Discovering Homo Naledi: Journey to Find a Human Ancestor, Part 1 | Nat Geo Live
Lee: I'd come to South Africa. I'd launched myself into exploration. And out I went looking to combine these technologies: satellite imagery and handheld GPS. I started mapping sites. I saw that cave sites formed in linear lines. I saw fossil sites clustered together. It intrigued me so much, I put together a list of targets, printed them on an A-4 sheet, loaded my dog into the car and on the first day out I found 21 new cave sites. It became an addictive process. By July of that year, 2008, I'd found more than 600 cave sites. I discovered more than 60 new fossil sites. And I thought if this was my legacy, it's fantastic. This will be my gift to future generations of scientists. (applause)
These discoveries began in a situation that I found myself in back in the 1990's. A situation where exploration appeared to have been finished in the field of paleoanthropology in the search for human origins. I found my own university closing my exploration program. I found myself in a situation of assisting in a job search to find a new director, to push the paleoanthropology, the human origin study in a new direction: towards technology. Towards the application of using modern technology to study existing fossils, not to find new ones.
That young man that was going to take over my directorship position and lead us in a new direction was killed in a motorcycle accident in London. But we had already invested in that direction. We had post-doctoral students, computers, everything and one of them, a young Kenyan named Job Kibii came into my office and said would I be his post-doctoral supervisor. Now with this tragedy, I said, "No. Because I can't be. You're a lab guy, I'm a field guy. But I've just found this site that's bugging me. So, if you want to learn to be a field guy let's go out to the site and see what it has to offer."
August 15th 2008, Job, myself, my dog Tau, my then nine-year old son, Matthew, walked up to the site. I got to the edge of it, we're looking around. I said, "Go find fossils." And with that off Matthew and Tau went. And I was talking to Job, and I said, "You know, I don't know why they left this little hole. Miners had actually found this and just put a couple of blasts into it. But then they'd left it." And as I finished saying that, Matthew, who is now 15 yards off the site in the middle of grass says, "Dad, I found a fossil." I almost didn't go and look. But he's my nine-year old son, and like all of you, you want to encourage fossil hunting so I started walking towards him... (audience laughter) ...and this is what I saw. And, five meters away, I knew his and my life were going to change forever. Because sticking out of the side of that rock I saw a hominid clavicle.
Matthew says I cursed, I don't remember that. And I turned the rock over and there, sticking out of the back of it was a jaw and a tooth and that would lead to an extraordinary time. Matthew had found a skeleton. One of the rarest things you can ever find. That skeleton would be part of this skull. We would eventually find another one, and then another one, and then another one, and then another one. We would call that little site, Malapa, and it would for a moment in history be one of, if not the richest early hominid site on the continent of Africa. Skeletons in remarkable pristine condition. The organic material. I threw myself into this. This was a paleoanthropological equivalent of winning the lottery. We don't find these things.
Over the years following that, 2011, 2012, 2013, we would have the time of our scientific lives. Something like 15 papers in the journal Science. More in the journal Nature. Dozens of peer-reviewed articles. It was living a scientific dream. It was our version of a scientific lottery all from a little site that looks like that: a hole in the ground. And I realized at that moment, this was about June-July of 2013, that I had made an error. That error was pretty fundamental and pretty simple. I had not been exploring since Matthew had said, "Dad, I found a fossil." I had literally won the lottery, why would you?
Fair enough to say that I was putting together this great scientific team we were producing this research but I had not gone back out and gone to those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sites that I had discovered walking those hills. And so, I decided to go back out in the field. And if you can imagine that this landscape is less than 45 minutes outside of the city of Johannesburg. It looks like that. And when you look at that you probably see one these beautiful, rolling African landscapes. But that's not what I see. I see a giant block of Swiss cheese. Because underneath that Dolomitic limestone are a network of hundreds of kilometers of caves.
Well, most of them are not these big cavernous-type caves that some of you may envision when you hear the word cave. Most of them are these small narrow trenches and splits in the ground, forming along ancient fault lines. And I was thinking, "how am I going to do this?" I had done cave exploration in this region back in the 1990's. And I had looked and squeezed my way through these things in the 90's, and had not found much. And as I was thinking of how I would move forward with an exploration program to take my surface images and move them underground, a pirate walked into my office.
He was a former student of mine. Pedro Boschoff. He had gone off diamond prospecting in Central Africa and failed, and had come back destitute. And said, "I made a mistake. Paleoanthropology is my love please can you give me a job, I want to get back into it." And I said, "You know, your timing's good." (audience laughter) "I want to get underground." And Pedro quickly found out something that I already knew. That like me, he had no longer become physiologically appropriate for much of this underground work. (audience laughter) These are narrow squeezes. But I said, "You know, get out there and go to areas we know the best."
I had learned something from Malapa. And so we went to the caving club and found two young men who were physiologically appropriate. (audience laughter) On the right was Rick Hunter, who was a member of Mensa who had been kicked out of high school for blowing up the high school science lab. That is a true story, and was working as a builder. And on the left, Steve Tucker, an accountant by day. We showed them what we were looking for: kind of casts, photographs and sent them into some of these deeper recesses.
Steve and Rick went into the site that they expected the least from. Perhaps the best known cave site in South Africa if not in Africa: The Rising Star system. It was completely mapped. Or so they thought, until they worked their way on that late evening up an area after spending four and a half hours going through torturous sort of little squeezes and crevasses up a thing that's called Dragon's Back on the map. A series of collapses that's knife-edged. They were 40 meters underground, they climbed about 20 meters, to look down a little slot that was seven and half inches wide. Into the darkness and of course, they went down.
Down more than sixty feet into this narrow slot. Squeezing their way in not knowing if it was going to open up at any time and down you drop-- at the bottom they entered a little narrow passage. And there they began to immediately see small white bits on the ground that looked like bones. They followed them in, which led to a slightly larger chamber. And there they saw material on the ground. And they thought it looked a lot like what I'd told them we were looking for.
October 1st 2013, I was sitting at home. The front intercom at my gate went. I picked up the intercom and there a voice said, "You're gonna wanna let us in." It was creepy just like that. -(audience laughter)- -(Lee chuckles)- It was Pedro. And I opened the gate eventually and let them in. And there Steve opened up his laptop and I saw the most extraordinary pictures I thought I would never see in my life.