• Question: when did you realise you wanted to be a scientist?

    Asked by weris to Jena on 13 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Jennifer Bates

      Jennifer Bates answered on 13 Nov 2016:

      I was on an excavation in Turkey when I was 19. I had been asked to work on a flotation machine – it sorts ancient seeds from soil – and I realised I wanted to know more about the things I was finding. What were they? How could I identify them? And what did they mean? My big question about the past has always been how did people live thousands of years ago and suddenly I found a way to think about it – what were people eating? And the best way to answer that was by doing archaeological science!

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