), at Mt. Carmel caves in Israel from 1929 to 1935. Yusra was not a professionally trained archaeologist, but one of many local villagers hired by Garrod and her team to conduct the bulk of the work in the excavation.  Such practices were common at the time, and still are in some regions of the Middle East. Many of these villagers, despite having no formal education on the subject, were skilled excavators who had decades of experience. Yusra was the most skilled of all the village women employed under Garrod. Yusra’s job during the excavations was picking out items before the excavated soil was sieved, and she became immensely skilled in recognizing lithics, fauna, and human remains. One day she found a tooth, then a series of skull fragments which turned out to be part of a crushed but mostly complete skull of a Neanderthal woman. The skull, now known as Tabun-1, dates to 120,000 years ago. It is of the most ancient human skeletal remains found in the Levant.Although she was a prominent member of Dorothy Garrod’s excavation team and  responsible for the discovery of one of the most significant samples of neanderthal remains ever found, very little is known about Yusra’s life except for what is written about her in Garrod’s notes. She wanted to study at Cambridge at the encouragement of Garrod, but was unable to do so for a number of reasons. It is unknown what happened to her after the Mt. Carmel excavations because her village was abandoned and destroyed during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Yusra is an example of a woman and a class of skilled laborers whose contributions to early archaeology went unacknowledged and largely forgotten.  -- source link

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