Discovering Homo Naledi: Journey to Find a Human Ancestor, Part 2 | Nat Geo Live

Narrator: Rick and Steve had no idea what type of bones they were looking at. But, they seemed intriguing. They took pictures and decided to show them to Pedro.

Pedro: So, needless to say, I called Professor Berger. He didn't answer his phone and we decided we're going to drive to his house. Because now we're all excited, bubbling, of course.

Pedro: Arriving at his home, I rung the bell and when he answered, my words to him was "Lee, you really want to talk to us." (laughs)

Lee: I knew immediately that that was a Fossil Hominid. It was not a human. I could tell by the proportions of the teeth I could tell by its size. You can see that fine scientific scale that I'm lucky, we have not got in trouble for. Because if you read carefully, it says, "Home Sewing Aid Only" on the side of it. (laughs) But I could see, that this was something... extraordinary. Second to that, it was just lying there on the ground. Now, that doesn't happen in South Africa. I assure you, it doesn't happen in South Africa. That skull that you saw that Matthew had found in that hard rock that rock is like concrete. That skull and skeleton just one of them took about 22,000 preparation hours to get to that state. This is lying there. The next picture confirmed that this was something truly extraordinary. Every one of those bones, I realized was Hominid. Believe me, they are. Anyone trained from me would look at that and say, "My Gosh!" And they're just lying there in dirt. Even more extraordinary, there was a skull. Can you see the curvature there? Just sitting in dirt, on a floor. And it looked tiny. So, I decided I needed to put someone in there that I absolutely trusted. That could take a scientific photograph of these things. And I happened to know someone, who fit the physiological profile that could get down that cave. Who I trusted immensely my, then six foot four... son who's sitting in the audience today. Who is physiologically appropriate to get down a seven and a half inch slot. Showed him how to use a scientific camera gave him a scale and... a few days later...

We went into this cave, a torturous route that took us almost 50 minutes to get to the base of Dragon's Back. Up we went, up this thing, where if you slip off, you die. We get to the edge of that crevice and we look down it and... down I sent Matthew with Rick and Steve. Because I'm trying for "Father of the Year". (audience laughter) There I sat in the dark looking at this impossible route. How in the world was I going to accomplish an expedition and excavation here? Forty five minutes or so go by and I hear scrabbling. Matthew's head pops up. Because I'm going for "Father of the Year" I didn't go, "Are you okay?". I went, "And?" (audience laughter) And Matthew handed me the camera and said "Daddy... it's amazing, It's beautiful." It was everything that those original pictures had said and that's when I knew I had to push the button. Except, I didn't know what button to push. 'Cause I needed people to work in there. I needed people to... effectively risk their lives in a well-known cave down a seven and a half inch slot, underground. In a fragile, relatively shallow environment that could have gases in it. It could collapse at any time. I had no idea how I was gonna find people with skills. They had to be paleoanthropologists or archeologists, they had to be able to excavate they had to have climbing skills, all these things. I did what any one of you would do... I put a Facebook Ad out. (audience laughter) That Facebook Ad asked for skinny scientists. They had to be able to work in underground environments, climbing skills, not claustrophobic. They wouldn't tell them what to do. They had to drop everything be ready within three weeks from that date to come for a month to South Africa. I wasn't going to pay you. Oh and by the way, you have to have a PhD or a Masters in paleoanthropology, archeology, etc. Hit send, thinking there were probably three people in the world that would fit that. Within 10 days, I had almost 60 qualified applicants. Eighty percent of which were young women. I selected from that, six extraordinary scientists who just happened to be young women. These extraordinary scientists, dropped everything and flew to South Africa within three weeks. We'd put together a 60 person expedition. All the support teams you need, the safety cavers planning this extensive underground expedition. At the same time, this great society took another risk. They agreed to do this live to the world. Because I thought, this may be the last moment in history where we actually can bring the world the recovery of a Fossil Hominid skeleton.

And so, they let us create this blog and website all ready to tweet and Facebook and blog and go live on the day we went underground. A very brave move, by the way. Because, if I was wrong this was going to be a rather large embarrassment. On November the seventh, that 60 team expedition launched in the field. Over the next couple of days we laid three and a half kilometers of military grade audio-visual cables. Cameras, all the machinery that we would need to conduct this excavation, live underground. We would create Command Centers, Caving Tents, a Science Tent to take this skeleton out live in front of the world. On November 10th, we launched the Rising Star Expedition. There, we sent those scientists into this cave led initially by Matthew. And we watched these amazing images. Very quickly, these amazing scientists became known as "Underground Astronauts". And yes, I have received enough hate mail about why they shouldn't be called, "Astronauts". They should be called, "Terranauts" or "Troglonauts" or some other version of that and I apologize. But, I'm not that sorry, because it really was like watching astronauts on a spacewalk.

They would get up in the safety gear, helmets on all this stuff and equipment and they would vanish from our sights. And they would appear in these black and white images as they crawled through these cave systems. Taking often 40-45 minutes to get to that chute and then they would vanish from our communications as they went down this slot where they could wear no safety gear, 'cause it's so tight. And they began to excavate material. And these are the kind of images that we were watching. I could communicate live with them. They couldn't see me, but I could talk to them. The collection began, we designed technology that had never been used before, underground. White light, laser scanners that were giving us real time scans on computers like that down to resolutions of 0.3 of a millimeter as we were mapping underground with these scanners. It was amazing! And material began to come out. And by the second day, we realized, I had been wrong. It was not a skeleton. It was... more than one skeleton. By day two, we had three right femurs. I assure you, there is no primate in the world that has three right legs. As we would go, by the end of the first week we had discovered more Fossil Hominid material than in the richest site ever discovered in the search for human origins in Southern Africa. In one week. And I could see that site, right out my command center because it was less than a mile away.