Some academic research can be dreadfully tedious, a slow and heartbreaking process of two steps forward and one step back. Or several steps back.

This is true for many disciplines. Consider medicine, where, for example, a microbiologist might devote her entire career to a specific viral strain in hopes of developing a vaccine that may never materialize. Or what about geologists, who must document change over eons, eras, periods and epochs, rather than millennia or centuries? Don’t even talk to them about decades.

Claire Terhune views recently discovered excavation records.

Claire Terhune views recently discovered excavation records.

It would be inaccurate to say these researchers are in it only for a major discovery – the means here must be as fulfilling as the ends – but I’m sure they wouldn’t complain if one showed up in their Petri dish. So they must settle for little moments, glimpses of something that will lead to bigger findings. Often for others instead of them.

These little discoveries can be thrilling. Ask Claire Terhune, assistant professor and biological anthropologist at the University of Arkansas. For about two weeks each summer over the past four years, Terhune and several colleagues have visited Bucharest, Romania, to catalog and analyze fossils stored in boxes at the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology.

The fossils came from a place called Grănceanu (also in Romania), which is one of the most significant paleontological sites in Eastern Europe. At Grănceanu or another site in the Olteţ Valley, anthropologists hope to find clues that will explain how human ancestors “dispersed,” or migrated from Africa to Eastern and Central Europe during the early Pleistocene, a geological subepoch that started roughly 2.6 million years ago and ended 781,000 years ago.

After Grănceanu was discovered in the 1960s, researchers published articles about its rich deposits from the 1970s through the 1990s, but for various reasons, mostly political, access to the fossils was limited and documentation from the site – excavation notes, geological information and a list of all of the fossils – was thought to have been lost.

This summer, on their last day at the Institute, as they were packing up specimens and reorganizing them into new bags and crates, Terhune and her colleagues noticed a cabinet with the label “Oltenia” on it. Oltenia is the region surrounding the Olteţ Valley. The researchers opened the cabinet and found a treasure trove of documentation from work that had been conducted in the 1960s.

In front of the cabinet, Terhune and her colleagues sat on the floor and immediately started flipping through the documents, which included maps of the Oltenia sites. But she and her colleagues were running out of time, so they had to settle for taking photographs of the documents.

“We still need to comb through these papers, but we suspect their contents are promising,” she said. “Hopefully they will help us sort through the fossils and discover more fossil sites in years to come.”

To learn more about Terhune’s research in Romania, see Reseaarch Frontiers’ Field Notes.