It wasn't until he was back in Oklahoma as a University of California, Berkeley, PhD student attending a 2002
paleontology conference hosted by the museum that the bones first caught his attention.
I mean, I would say the whole last 30 years have been remarkable times because so many new techniques have come online: dating, CT studies, the synchrotron, allowing us to look [at] individual growth lines in Neandertal teeth,... the ability to date things with much greater precision, and then DNA — and, you know, I was in Svante Pääbo's press
conference in London in 1997 when [he] announced the first mitochondrial DNA and I went on record saying it was the equivalent in
paleontology if landing something or landing on Mars and who could have imagined 10 years later we talk about the whole genome; it's incredible.