Squeezing Through Rocky Caves to Find Ancient Skeletons | Expedition Raw

I was the first scientist to go into the cave. Once the actual remains had been discovered, I looked down and just thought, "Oh really, I may perhaps have bitten off more than I can chew." But you know, at the same time, the excitement of what we were about to do overwhelmed that fear. And yeah, I'm perfectly prepared to shove myself where I don't belong.

I got this job by answering a Facebook ad. I put a call out on Facebook saying, "I need skinny scientists who are not claustrophobic in a dangerous and difficult environment." And so, I applied, thinking, "Well, you know, give it a shot." A couple of days later, I got the email saying, "You know, you're in!" God, this place is beautiful. You're just pushing into somewhere entirely new, and I can imagine that's how the astronauts felt when they were going out into space for the first time. You just thought, "No one else has done this."

You know, Lee's grand plan, the whole team's grand plan, if there had been a serious accident deep in the cave, was that we would have had to send a medical team to them, and they would have had to live underground until they could get themselves back out again. Critical issues. No one panic. Yeah, see, it's normal. A 200-meter obstacle course is your daily commute.

Yeah, and at its narrowest, it's 7 to 8 inches. I guess it's basically just a meter of rocky cags. So, it's sort of like looking into the mouth of a shark, just trying to also slow it down a bit. All you see is what your headlamp shows you, 'cause you're deep underground. My headlamp would pick up flashes of bone just here and there and everywhere.

We'd realized that we had more than one individual, so we'll put pin number one right beside the mandible, and that's where we'll concentrate. Okay, skull is being flagged. You can see the skull here. Well, we have our genus with that—this is indisputably Homo. Yes, yes.

What Homo naledi has done is force everybody to rewrite the textbooks. The family tree that we always sort of think about and have been kind of adding little twigs and branches to along the way actually may be a lot bushier than we ever really realized. And so, that opens up a whole new world of exploration and research that actually is really exciting.