To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

In the years before he got into journalism, senior editor Charles Alexander taught science at two high schools in Tennessee. He told his students about early man and the origins of life and touched on the dinosaurs. "And just about everything I taught them," he says, "was wrong."

Alexander has no reason to feel chagrined: every other science teacher in the country was purveying the same fare. The fact that the material has since proved almost totally obsolete helps explain why a recent series of TIME cover stories detailing new findings about ancient civilizations and prehistory has had such an impact. The stories have been overseen by Alexander and fellow senior editor Claudia Wallis; the two have shared the supervision of TIME's Science staff for three years.

Neolithic man, the Maya, life's origins -- at first glance, such subjects seem to have little in common with urgent reports datelined Hebron or Sarajevo. But make no mistake, the news value is profound. To cite this week's cover story, which Alexander edited: the conclusion of a recent scientific paper -- that Homo erectus wandered out of Africa nearly a million years earlier than was previously believed -- requires a change in our fundamental thinking about human evolution, and hence the way we understand ourselves. When the information is that important, Alexander muses, it doesn't matter "whether Homo erectus is still making news, or we're still finding out the news he made 2 million years ago."

Wallis discovered exactly how strongly readers respond to such "old news" two years ago, when she edited a cover story about the "Ice Man," a Stone Age human trapped and preserved in an Austrian glacier. It was one of the year's most popular stories. Last year she repeated the experience with a cover updating the conventional wisdom about dinosaurs; Alexander has had similar success with a cover exploring the dawn of life. Notes Wallis: "If you have a new artifact to look at -- the skull of an early hominid, the talon of a velociraptor -- you can engage in a thrilling kind of time traveling. Add some evocative writing, and readers can be transported."

We trust that this week's effort, reported by Andrea Dorfman and written by Michael D. Lemonick, will transport readers once again. That, and bring the graduates of those two high schools in Tennessee -- as well as other high schools throughout the country -- up to speed.