Nova (1974–…): Season 42, Episode 13 - Dawn of Humanity - full transcript
Deep in a South African cave, an astounding discovery reveals clues to what made us human.
What makes us human?
Where do we come from?
Ever since Darwin
put forward the idea
that we evolved from apes,
scientists have wondered
about those first creatures
that left the ape world
and crossed into ours
In the last 50 years,
fossil finds have filled in
some of the many blanks
in the story of our evolution
But the bones of our ancestors
are few and far between,
allowing only glimpses
of how we slowly changed
over millions of years
from ape
to human
Now, in South Africa,
in caves dangerously deep
underground,
two new species of hominin,
our human ancestors,
have been found
There it was,
right there:
one of the most spectacular
early hominins ever discovered
lying on the surface of a cave
And not just a few
bone fragments
It's everywhere
Here, there are thousands
It's just absolutely incredible
the amount of bone
that's coming up
Oh, beautiful!
The first thing that
came through my mind
was Howard Carter's anecdote
about opening Tutankhamen's tomb
It was Lord Carnarvon in the
back saying, "What do you see?"
And Carter says,
"Things, wonderful things"
We have found
a most remarkable creature
and a most unexpected one
So we need a new kind
of language to talk about this
These bones could finally bring
our past into focus
What story will they tell
about how we became human?
A new light shines
at the "Dawn of Humanity,"
right now on this NOVA/
National Geographic special
The high plains to the northwest
of Johannesburg
have been called
the Cradle of Humankind
In the 1930s and '40s,
fossil finds here gave us
the first important glimpses
of our earliest ancestors
Then, for decades,
the discoveries seemed to dry up
It looked like
the Cradle of Humankind
had little left to offer
Go get 'em, good luck
Happy hunting
But now, from deep caves
in the Cradle
come two new discoveries
that could reshape
the understanding
of our ancient past
What is it?
It has teeth
It's so solid!
There aren't just
hundreds of bones;
there are thousands of bones
I had never seen or dreamed
of anything like the richness
of this site
Bones that may end up
illuminating
a critical million-year period
in our evolution
that has long been a mystery
There's a big gap
in the fossil record
with only a few little fragments
The fossil record suggests that
in that gap
lies the dawn of humanity:
the birth of the genus Homo
It's perhaps
the least understood
and most important episode
in our evolution
Before it was the world
of Australopithecus,
an ape-like creature
with a tiny brain
Lucy is the poster child
for the Australopiths
She walked upright, but belonged
to the world of the apes
If I were to see
an Australopithecus
at the end of a football field,
I would probably call the zoo
and say,
"Hey, an ape has escaped"
The upper part of the body
in Australopithecus is,
in general way, ape-ish
Go down, look at the pelvis,
very human-like
An Australopithecus
is sort of like a bipedal ape
If you went back in time
and saw them
walking around the savannah,
you would see animals that
stood up and walked like we do,
but they would've been smaller
in body size
Their brains
wouldn't have been as big,
so their heads
would've looked smaller
Their jaws and teeth
were very large
The fossil record suggests that
somewhere between two
and three million years ago,
these ape-like Australopiths
evolved into the first
recognizably human species:
Homo erectus.
They have big brains
and small faces,
adaptations for using tools
If I were to see, say,
Homo erectus
at the other end
of a football field,
I would probably call 911
and say,
"Oh, there's a wild man
over here,
and you know somebody should
put some clothes on him"
So what went on
in the transition
from Australopithecus
to Homo erectus?
For years, the only species
that filled that gap
was a creature called
Homo habilis.
But so little of it
has ever been found,
the origins of the genus Homo
have remained an enigma
The greatest mystery
facing paleoanthropology today
is to try to understand how,
when, where the transition
from Australopithecus to Homo
occurred
And what we don't know
is what happened
between Australopithecus
and early Homo
That's one of the big mysteries
right now we're trying to solve
The prize would be to discover
fossil remains
that could tell us about
that mysterious transition
And now,
they may have found some
There you can see two foot bones
in articulation
Emerging from ancient caves
in South Africa
are fossil finds
of astonishing richness,
and not just fragments,
but virtually complete skeletons
From the very first block
that we had,
we had a portion
of the mandible, the lower jaw,
and we had a collarbone
and one of the bones
of the forearm
So that was really,
really exciting
She's in there
We have a skull,
we have a mandible,
we have a complete scapula,
we have a complete clavicle,
we have a complete arm,
a complete hand,
and half of the pelvis,
which we can,
with reconstruction,
make into a whole pelvis
Will these skeletons
live up to their promise,
offering us a new understanding
of the dawn of humanity?
In August 2013, South African
Pedro Boshoff was out of work
He had been a soldier,
a prospector, an adventurer,
and even a part-time student
of human origins
Now he wondered
if he could earn some money
doing what he loves most:
fossil hunting
Towards the end of August,
I approached
Professor Lee Berger,
asking if there would be
the possibility
of a position at faculty
with him
Pedro Boshoff
came into my office
and said, you know,
"I really need work,
"and I have
the same belief as you
that there is more out there"
Lee Berger started exploring
the area of South Africa
known as the Cradle of Humankind
in the early 1990s
After 18 years of searching,
he had found only a few
isolated fossils
That's not unusual in the field
of paleoanthropology
These early human fossils
are probably the rarest
sought-after objects on earth
We in paleoanthropology
sit in one of the few fields
that probably have more
scientists studying objects
than there are objects to study
In fact, the vast majority
of people who do what I do
will never find a single piece
of one of these early humans
And if they do, it's going to be
an isolated tooth
Probably 80 to 90% of our record
are just little bits
of isolated teeth
Just to the northwest
of Johannesburg,
the Cradle of Humankind
is riddled with limestone caves
Some have already yielded
fragmentary fossils
of our remote ancestors
Lee was convinced there were
more discoveries to be made
I had known Pedro for 20 years
and I said, you know,
"Go out there,
enlist your caving buddies,
get underground, and see
if you can find something"
And so I bought Pedro
a motorcycle
so he could move around out here
Basically what he wanted me
to do
is to go through
the Cradle area,
locating and finding fossils
So I sat as I often do on a rock
and I contemplated
how I'm going to approach this,
and then it dawned on me:
I'm part of a caving society,
having caved in this area
for years
And in there,
I found Rick and Steven
I asked them to systematically
work their way
through caves and holes
towards the east of the Cradle
while I was busy working
in the west
We often don't look
in the places
that are most familiar to us
because we think
we know them well
I call it backyard syndrome
And so I said, you know,
"Start right under our noses
Go to the most
well-known places"
On September the 13th, 2013,
Rick and Steve decided
to look into a cave system
they thought they knew well
It's called Rising Star
It's an amazing cave
It's got a bit of everything
There's tight squeezes,
some great climbs,
beautiful formations
Rick and Steve headed
deep underground
I wanted to show Rick
a great climb in the cave
called the Dragon's Back
We climbed up there
And in the process
of taking some video
of the formations
at the top of it,
Rick wanted to get past me
So I went down
a small little crevice
basically so that Rick
could crawl over me
I was just getting
out of his way,
and as I went into it,
I noticed that there's still
a little bit continuing down
Once in the crevice,
Steve realized there was nothing
below his feet
He squeezed himself further down
Every time you go down,
it just goes a bit further
and a bit further
and a bit further down
You squeeze your body in
so that you don't slip
and you feel around for a grip
So my legs were dangling down
this last little bit
and you don't feel anything
below you
And the only way to climb down
is actually to lower yourself
as far as possible,
just keep on lowering yourself
until you're literally
your arms are almost
fully stretched out,
and then you start to feel
a couple of rocks
that you can actually
put your feet on
He emerged
into an hidden chamber
He called for Rick
to come down and join him
They could see massive rock
formations above their heads
But the real discovery
was beneath their feet
The floor of the cave
was littered with small bones
We saw at first one bone
lying around
We looked around a bit more
and, well, another bone
We actually spotted teeth
in the rocks
and realized
we actually had found something
Followed by a skull
in the ground
And finally,
one of the most interesting ones
was a mandible
with four teeth in it
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
And I will never, never forget
when he came to me
with his photos,
put it on the computer,
and the first thing I noticed
was the jaw with the teeth
And I realized
this is definitely a hominin
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
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!"
Pedro says, "You're really
gonna want to let me in"
And, you know,
9:30 at night, and it's dark,
but I could hear that emotion
in his voice
They flipped open a computer,
and I saw something
I don't think I ever dreamed
I would see
on a computer screen
A lot of swearing at first
Apparently that's his reaction
when he sees fossils
But yeah, he immediately
identified it as a hominid
That was a mandible
of what was clearly
an early hominin,
the teeth just perfect
The next picture
had a skull in it of a hominin
I could see it in outline
There were bones everywhere
They'd take
Every one of them
I could see in the image
were hominin
I was a bit in shock
because it all went like
a car crash for me, you know?
It really did, black and white,
and I have only visual,
not audio
Hominins are all creatures
in the human evolutionary line,
including Australopiths,
Homo erectus, and us
When his shock faded,
Lee immediately turned his mind
to the question of what type
of hominin this might be
From what he could see,
Lee thought it was
a single individual,
probably one of those
Australopiths
that came on the scene
some four million years ago
The photos were hard to make out
Lee wanted to know if the bones
in the Rising Star cave
were similar to fossils he had
discovered five years earlier
That was in a different cave
just ten miles away,
also in the Cradle of Humankind
It was Lee's first big find
The story all began
on August the 1st, 2008,
when I came into this valley
following targets,
which were these trees
above my head
that I could see on Google Earth
I walked up that old
lime miners' track way,
which wasn't quite as clear
as it is today,
mostly overgrown,
and I came into this grove
and found this little hole
The little valley
was called Malapa
Lee thought he knew it well
It was a Friday
Lee's nine-year-old son Matthew
and his dog Tau were with him
I stood at the edge of this pit
and I said, "Go find fossils"
With that, Matthew raced off
into the bush here
I thought he was going
to go chase giraffe or zebra
or something like that
with Tau in tow,
and a minute and a half later,
he shouted,
"Dad, I found a fossil"
Sitting right over
by that lightning-struck tree,
he had stopped and found
a little rock,
and I almost didn't go and look
because I knew he had found
an antelope fossil
because that's pretty much
all we ever find
I saw a fossil
I didn't think it was a hominin
I just thought
it was an antelope
because we find
thousands of those
I started walking
towards him though
because I had to see
what he had found,
and five meters away,
I realized that
sticking out of that rock
was a hominin clavicle
I couldn't believe it
I took the rock in my hand
and I was turning it,
trying to think
what else this could be
And as I turned
the back of it over,
there sticking out of the back
was a mandible and a canine
That's when I realized
that an extraordinary thing
had taken place
After almost 20 years
of searching
in the Cradle of Humankind,
Lee finally had
a major discovery
He had his son to thank,
but also a crew of Welsh miners
who had come through the valley
a hundred years ago
And they'd come through
this area
looking for limestone
to build Johannesburg,
and they would blast
these caves apart
looking for that rich, white,
pure limestone,
and they'd burn it
and make cement out of it
In the 1880s Johannesburg
was a gold rush town,
little more than a collection
of shacks
But it sat on some
of the richest gold seams
ever discovered
As the gold kept coming,
so did the gold prospectors
The town grew
and construction crews
were desperate for limestone,
essential for cement
and gold processing
Lime miners combed
the high veld outside the town
looking for seams of limestone
Although they likely
didn't know it,
these seams concealed remnants
of ancient cave systems
and were full of fossils
When they found
the limestone seam at Malapa,
they laid their charges as usual
They came in here
and put in three,
at the most four, blasts
One right below me here,
one over on the side,
one over there that I can see
Then, for some reason,
the miners never collected
the blocks of lime
and left the blast hole
largely untouched
I'm not sure why they did that,
but what they did do
in that process
was expose just the edge
of these remarkable skeletons
They damaged it just enough
so we could find this site
and could make these
fossil discoveries,
but not too much that
they destroyed the evidence
It really is a miracle
It was in one of the rocks
scattered by the blast
that Matthew found
the collarbone of a child
But that was just the beginning
The hole where the miners
planted the dynamite
would soon yield so much more
It was only once
I had the permit
and we came back on September 4,
a whole bunch of us
that we spent all morning
looking here
and we found nothing
We were even thinking of leaving
because we thought
there wasn't anything here
I stood over on the other side
of this pit,
looking down into that pit,
and I saw something sticking out
of the rock right down here
And what I saw stunned me
And I climbed down the pit
and looked right over here,
and there
sticking out of the wall
was the proximal humerus
of a hominin
I couldn't believe it...
I did my PhD on this
I climbed closer,
and as I got closer,
I realized there was a scapula
of the shoulder blade in place,
and I came even closer
and put my hand on the wall,
right here,
and two hominid teeth
fell into my hand
Then I said something,
and that started the second part
of this remarkable story
Everyone piled down in here,
at my feet was a proximal femur
in a block here
that clearly belonged
to the child
What was amazing was
it never crossed my mind
that this wasn't the child
that Matthew had found
How could you find two skeletons
in a site like this?
What it would turn out to be,
of course,
was a second skeleton,
the female skeleton
The child would be laying
right here,
just lying in position here,
and it would turn out that
there were other skeletons here
There's one sitting over there
There's a baby
just above me here,
and who knows how many
are in front of me here
It really is a treasure trove
of paleoanthropology
One by one,
they took out blocks of stone
they thought might have
hominin fossils in them,
remnants of our ancient
human family
The blocks were all taken back
to the University
of the Witwatersrand
At the medical school,
Lee's wife, Jackie,
a radiologist,
ran the blocks
through a CT scanner,
allowing the scientists
to peer inside
There you go, okay, that's good
What one of those blocks
revealed was stunning
A slice came through,
and you could see
an entire skull
I was dumbfounded
I could not in my wildest dreams
believe an entire skull
could be sitting
in this little rock
Then began the painstaking job
of freeing the skull
from the rock
that had encased it
for possibly millions of years
It took me three months
to get it out
I was the first one
that saw this
And you can't describe it
to anybody
It's beautiful
I mean, it's been in the ground
for 1 9 million years,
and you're the first person
to see that
I thought,
"Well, you're beautiful"
I basically brought this boy
back to life
Finally, the skull was free
Its small brain
and forward-projecting face
made it clear that
it was an Australopith
But details of the teeth
and other parts of the skeleton
made it unlike any found before
Many types of Australopithecus
once walked the earth
between about two
and four million years ago
Lucy is known as afarensis.
There's also
Australopithecus africanus.
This appeared to be
an entirely new species
Lee called it
Australopithecus sediba
after the waterhole
near which it was found
In the local language Sotho,
"sediba" means "wellspring"
The team was able
to radioactively date
the limestone layers in the cave
with great precision
The layer containing
the sediba skeletons
was 1 97 million years old
That makes these creatures
among the last of their kind,
living right at the end
of the fossil gap
between Australopiths
and Homo erectus.
Here at last was a creature
that could tell us something
about that transition
And the bones
were not just fragments
Here were two remarkably
complete skeletons,
a female and a child
Still encased
in the rock at Malapa
are fragments
of at least three more,
waiting to be excavated
This made sediba the most
complete evidence ever found
for what was going on
at the dawn of humanity
The Australopithecus sediba
fossils
are some of the most
spectacular skeletons known
for early hominids
They're absolutely amazing
We don't get two bones
associated with one another
very often,
much less several bones,
much less partial skeletons
So that makes these fossils
really special
Sediba was exciting
from the get-go
Right away, we knew that
we had parts of the skeleton
and we had parts of the cranium,
which helps us figure out
who this animal is
So that was really,
really exciting,
and initially, these upper limb
bones looked very primitive,
so we knew we were dealing
with something
that looked like it would be
a good climber,
kind of an ape-like creature
Peter Schmid's job is to
reconstruct sediba's skeleton
Unlike past fossil finds,
here, the skeletons
are so complete,
there doesn't have to be
much guesswork
By scanning and mirror imaging,
Peter can fill in any missing
bones with great accuracy
From the CT, we've got
a few thousand slices now,
and Aurore has to put everything
together to form a 3D model
And then we have to cut
the model
because the pelvis
we already casted,
so we only need the rib cage
But the right rib cage
we have already,
but we need now
the mirror image of that,
and the computer helps us to do
the mirror image in a second
Layer by layer,
a 3D printer then slowly prints
the rib cage in fine plaster
Beautiful
Finally, Peter has assembled
a complete skeleton
It's highly unusual
All Australopiths are a mix
of ape and human,
but sediba has a unique
mosaic of features
scientists have never seen
before in the same creature
The arm is very long,
like in a chimpanzee,
but the hand
is with short fingers
and a very long thumb,
like a human hand
which was never found until now
because this is the most
complete hand ever found
in this period
Job Kibii,
who was with Lee and Matthew
when they discovered
the skeletons,
has been working
on the sediba hand
He's found
an unusual combination
of ape and human features
here too
What's special
about sediba's arm and hand
is that we know sediba
has a very long thumb,
which is more chimp-like,
but sediba has
a very human-like hand
For example, sediba has a thumb
which is longer
relative to the other fingers,
which indicates
a human-like condition
Sediba's hand, with its
opposable thumb
and forefingers,
is so human that
it could've been a tool user
But since no tools were found,
that remains only
an intriguing possibility
From the reconstructed skeleton,
paleoartist Viktor Deak
can start to create
a lifelike digital painting
By virtually applying
tissue thickness markers
carefully calculated
from the known facial tissues
of living primates,
he can build up a realistic
impression of sediba's face
Once that was all done,
I have now gone ahead
and created a body for it,
and if you want to see,
we can check all that
by going transparent
and seeing, making sure that
the bones and everything line up
in the proper spaces
So here we have
a concept reconstruction
of how sediba
potentially could look like
The step from there
to a lifelike digital painting
is a short one
Finally, for the first time
in almost two million years,
the face
of Australopithecus sediba
looks out on the world
once again
But the true revelations will
come from the bones themselves
Because they are
so well preserved,
these fossils
will give scientists
unprecedented insights
into the lives
of these ancient creatures...
Everything from what they ate
to how they died
Such details might help explain
the Australopiths' transition
into our genus: Homo
They might also prove
or disprove
a highly influential theory
about the dawn of humanity
A theory inspired
by the very first discovery
of an Australopith fossil
The year is 1924
Anatomist Raymond Dart
teaches at the University of the
Witswatersrand in Johannesburg
His hobby is fossil hunting,
but he never imagines
he will find a human ancestor
Nobody at the time believes
we had evolved in Africa
Well, in the late 19th century,
fossils were found in Europe
with the Neanderthals
They were found in Asia
with the earliest known examples
of Homo erectus.
No one really had a sense
that anything interesting
occurred in Africa
Darwin and Huxley
predicted that our origins
would be in Africa
based on comparative anatomy
You know, they looked
at the skeletons
of chimps and gorillas,
and they looked at ours
and they went,
"Well, they're so close to us
"and they're more close
than anything else,
so it must have been in Africa"
And then the sort of
second generation
of evolutionary biologists
shied away from that
They started to find fossils
in Europe
They started to find fossils
in Asia
And, of course,
that tied in very nicely
with sort of racist,
imperialistic thoughts
of the day
They couldn't abide the thought
of it being in Africa
In late 1924, Raymond Dart
receives a package
He sees it's
from the mining town of Taung
in South Africa's
Northwest Province
And in that box is a fossil,
and this is a game-changing
fossil
It's been sent to him by miners
who noticed what looks like
the skull of a small ape
encased in the rock
Dart is fascinated
He begins the long,
laborious process
of revealing
the mysterious skull
He can see that
it is the skull of a child,
but like no child
he has ever seen before
It has ape-like characteristics,
but also some very human ones
And so as he cleaned this fossil
and he saw the hole
in the bottom of the skull
where the spinal cord enters
the brain underneath
that he had something like a
two-legged walker on his hands
And this he named
Australopithecus africanus,
and what that means is
"southern human of Africa"
Dart rushed into print
with his find
He claimed it is proof
that we evolved in Africa,
just as Darwin had predicted
He was unprepared for the
firestorm his theory unleashed
The Taung child sparked
an incredible revolution
Up to that point,
everybody said,
"Let's look to Europe
for our ancestors"
It was unthinkable that
anything as important
as the emergence of humans
could have happened in Africa
Raymond Dart was a feisty guy,
and when he was pushed back
by the British intelligentsia,
he became feistier,
more aggressive
in terms of his defending
of his views
Most scientists
disagreed with him
He really was seen
as an outsider,
but it absolutely
set the ball rolling
for, one, paleoanthropology
as a field in Africa,
and, two, vindication
of what Darwin and Huxley
had predicted
with actual fossil evidence
It showed once and for all
that our origins were in Africa
and only in Africa,
and that's huge
It totally changed the field
Dart was sure he had discovered
the missing link
between apes and humans
But it wasn't enough
to know what they looked like
He wanted to know
how they behaved
What sort of creatures
were they?
He understood that these great
questions about our ancestors
were also questions
about ourselves
The reason we are interested
in our own ancestry, I think,
is the reason that
you or I want to know
who our parents were
and who our grandparents were
or great-grandparents were,
because somewhere in us,
we realize that there's
a little bit of them in us,
so to understand
the quirks of our own behavior
and why we do things,
if not just why we look
the way we do,
comes from that ancestry
Paleoanthropology is just that
in deep time
We're looking way back
And so we're looking
at the things,
the sort of little bits
and pieces
that drive why humanity
is like it is today
Raymond Dart
was building a theory
about how the Australopiths,
our ape-like ancestors,
became human
His ideas about the dawn
of humanity were the touchstone
for thinking about our origins
for generations
In the 1940s,
more examples
of Australopithecus
began to be found
And a key site not only had
fragments of Australopithecus,
but also the bones
of many other fossil animals
And Dart noted that these bones
were broken in a special way
Dart became convinced
they were weapons
made by our primitive ancestors
Was this the key
to what first made us human?
Dart had been a young medic
in World War I
He had seen firsthand
the barbarity
humans are capable of
It made sense to him
that the origins of humanity
were steeped in blood
Raymond Dart's experience
in the World War
may have colored
his interpretation
of what these bones
and teeth meant
You know, it gave him a view
of the dark side of humanity
and the violence of humanity,
and he came up with this idea
that Australopithecus
had figured out that bones
and teeth were hard
and could be used as weapons
to kill other animals,
the sort of killer ape theory
of early humans
Dart believed that
the more aggressive
and adventurous
of our ape-like ancestors
abandoned their forest
environments
and moved into savannahs
There, they became hunters
and predators
His theory that
this violent transformation
gave rise to humanity
soon found an audience
far beyond the small world
of paleoanthropology
In the 1950s,
there was a drama critic
and playwright
named Robert Ardrey
who became very interested
in human origins,
and he went to Africa
and spoke with Raymond Dart
And Robert Ardrey,
being a dramatist,
could write like anything,
and he wrote this amazing book
published in 1961
called African Genesis.
African Genesis
became a pop science
publishing sensation
of the early 1960s
Ardrey's ideas, building
on those of Raymond Dart,
helped frame public debate
about the dawn of humanity
for the next 20 years
The very first sentence
in that book,
I remember it
because I read it as a teenager
and was enthralled by it:
"Not in innocence and not
in Asia was mankind born"
And in that one sentence,
he encapsulated
Raymond Dart's ideas
that it was an African genesis,
and that where we came from
was not
from an innocent creature
but from the most violent
of killer apes
One of Robert Ardrey's
greatest fans
was the filmmaker
Stanley Kubrick
At the time,
he was planning a film
based on the science fiction
novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It was to be a meditation
on human technology run wild
On a mission to Jupiter,
the spacecraft's computer turns
on the crew
At the beginning of the film,
our ancestors discover
the first technology:
weapons
Eventually, they will use them
on each other
This was the "dawn of humanity"
imagined by Dart and Ardrey
And so this sets up then
for Kubrick
the same conflict that Dart felt
For Dart, that first weapon
explained the emergence
of human beings,
while at the same time,
it explained the atrocities
of the 20th century
Are we killer apes at heart?
Is this what we will discover
about our ancestors
at the dawn of humanity?
The discoveries at Malapa
may finally provide evidence
to support or refute
Raymond Dart's theory
The sediba skeletons
are so well preserved,
they give the scientists a
unique glimpse into their lives
And that's the story
we're really after:
how did these individuals
really live
out there in the environment?
What did they do
on a daily basis?
Whether they were so-called
"killer apes" or not
can be seen in what they ate
The first direct evidence
comes from their teeth
At the Max Planck Institute
in Leipzig,
Amanda Henry is analyzing
calculus, or tartar,
fossilized
along with sediba's teeth
Calculus is what happens
when the bacteria in your mouth
form a film on your teeth
So it's this very thick,
layered,
heavily mineralized material
that forms around your gum line
and on all sorts of surfaces
of your teeth
And as it forms,
it traps bacteria and proteins
and remnants of your food inside
Just like the tartar dentists
remove from our teeth,
the calculus from sediba's teeth
provides a snapshot
of what they were eating
So once I have the calculus here
in this little powdered form,
I'm going to dissolve it
in a little bit of a weak acid,
and then we're gonna rinse
that acid off,
and hopefully
what we'll be left with
is micro-remains with
this mineral matrix removed,
and then we'll look at that
under a microscope
and see if we can identify
what was in the calculus
Amanda can see
what sediba was eating
when she discovers phytoliths,
the microscopic
remains of plants
Well, this is a phytolith
that we recovered
from the calculus
of the sediba individuals,
and we have a couple
of examples here
all from different plants
that this individual ate
Here at last is evidence
that will help support
or disprove Dart's theory
Well, this is the first time
that we've had direct evidence
of the kinds of foods
that any Australopith ate
We've had proxy information
before,
we've had sort of
vague categories
where the food's harder
or tougher,
but this is direct evidence
That's exciting
What Amanda can see
trapped in sediba's tartar
are microscopic remains
of many different plants
We have phytoliths from grasses,
we have phytoliths from the bark
or woody tissue of plants,
and we have phytoliths
possibly from fruits,
so all the evidence
suggests that
the foods that this individual
was eating
was coming from closed
forested regions,
so eating fruits,
maybe chewing on stems,
eating the grasses
that are growing in that area
The tooth evidence from sediba
indicates a diet very similar
to today's chimpanzees
While they may have eaten
some meat,
there's little to back up
Raymond Dart's theory
that they were killer apes
So later scientists came
and looked at the evidence
and found that
there were tooth marks
in the skull of
an Australopithecus individual,
and that was just really
compelling evidence
that Australopithecus maybe,
instead of being the predator,
was the prey
So our ancestors, or the early
hominin in South Africa,
were the victims,
rather than being the carnivores
that Raymond Dart
wanted them to be
The caves
in which he was finding
not only the remains
of human ancestors,
but the remains of many,
many, many other animals,
which he thought
were being consumed
and devoured by our ancestors,
were actually all the victims
of predators and carnivores
who were pulling all of those
animals into the cave
It seems Raymond Dart's vision
of our ancestors
as the first killer apes,
so famously portrayed
by Stanley Kubrick, was wrong
The sediba skeletons
are so well preserved,
they offer the team
a chance to investigate
not just the lives,
but the deaths
of these individuals
They can analyze the
two-million-year-old death scene
almost as if it were
a forensic case
I mean, we're looking
at the preservation
of organic material here
These animals are articulated
the way they died
The breakage patterns
may often be a result
of the moments before
or shortly after their death
So far, the team has excavated
the skeletons
of a female adult and a child
So the female was this one
And the juvenile
is all the bones in blue,
all of these
They were found very close
to each other
Aurore Val has been creating
a virtual reconstruction
of the scene
at the bottom of the cave
Besides the sediba skeletons,
there are the skeletons
of many other animals too
How did they all get there?
Two million years ago,
Malapa was a much deeper cave
Landscape erosion has reduced it
to a small depression
in the ground
But when Australopithecus sediba
was around,
it was a cave system
about 90 feet deep
Imagine a vertical shaft
going up
There's probably water dripping
down, roots hanging down
Right here is the curled-up body
of the female,
lying right there
is a child's body,
the 13-year-old boy
There are other animals,
all being eaten by bugs
and going through
the usual process of decay
This reconstruction shows
the sediba death scene
in great detail
Now the team want to know
how all these creatures died
Were they dragged in
by predators, or did they fall?
The man to answer that question
is Patrick Randolph-Quinney
He's an eminent
forensic anthropologist
more accustomed to working
on murder cases and mass graves
I'm involved
in looking at homicides
and involved in looking
at the forensic
identification process,
So, unknown remains,
giving them back their identity
and their name,
that's what I do for a living
The skull of the child
is the first piece of evidence
This is this fracture here,
and it's a fracture
that's actually separated
part of the body of the jaw,
and it runs up through the tooth
And basically,
if you're in an impact,
you jar your teeth together
and you create compression
on the tooth row,
and that provides force,
or generates force,
which goes down
to the tooth roots
And what this has done
is actually split
part of the corpus apart
So it's actually damage
consistent with effectively
an impact on the jaw,
and the energy has come
from the teeth
out into the bone around it
And that only happens
mechanically with fresh bone,
so this individual
was still functioning skeletally
when this happened
The mandible fracture
is a green fracture
that happened when the bone
was fresh, at or around death
It would be consistent
with a fatal fall
The fractures to the forearms
are even more telling
And if you look at MH2,
she's got a fracture that runs
through the body of this joint,
where it articulates
in the elbow with the humerus,
the bone of the upper arm
There are also other fractures
associated with the wrist,
in this portion of the ulna
and this portion of the radius
And we've actually got fractures
in the scaphoid and triquetral
bone in the wrist as well
And what this appears
to indicate
is putting your hand out
to stop yourself
This seems to be good evidence
the individual was alive
when she fell
The cave at Malapa
was probably a death trap
Were they searching for water
and lost their grip?
Perhaps they were trying
to escape in terror
from some predator
Whatever the reason,
they fell and died
either immediately on impact
or soon after
It appears that mud
then buried the bodies,
and as it hardened,
kept them from disintegrating
This is why they were
so well preserved
Then began the long,
slow process of fossilization
in which all organic material
in the bone
was replaced by minerals
Today, the sediba fossils
are still yielding insights
into the Australopith world
of almost two million years ago
But the most tantalizing
question of all
is still unanswered
How did these primitive
creatures evolve
into more advanced
human ancestors?
To find out,
scientists need to find
perhaps the most elusive
fossils of all:
the first members
of our genus Homo
For decades, the only fossils
that came close
were the fragmentary remains of
a creature called Homo habilis:
handyman
In the early 1960s,
fossils discovered
from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania
by the Leakeys
led to the definition
of a new fossil species
in our evolutionary tree:
Homo habilis...handyman
And what was significant
about that
is that stone tools
were connected
with what Leakey proposed
as the first human,
a member of our lineage,
the genus Homo
Like most scientists
at the time,
Louis Leakey thought
our evolution
was probably a gradual,
linear process:
a single chain of species
becoming progressively
more human
He decided the key event
that made our ancestors cross
the threshold to humanity
was not the invention
of weapons,
as Raymond Dart believed,
but tools
Since Homo habilis seemed to be
the first toolmaker,
he declared it the first member
of our genus: Homo
Here at last was the link
between the ape-world
of the Australopiths
and the human world
of Homo erectus.
So there was always this gap
between Australopithecus
and later members
of the genus Homo,
like Homo erectus
and Neanderthals,
and we didn't really know
what species in that gap
would have looked like,
and then along in the 1960s,
along comes along Homo habilis,
and it's slightly
bigger brained,
it's probably
a bit more bipedal,
and of course it had these stone
tools associated with it,
and it was argued very strongly
to be a contender
for early Homo, and it was
instantly controversial
and it's still controversial
to some people today
It's a bit of a mess
Because it became clear
probably in the 1990s
and moving
into the early 21st century
that Homo habilis, we really
didn't know what that was
One of the main reasons
for classifying it as human
was that it was found with tools
But that is now looking less
like a defining characteristic
of the genus Homo
We now know that even the more
primitive Australopiths
had the capacity to use
stone tools
Zeresenay Alemseged,
who discovered
a three-million-year-old
Australopith
called Dikika child, has found
what he believes to be evidence
of stone tool use
in the same period
If you were defining
Homo habilis as a toolmaker,
tool user,
then what do you make of it
when you see
that Australopithecus
was doing the same thing?
We know that there is
rudimentary stone tool use...
Not stone tool but stone use...
Among living chimpanzees
The confusion surrounding
Homo habilis has grown
It has been compounded
by the fact that so little
of it has ever been found
Colleagues have said, you know,
if you had a shoebox,
you could put all those fossils
that might be early members
of the genus Homo into it
and still have room
for a good pair of shoes
With so few fossils to go on,
scientists had little
they could say for sure
about the first members
of our genus, Homo
This was the situation
when the two young cavers,
Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker,
made their discoveries
in the Rising Star cave
When Lee saw the photos
from the fossil chamber,
he could only hope they would
clear up the confusion
Was it another sediba
or was it even Homo habilis?
The only way to find out
was to bring up the fossils
Lee knew there was
no time to waste
I had to make a decision,
and about, oh,
just before 1:00 a m,
I decided that history
would never forgive me
if I did not act right then
Just five weeks later,
the Rising Star excavation
was beginning to take shape
Its planning had taken
some ingenuity
Lee knew he would never be able
to get down to the fossil
chamber himself
In places, the chamber entrance
was less than seven inches wide
I put a call out
on Facebook saying,
"I need skinny scientists
"who are not claustrophobic,
who are cooperative,
"who can work together
"in a dangerous
and difficult environment
And I need you available
by the first of November"
I saw Lee's Facebook post,
actually,
and on a whim I applied for it,
and then the next thing I know
I got asked to interview
and from there,
just things started happening
really quickly
I saw a call that came out
on Facebook from Lee
that was looking
for skinny scientists,
skinny paleoanthropologists,
that weren't claustrophobic
and that would be able to fit
into a slot that was
about 18 centimeters,
and that was very intriguing
I didn't say what
had been discovered
I didn't say anything
about what I thought it was
They only knew it was me
in South Africa
and it was clearly underground
I thought I'd get three, four,
five applicants, I really did
I mean, how many people
in the world could be qualified
and fit that criteria?
Within ten days I had
57 qualified applicants
from all over the world,
most of them women
One morning I woke up
and there was a call
for tiny, experienced
archaeologists from Lee Berger
and I thought, "That's me"
I received the Facebook post
via a friend who saw that it was
an ad for a small archaeologist
with caving
and climbing experience
and she said, "That's you!"
I'm almost finishing a PhD
in physical anthropology,
osteology, so this is my area
I'm an archaeologist,
so I can study up quick
on the paleo stuff
I'm a Ph D candidate
specializing in evolutionary
biomechanics,
so more on the paleo-
anthropological side of things
It really seemed perfect,
in fact
When I read the callout
to my husband, he said,
"Well, they might as well have
just meant, you know,
written: 'Marina is wanted
over here ""
So
The Rising Star expedition
was to be a new kind
of paleoanthropology
tailor-made for the age of
social media and the Internet
I held Skype interviews, and
I did a few things in that,
with the 11 people
I'd short-listed
out of this spectacular list
of applicants
Lee explained a little bit
about how the cave was found
and shared with us
some video footage
and the initial photographs
that Steve and Rick took
And he told us about
the conditions of traveling
into the cave
So, you know, he wanted to make
sure that we really knew
what we were getting into
It was mysterious
It was very enticing
for that reason
You know, sort of wondering what
sort of circumstances there were
that necessitated asking
for small people
with excellent
paleontological skills
In the Skype interviews,
I wanted to see these people
face-to-face,
but I also wanted to test
some things
I needed to know that
if I shut the cameras off,
which I did for many of them,
I want to hear
if they could respond to me
Because I had already
designed by then
this system of communication,
I knew
I knew I was never going to
I will never set foot
in that chamber
Then maybe a day after that,
I was told I was a go
It was so fast, so fast
And I sent off emails saying,
"Congratulations, pack your bags
Expect to be here
in the first week of November"
Then I got the email
that said that I got it
and then characteristically
I bust out crying,
and just kept reloading
my email to make sure,
refreshing it, just like,
really, it's really there,
it's really there,
and I screamed so loud
It was a very quick process
The ad went up
and then the interviews
happened the next week,
and then I learned a day later
that I was accepted
to the project
All of a sudden I was
rearranging my schedule
and waiting for the plane
tickets and packing up
and reading quickly everything
that I needed to know and
so it was fast and furious
getting ready for this
My brain was just like a flurry,
like an explosion of glitter
and confetti
Just
It's everything, it's like every
best birthday and Christmas
and Hanukah and Kwanzaa and
it's everything, all at once
I figured if he thought
I could do it,
if Lee thought I could do it,
then I could do it
I had no illusions that
this was going to be easy
Nothing like this
had ever been done,
certainly in the African context
I knew, perhaps ever,
anywhere, and I knew
I had to have everything
from medical support
to safety support to the design
of the infrastructure
underground and above ground
and all the things that go on
with a scientific expedition
Yeah, let's get a bag
As the camp was set up, Pedro,
Rick and Steve readied the cave
for the excavators
Safety lines, lights, cables
and cameras were installed
The possibility for accidents
was ever present
Lee rehearsed safety procedures
over and over again
Critical issue is, no one panic
Yeah, yes, we see you
A command post was set up
from which he could watch
virtually every part of the cave
I really began to get a feel
for what I was putting
these young women into
as the cavers who were laying
over two kilometers of cable
And I think they were terrified
and I was terrified,
They were still untested
We took them through the caves
testing their capabilities
in this system
And so we reached the 10th,
which was my intended day
of going in
and we tested systems,
everything worked
It was a little sloppy
but it worked
We tested safety, it all worked,
and by the early afternoon
we were ready
You'd be surprised, I'm actually
a person of gentle soul
Is it weeping in the corner
like a Gollum?
Marina, Becca, and Hannah have
been chosen to go down first
Still, nobody knows
exactly what they will find
I've seen a skull,
I've seen the other pieces
I am pretty sure that we have
got quite a lot of a skeleton
of at least one hominin
That of course waits to be seen,
and it's going to happen
pretty fast now
over the next several hours
Anxiously watched by Lee and
the team in the command post,
Marina, Becca and Hannah
make their way
deeper and deeper underground
The descent is difficult
And as I looked down there
I thought, oh, you know,
I don't know if I'm
if I can do this,
but then once I was committed
to go down, it was actually
much, much easier
than I was dreading
just trying
to also slow it down a bit
because I've got
the GoPro running
It was just an amazing,
an amazing feeling to realize
how far away you are
from everyone up top
in the command center,
and to just fully realize
what you are down there to do
I became a little bit
overwhelmed,
but you also have to turn
that off in some sense
because you're only down there
for a limited amount of time
and you have a job to do,
a very important job to do
Going down the chute
for the first time was
honestly it wasn't as bad as I
thought it was going to be
And then you come
into a landing zone
and there's a hallway
to pass through
It's not really a squeeze,
but it's a narrow passage
to pass through
and then the chamber
opens up again
This is the entrance
to the cave here
So you start by descending down,
you know,
a fairly narrow shaft
and some tunnels
You get down into an area here
This is what we call
the Superman crawl,
which is a very narrow crawl
You have to crawl on your
stomach for about three meters
Then you enter
into another chamber
This is what we call
the Dragon's Back,
so that's the ridge climb
with the sort of four- or five-
meter drop on either side
You get up to the top
of Dragon's Back and you end up
at the top of the chute,
which is another sort
of tunnel access
that then you start the 12-meter
descent into the chamber,
so that's this area here
Once you drop into the chamber,
you're actually just
in a landing zone
It's another sort of antechamber
You then go through
another passageway
into the main chamber,
which we call UW-101,
or the fossil chamber
Marina is the first
to enter the chamber
There was a little bit of
trepidation, I have to confess,
and a lot of excitement
to be the first of the advance
scientists to go into the cave
The first thing that came
through my mind
when I went through
the final slot
into the actual final chamber
was Howard Carter's anecdote
about opening Tutankhamen's tomb
I think it was Lord Carnarvon
in the back saying, you know,
"What do you see?"
And Carter says,
"Things, wonderful things"
And it was that feeling
God, this place is beautiful
First of all,
the cave is beautiful,
just geologically beautiful,
and then you look down
and it was just a sea of bone
and it was obviously
just not regular bone
So, yeah, it was amazing,
amazing
And then I saw them enter
this chamber
We got the cameras set up and
you could see their feet moving
And it was surreal
Fantas
Fantastic!
There we go
Skull is being flagged
You can see the skull here
She's now flagging the mandible
And then the process started
The process
of doing science began
So we'll put pin #1
right beside the mandible
and that's where
we'll concentrate
Okay
Okay, das ist super.
Okay, thanks
Bye
Yeah, that's perfect right there
Okay, going to start scanning
Okay, scan
The first foray into the fossil
chamber lasts only a few hours,
enough time to start scanning
and flagging bone fragments
as well as to test
the safety systems
Okay, how did that go?
Let's see
It's mapping right now
Finally it's time to bring up
the first precious fossil,
the mandible
Uh, there, there, coming
I see what looks like a mandible
in the middle there
On the right
That looks fantastic
It's Becca who will take care
of it on the ascent
All right!
You got the fossil, huh?
Yes, I got the fossil
Well done
Here you go
And we have everyone else
Everyone's out Rick's out safe
They're all out Well done
And so first their safety,
in that they were out
was just this enormous
emotive relief,
and then the sense that they had
actually got this thing,
so now I was going to see
for the first time
what all of this was about
When they opened that little box
and we unwrapped this thing
that they collected,
every great idea we had
went out the window,
gone, you know
Suddenly we didn't know
what we had
When he had first seen
the jawbone
in Rick and Steve's photos,
Lee had decided it probably
belonged to an Australopith
One of the most striking
characteristics
of an Australopith's face is its
large, apelike jaws and teeth
As the Australopiths
transitioned
into the genus Homo,
their faces shrunk
Jaws and teeth became smaller
When he finally had
the jawbone in his hands,
Lee saw it was too small
to be an Australopith
It seemed quite human
Could it be a new specimen
of Homo habilis?
Or could it be a new
transitional species
between Australopiths
and early Homo?
These are the questions on
anatomist Peter Schmidt's mind
as he studies the mandible
from Rising Star
You have this molar teeth
and the very strange use
of the frontal part here
And luckily we got another piece
so with these two pieces
we have a hemi mandible
which is complete and then we
can put on the mirror image,
and we have sort of outline
Peter can then compare it
to the mandible of Homo habilis.
I will take this away
and you see this is the tooth
row of Homo habilis.
You see also that these are
massive teeth, but the tooth row
is straight and we have
a very strong shelf here
The mandible from Rising Star
is clearly more curved
It's not Homo habilis,
and it's not an Australopith
They don't know what it is
This is pure confusion
We don't know what to make of it
We realize all of our
preconceived notions
have to be tossed aside
We can't go into this thinking
it's going to belong
in this group
or belong in that group
We just have to start
from literally scratch
The team hopes that as more
fossils emerge from the cave,
the confusion will clear up
It's so solid
There is reason to be optimistic
Each descent reveals more bones
Where once they thought there
might be one individual,
they now see evidence
of a whole lot more
It was probably a couple
of hours into the first day
when we realized
it also wasn't one skeleton
Another femur
If I remember, right,
it started with a second femur
from the same side
and since there has never been
a three-legged hominin,
we knew there were two,
and then there were three
And I think it was by day two,
there were four
And we realized we were
in something
very, very, very special
All right, good luck with that,
Becca, we can't wait to see you
You've got something
we want to see
Every time the scientists in the
cave remove a piece of bone,
they find more bones beneath it
It's everywhere
I mean, it's all strewn,
all throughout
Not just the chamber, but
the passages leading to it
are littered with bone fragments
At the landing zone
where they stopped,
I'd get a call on the intercom
"We found another tooth"
It was just sitting there
I was trying to find a nice
place to sit, and there it is
It just caught my eye
Rick was sitting there
as a safety caver waiting,
and he kicked the dirt
and hominins fell out
You have to pass me up
some flags
Do you have enough flags?
By the afternoon of day 14
in the expedition,
we were overwhelmed
I'd started with one safe
to hold one skeleton,
day three we had two safes,
day four we had three safes,
day six, people were going,
"We need more safes"
Woo-hoo!
Tooth und more
I don't know whether
you should hug me
for someone finding something
in the other spot
Oh, man
By day 14, as we would get
fossil after fossil,
we were getting 40, 50, 60,
70 elements a day,
all that was flashing through
my mind as I was doing that
was that famous scene in Jaws
where Roy Scheider is chumming
and they hadn't yet
seen the shark
And he's sitting there chumming
and all of a sudden
this gigantic shark appears
And he goes, "We're going
to need a bigger boat"
We're gonna need a bigger safe
It's extraordinary
I think this year at Christmas
I'm just going to hang
one of these
instead of a stocking
As the fossils accumulate
in ever-greater numbers,
a picture of the creature
of the Rising Star cave
begins to emerge
This is part
of a juvenile pelvis
Thigh and hip bones tell them it
was an upright walking biped,
but its gait was primitive
From what they can see of
the exposed skull, it is small,
not much bigger than a chimp's
I'm gonna have to tell
them to leave that alone
But the teeth and jaws seem
more advanced: Homo-like
The team's excitement grows
It's beginning to look as if
they have found another species
from the dawn of humanity
But on which side
of the Australopith-Homo divide
will it fall?
One of the key fossils that will
tell them that is the skull
They are saving that until last
Distance is perfect
And I can see marker two
Record
Recording
In the meantime,
another extraordinary fact
is becoming evident
There are no other animals
in the cave
All the fossils
are human ancestors
This is unheard of
It was pretty surprising
that something completely normal
to every other excavation
I have ever been in
on the continent of Africa,
everyone I have ever heard of
on the continent of Africa,
wasn't happening here
We weren't getting anything else
other than hominins
When early hominins are
discovered in caves,
they are always found along
with the bones of other animals
that have either
wandered in and died
or been dragged there
by predators
They're mixed with antelopes
generally in huge abundance
Then you get, depending
on the circumstance,
some carnivores and other bits
and pieces, and rodents,
and the stuff that accumulates
when things die
and are eaten
and are dragged into caves
Apart from the bones
of a solitary owl,
there's not
a single other animal
in the Rising Star chamber,
only hominins
So how did these creatures
get in there?
The chamber is
very inaccessible,
deep in the dark zone of
the cave, with no entrance
other than the long,
narrow chute
The team believes it likely
was just as inaccessible
two million years ago
It is starting to look
as if the bodies might have been
intentionally placed there
Could this possibly be
some sort of burial?
There has never been evidence
of anything like this
linked to such
a primitive-looking ancestor
So we got that looming
in front of us
and don't have an answer to it
Until now, the earliest
known burials
are from about 100,000 years ago
and a much more advanced form
of early human
The team doesn't have a date yet
for the fossils of Rising Star,
but it seems unthinkable
that such a primitive-looking
creature
could be disposing of its dead
But that's what it looks like
And the age ranges of the
individuals are very similar
to what archaeologists find
in cemeteries
At the early stages
of this expedition,
they look like
a cemetery population:
very young individuals
and very old individuals
and nothing in the middle so far
It doesn't mean we're not going
to find it,
but that's what you see in a
cemetery when you dig it up
Right now it looks
a lot like that
Will it hold out to be that?
That will be a mystery
I want to see solved
And we're left with
this conundrum of, you know,
is what we are looking at
You almost don't want
to say it out loud
It's a mystery with
profound implications,
but one that will require
further analysis
before anyone is willing
to back it wholeheartedly
The excavation
is now approaching
its third and final week
Perhaps the most important bone
has been left until
near the end: the skull
Its shape and the size of its
brow ridges will be crucial
in telling them whether
the creature of Rising Star
is Australopith or Homo: human
We're going to go ahead
and bite the bullet
and take that skull out, okay?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, good, good
If only because it
gets it out of the way
Yes, I know
Not because you want it out
to see it, right?
Oh, I want it out!
A couple of reasons
we want to get it out
One, the skull
can tell you a lot
It can tell you
cranial capacity,
start getting an idea
of the shape of the skull
Is it Australopith-like
and pinched in the front,
or is it rounded
more like a human,
or is it something in between,
does it have
a sagittal crest neck?
We want to see that skull
And also the skull was probably
the most complex
initial extraction
It is fragile,
it's a thin piece of bone,
and it could break apart
We need to know whether we could
get something like that out
And we need to get it out to see
what was underneath it,
whether this was a skeleton
or whether there were
lots of individuals
associated with each other
So there was all this tension,
and it was a lot harder
to extract than we thought
Oh, I'm sure you'll find plenty
All right, stage on in after her
Good luck, everyone
Have a blast, huh?
Thank you Will do All right
Let's get you something here
Go get 'em!
Good luck
Happy hunting Thank you
Enjoy topside
The skull is extremely fragile
The team carefully scans
the area immediately around it
How big?
Yeah, those are perfect
Then they begin the laborious
process of removing
every tiny fragment of bone
surrounding the skull
Oh, we've got medium bags now
Finally, they delicately scrape
away the dirt to release it
We're done this easily
Got it
Everyone was feeling
all these points of tension
around the science of the skull,
when we knew it was imminent
coming out
We only had two people
down on the bottom,
and they were working on it,
Becca and Marina,
and working and working
and working, and finally
we kept trying to call them out
and they wouldn't come out,
because they knew they were
that close to the extraction,
and eventually it did come out
That's it
That's it
It's so fragile
With everyone holding
their breath,
praying that it doesn't break,
the skull fragment is finally
lifted and delicately placed
in a box
That's it
Then it begins its slow ascent,
leaving the cave
for the first time
in possibly millions of years
He's holding the box
Yeah, that's right,
he's holding the box,
so he can't do this, he's gotta
be much more careful than that
Yeah, all right,
there it is, all right
How fantastic
Wow
And all of those scientists
piled back in, all of the people
that spent so much time
and so much energy
coming to this moment,
went back in there,
and they lined up
in the most difficult places
up the Dragon Back to Base 1
and they knew there was a risk
that it could get damaged, if
dropped it could get destroyed
And this huge team effort
occurred as they handed this off
from one to the other,
as it moved its way
from this dark recess where it's
been for however long it's been
to the entrance of the cave
where those of us
not privileged enough to be able
to get into this system
had to wait with huge tension,
watching this passage
on the cameras
until there it was
There you go folks,
let's go get it
Great moment
It's like a Rocky moment
There is so much wonder,
no one's bored,
no one's too academic
to hold it in
Everyone is just brimming
with childlike excitement
Would you hate me
if I took this before I hug you?
Please take it
Oh, well done
I don't even want to hug you
with that thing in your hand
I'm going to give this
off to John
I'm constantly sitting there
and stopping myself and going,
"Oh my God, this is like...
It's old
"It's probably the first time
this fossil has seen
the light of the day
in millions of years,"
and so I'm continually sort of
having to stop and just think
for a moment and sort of
revel in it
It's the moment everyone
has been waiting for
They hope the skull fragment
will be the telltale piece
to identify the creature
of Rising Star
as either an Australopith
or a member of our own genus
Looking at a left frontal,
so it's this part, the orbit,
and then part of the brain case
behind the orbit
And that is
a very important piece
Large orbital ridges
with indentations behind them
would indicate Australopith
Smaller brow ridges
with evidence of a more rounded
skull would say Homo
We do have our genus
We do?
We have our genus with that
Yes, yes!
The team's verdict is clear:
they have a new member
of our genus
Did we do good?
We did good
Now the question is:
what can it tell them
about the mysterious
dawn of humanity?
We are certain that this is in
the genus Homo, our genus,
and we are certain
it's a new species
And that's where we are
right now
The idea that we've discovered
a large number of individuals,
males and females,
young and old, of a new species
in the genus Homo
In the next phase,
they'll have to piece together
and analyze the rest
of the fossil remains
Already they have
almost 2,000 bone fragments
from more than 12 individuals
The Rising Star discovery
is one of the most startling
and amazing discoveries
in all of hominin evolution
To have that many fossils
in one place is unprecedented
and took everybody by surprise
The excavation was planned
as a three-week operation
As it nears its end,
the scientists know
they will have barely scratched
the surface of what Rising Star
has to offer
I had never seen or dreamed
of anything
like the richness of this site
There aren't just hundreds
of bones,
there are thousands of bones,
it's clear
You can't blow on the ground
and it doesn't uncover
another one
They can't gently brush their
hand across it, and teeth,
and long bones don't fall out,
usually of another individual
This is going to take
a long, long, long time
As everybody goes home,
the Rising Star fossils are
carefully transported to the
University of the Witwatersrand
It was here, 90 years ago,
that Raymond Dart sparked
a firestorm
by declaring that the dawn of
humanity was in Africa
It seems fitting that it is here
too that the mysterious
early humans of Rising Star
will begin to tell their story
At a symposium six months
after the excavation,
researchers meet
for an intensive analysis
of the fossil material
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
They're in the
analytical phase here,
they're in the diagnostic phase,
and it's been an experiment
in, you know, working together,
bringing together some of
the brightest minds
on the planet with some of
the most current data sets
to analyze over 1,700 fossil
hominin remains
that we recovered
only last November
And it's been fantastic to watch
I mean it's this constant energy
of science
And you can almost feel it
in the room right now
We are total nerds,
it's nerd heaven here,
but I mean it is an
extraordinary experience
There's never been anything
like this before in the field
of hominin paleontology,
to get a group of young,
talented scholars together
to bring their new techniques
and their fresh outlooks
on the record
to newly discovered
fossil hominin remains
This certainly never happened
when I was a Ph D student
and I would have died
to have done this
As the analysis goes on, the
bones from the Rising Star cave
are finally ready
to be presented to the world
We've got a new species of
early human in the genus Homo,
and that's tremendously exciting
We've never had anything
in that transition period
between the late Australopiths
and the earliest members
of our genus in any kind
of abundance,
and boy, we have it
in abundance now
To members of the team,
the fossils suggest a creature
unlike anything ever found
before
We're looking at creatures that
are humanlike in their feet,
humanlike in their hands,
humanlike in their teeth,
everything that interacts
directly with the environment
is Homo
And everything that is sort of
central... you know, the trunk,
the architecture of the
vertebral column, the brain...
Those sorts of things
are more primitive
It's like evolution is crafting
us from the outside in
We've called the species
Homo naledi and "naledi"
means "star" in Sotho
and we've called the chamber
that the fossils come from,
it still has fantastic fossils
to be found,
the Dinaledi chamber,
which means the chamber of stars
Homo naledi is a strange mosaic
of ape and human,
small brained and small bodied
with chimp-like arms,
but with human hands, teeth,
small brows and long legs,
probably a long-distance walker
Naledi is
a surprise in very many ways
It's got an incredibly tiny
brain,
a brain that's more than
a third as small
as a modern human's brain is
Yet it's clear when you look
at the cranial shape,
the dentition, the legs,
particularly the feet
and even the hands, that this
thing is part of our genus
Here are creatures on the cusp
of becoming human,
but still very close
to the Australopith world
It makes the question
of how they got into the cave
even more intriguing
It looks like they got in there
because somebody put them there
Now, if we say that,
you have to understand
that's a very controversial
thing to say
And in so we approach it
very conservatively
We can show that there's
no signs of predation
We can show that there's
no predator that accumulates
only hominins in this way
We can show that they didn't
all get there at once
We can show there's not a flow
of material into the chamber,
and that's where we leave it
scientifically
You know, we can say, the best
hypothesis we can come up is
they were put there
If this is true, its
implications are far-reaching
They now know that
the Rising Star hominin had
a brain size in the range
between 450 and 550 cubic
centimeters
That's just slightly larger
than a chimp's
So if in fact the Rising Star
hominins are purposefully
disposing of their dead,
we're talking about
some small-brained hominins
who are doing this
And that begins to change
our thinking about sort of
the cognitive attributes and the
neural machinery that you need
to engage in that kind
of behavior
And that becomes really
interesting
The accumulation of Homo naledi
skeletons in the cave raises
the type of big question that
Raymond Dart wanted to answer
What type of creatures
were our primitive ancestors?
If the naledi skeletons
have indeed
been intentionally disposed of,
some sort of burial,
it would indicate already
quite advanced social behavior
This fits with new ways
of thinking about the transition
from ape to human
Many scientists now believe that
a key element of that transition
was the growth of ever-stronger
cooperation and social bonds
Psychologist Michael Tomasello
has spent a lifetime
comparing the social behavior
and capacities of chimpanzees
and human children
Well, there's social
and there's ultra-social
And all mammals are social
to some degree
Great apes are especially social
in the sense that they form
long-term relationships
with others
and have bonding relationships
with others, and they groom,
they support each other
in fights
So they're very highly social
creatures, but a lot of it
is organized around competition,
so a lot of it is organized
around coalitions to fight
over food and so forth
And in humans we of course
haven't lost our selfish
and competitive streak,
but we have become so much more
cooperative
Not perfectly cooperative,
but much more cooperative
The fact that we can
sit in an airplane
with 300 or 400 individuals
of breeding age
that we aren't related to
and not rip each other apart
is a uniquely human character
and it was evolved
on this landscape behind me
Because Africa is a harsh place
and we as early humans had
to evolve cooperation
in order to survive here
We didn't have big canines,
and sharp claws
We just had each other
Humans are the most highly
social primates
ever to walk the earth
We bond and form relationships
far more complex
than any other primate
So if the Rising Star chamber
is indeed a burial,
perhaps this would suggest that
here at the dawn of humanity
those more complex social bonds
had begun to take shape
This possibility will generate
fierce debate
as other scientists weigh in
But how do these discoveries
change the narrative
of human evolution?
There is an old refrain
in paleoanthropology
People always say we need more
fossils, we need more fossils,
we need more fossils,
but the fact of the matter is
more fossils just complicate
the picture
One compelling question
to be answered is
where do these new
fossil ancestors fall
on our family tree?
Dating the fossils is proving
to be difficult and complex
It will take time
The thing that's hard about it
is we don't know how old
those fossils are, and we can
tell what they look like
because we have so many of them,
but if they're 3,000 years old
or if they are three million
years old it's going to mean
a very different thing for how
it changes our understanding
of human evolution
Because we have a date,
things are a little clearer
with the Malapa finds
At 1 97 million years old,
most scientists believe sediba
is too late to be a
direct ancestor of ours
Our genus Homo was already
established by the time
sediba came along
But even if sediba
is not our direct ancestor,
it does show there were
many different types
of primitive ancestors living
together at the same time
Okay, yeah, yeah, keep pulling
Great, great!
The quality of the material
that Lee is uncovering
is really phenomenal
Sediba shows that we had
more than two or three species
in South Africa
1 9 million years ago
It's a very interesting find
It shows that there were
diversity
It's a beautiful material,
but I don't think that sediba
was ancestral to our genus Homo
Whether or not they are
our direct ancestors,
the fossils at Malapa
and Rising Star point us toward
a new way of thinking
about human evolution
We have the strong tendency
to want to draw simple lines
between species,
and make nice family trees,
and we have to understand
that that's our need
That's our desire
That's not necessarily
the way that nature works
It's very natural to think about
human evolution as a sort of
family tree in deep time
But evolution is much more
complex than that
Evolution is bushy,
there are different experiments,
populations try different
adaptations,
they try different ways
of being about the world
Paleoanthropologists talk about
the bushiness of human evolution
as a metaphor for the many types
of early hominins
and the difficulty of knowing
which one led to us,
but even that metaphor
may not do justice
to the way evolution works
Nature is messy
Nature is complicated
Nature does not really respect
our desire to put fossils
into neat bins and to sort of
name nice neat species
Both sediba and naledi
have a mosaic of Australopith
and Homo features
They seem to show
that at the dawn of humanity
there were multiple evolutionary
experiments with small-bodied,
small-brained,
upright-walking apes
Scientists now know some
of these varieties
of late Australopith
and early Homo lived together
at the same time
And some of them may have been
interbreeding
These aren't fully formed
species and there's a lot
of interbreeding between
these groups
Some adaptive features
are evolving in one group,
other adaptive features
are evolving in other groups,
and by interbreeding those
are coming together
And if that's the case we may
never be able to draw neat lines
between any of these groups
and later Homo
Perhaps now we need
a new metaphor to help us
understand our evolution,
one that expresses better
the dynamic and fluid nature
of it
Now perhaps the best metaphor
is a braided stream
And that's brought on
by discovery of these
mosaic hominins like naledi,
sediba, and others
They're showing us there's
lots of experiments going on
Some of these evolutionary
experiments died out,
others came together
and interbred
The ebb and flow of genes
through these groups
was probably so complex
that we may have to give up hope
of discovering a simple
linear evolution
So imagine in your mind
a glacier in the top of a valley
and what happens is as it melts,
it creates many, many rivulets
and some of them are large
and some are small,
and they all move off
down the valley
And almost inevitably at the end
of that valley is going to be
a lake, of which some,
maybe the majority,
but not all are contributing to
I think we have to begin looking
at these species we're finding
as almost individual channels
in a braided stream
It's clear they have something
to do with the end-population
and that's us, the billions
of human beings alive today
But it's hard to tell
which one's the most responsible
for us being here
The new finds on the plains
of South Africa are adding
a vital new chapter to the story
of our origins
The tantalizing gap
in the fossil record
at the beginning of our genus
is being slowly filled in
Finally, there is light
at the "Dawn of Humanity"
Where do we come from?
Ever since Darwin
put forward the idea
that we evolved from apes,
scientists have wondered
about those first creatures
that left the ape world
and crossed into ours
In the last 50 years,
fossil finds have filled in
some of the many blanks
in the story of our evolution
But the bones of our ancestors
are few and far between,
allowing only glimpses
of how we slowly changed
over millions of years
from ape
to human
Now, in South Africa,
in caves dangerously deep
underground,
two new species of hominin,
our human ancestors,
have been found
There it was,
right there:
one of the most spectacular
early hominins ever discovered
lying on the surface of a cave
And not just a few
bone fragments
It's everywhere
Here, there are thousands
It's just absolutely incredible
the amount of bone
that's coming up
Oh, beautiful!
The first thing that
came through my mind
was Howard Carter's anecdote
about opening Tutankhamen's tomb
It was Lord Carnarvon in the
back saying, "What do you see?"
And Carter says,
"Things, wonderful things"
We have found
a most remarkable creature
and a most unexpected one
So we need a new kind
of language to talk about this
These bones could finally bring
our past into focus
What story will they tell
about how we became human?
A new light shines
at the "Dawn of Humanity,"
right now on this NOVA/
National Geographic special
The high plains to the northwest
of Johannesburg
have been called
the Cradle of Humankind
In the 1930s and '40s,
fossil finds here gave us
the first important glimpses
of our earliest ancestors
Then, for decades,
the discoveries seemed to dry up
It looked like
the Cradle of Humankind
had little left to offer
Go get 'em, good luck
Happy hunting
But now, from deep caves
in the Cradle
come two new discoveries
that could reshape
the understanding
of our ancient past
What is it?
It has teeth
It's so solid!
There aren't just
hundreds of bones;
there are thousands of bones
I had never seen or dreamed
of anything like the richness
of this site
Bones that may end up
illuminating
a critical million-year period
in our evolution
that has long been a mystery
There's a big gap
in the fossil record
with only a few little fragments
The fossil record suggests that
in that gap
lies the dawn of humanity:
the birth of the genus Homo
It's perhaps
the least understood
and most important episode
in our evolution
Before it was the world
of Australopithecus,
an ape-like creature
with a tiny brain
Lucy is the poster child
for the Australopiths
She walked upright, but belonged
to the world of the apes
If I were to see
an Australopithecus
at the end of a football field,
I would probably call the zoo
and say,
"Hey, an ape has escaped"
The upper part of the body
in Australopithecus is,
in general way, ape-ish
Go down, look at the pelvis,
very human-like
An Australopithecus
is sort of like a bipedal ape
If you went back in time
and saw them
walking around the savannah,
you would see animals that
stood up and walked like we do,
but they would've been smaller
in body size
Their brains
wouldn't have been as big,
so their heads
would've looked smaller
Their jaws and teeth
were very large
The fossil record suggests that
somewhere between two
and three million years ago,
these ape-like Australopiths
evolved into the first
recognizably human species:
Homo erectus.
They have big brains
and small faces,
adaptations for using tools
If I were to see, say,
Homo erectus
at the other end
of a football field,
I would probably call 911
and say,
"Oh, there's a wild man
over here,
and you know somebody should
put some clothes on him"
So what went on
in the transition
from Australopithecus
to Homo erectus?
For years, the only species
that filled that gap
was a creature called
Homo habilis.
But so little of it
has ever been found,
the origins of the genus Homo
have remained an enigma
The greatest mystery
facing paleoanthropology today
is to try to understand how,
when, where the transition
from Australopithecus to Homo
occurred
And what we don't know
is what happened
between Australopithecus
and early Homo
That's one of the big mysteries
right now we're trying to solve
The prize would be to discover
fossil remains
that could tell us about
that mysterious transition
And now,
they may have found some
There you can see two foot bones
in articulation
Emerging from ancient caves
in South Africa
are fossil finds
of astonishing richness,
and not just fragments,
but virtually complete skeletons
From the very first block
that we had,
we had a portion
of the mandible, the lower jaw,
and we had a collarbone
and one of the bones
of the forearm
So that was really,
really exciting
She's in there
We have a skull,
we have a mandible,
we have a complete scapula,
we have a complete clavicle,
we have a complete arm,
a complete hand,
and half of the pelvis,
which we can,
with reconstruction,
make into a whole pelvis
Will these skeletons
live up to their promise,
offering us a new understanding
of the dawn of humanity?
In August 2013, South African
Pedro Boshoff was out of work
He had been a soldier,
a prospector, an adventurer,
and even a part-time student
of human origins
Now he wondered
if he could earn some money
doing what he loves most:
fossil hunting
Towards the end of August,
I approached
Professor Lee Berger,
asking if there would be
the possibility
of a position at faculty
with him
Pedro Boshoff
came into my office
and said, you know,
"I really need work,
"and I have
the same belief as you
that there is more out there"
Lee Berger started exploring
the area of South Africa
known as the Cradle of Humankind
in the early 1990s
After 18 years of searching,
he had found only a few
isolated fossils
That's not unusual in the field
of paleoanthropology
These early human fossils
are probably the rarest
sought-after objects on earth
We in paleoanthropology
sit in one of the few fields
that probably have more
scientists studying objects
than there are objects to study
In fact, the vast majority
of people who do what I do
will never find a single piece
of one of these early humans
And if they do, it's going to be
an isolated tooth
Probably 80 to 90% of our record
are just little bits
of isolated teeth
Just to the northwest
of Johannesburg,
the Cradle of Humankind
is riddled with limestone caves
Some have already yielded
fragmentary fossils
of our remote ancestors
Lee was convinced there were
more discoveries to be made
I had known Pedro for 20 years
and I said, you know,
"Go out there,
enlist your caving buddies,
get underground, and see
if you can find something"
And so I bought Pedro
a motorcycle
so he could move around out here
Basically what he wanted me
to do
is to go through
the Cradle area,
locating and finding fossils
So I sat as I often do on a rock
and I contemplated
how I'm going to approach this,
and then it dawned on me:
I'm part of a caving society,
having caved in this area
for years
And in there,
I found Rick and Steven
I asked them to systematically
work their way
through caves and holes
towards the east of the Cradle
while I was busy working
in the west
We often don't look
in the places
that are most familiar to us
because we think
we know them well
I call it backyard syndrome
And so I said, you know,
"Start right under our noses
Go to the most
well-known places"
On September the 13th, 2013,
Rick and Steve decided
to look into a cave system
they thought they knew well
It's called Rising Star
It's an amazing cave
It's got a bit of everything
There's tight squeezes,
some great climbs,
beautiful formations
Rick and Steve headed
deep underground
I wanted to show Rick
a great climb in the cave
called the Dragon's Back
We climbed up there
And in the process
of taking some video
of the formations
at the top of it,
Rick wanted to get past me
So I went down
a small little crevice
basically so that Rick
could crawl over me
I was just getting
out of his way,
and as I went into it,
I noticed that there's still
a little bit continuing down
Once in the crevice,
Steve realized there was nothing
below his feet
He squeezed himself further down
Every time you go down,
it just goes a bit further
and a bit further
and a bit further down
You squeeze your body in
so that you don't slip
and you feel around for a grip
So my legs were dangling down
this last little bit
and you don't feel anything
below you
And the only way to climb down
is actually to lower yourself
as far as possible,
just keep on lowering yourself
until you're literally
your arms are almost
fully stretched out,
and then you start to feel
a couple of rocks
that you can actually
put your feet on
He emerged
into an hidden chamber
He called for Rick
to come down and join him
They could see massive rock
formations above their heads
But the real discovery
was beneath their feet
The floor of the cave
was littered with small bones
We saw at first one bone
lying around
We looked around a bit more
and, well, another bone
We actually spotted teeth
in the rocks
and realized
we actually had found something
Followed by a skull
in the ground
And finally,
one of the most interesting ones
was a mandible
with four teeth in it
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
And I will never, never forget
when he came to me
with his photos,
put it on the computer,
and the first thing I noticed
was the jaw with the teeth
And I realized
this is definitely a hominin
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
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!"
Pedro says, "You're really
gonna want to let me in"
And, you know,
9:30 at night, and it's dark,
but I could hear that emotion
in his voice
They flipped open a computer,
and I saw something
I don't think I ever dreamed
I would see
on a computer screen
A lot of swearing at first
Apparently that's his reaction
when he sees fossils
But yeah, he immediately
identified it as a hominid
That was a mandible
of what was clearly
an early hominin,
the teeth just perfect
The next picture
had a skull in it of a hominin
I could see it in outline
There were bones everywhere
They'd take
Every one of them
I could see in the image
were hominin
I was a bit in shock
because it all went like
a car crash for me, you know?
It really did, black and white,
and I have only visual,
not audio
Hominins are all creatures
in the human evolutionary line,
including Australopiths,
Homo erectus, and us
When his shock faded,
Lee immediately turned his mind
to the question of what type
of hominin this might be
From what he could see,
Lee thought it was
a single individual,
probably one of those
Australopiths
that came on the scene
some four million years ago
The photos were hard to make out
Lee wanted to know if the bones
in the Rising Star cave
were similar to fossils he had
discovered five years earlier
That was in a different cave
just ten miles away,
also in the Cradle of Humankind
It was Lee's first big find
The story all began
on August the 1st, 2008,
when I came into this valley
following targets,
which were these trees
above my head
that I could see on Google Earth
I walked up that old
lime miners' track way,
which wasn't quite as clear
as it is today,
mostly overgrown,
and I came into this grove
and found this little hole
The little valley
was called Malapa
Lee thought he knew it well
It was a Friday
Lee's nine-year-old son Matthew
and his dog Tau were with him
I stood at the edge of this pit
and I said, "Go find fossils"
With that, Matthew raced off
into the bush here
I thought he was going
to go chase giraffe or zebra
or something like that
with Tau in tow,
and a minute and a half later,
he shouted,
"Dad, I found a fossil"
Sitting right over
by that lightning-struck tree,
he had stopped and found
a little rock,
and I almost didn't go and look
because I knew he had found
an antelope fossil
because that's pretty much
all we ever find
I saw a fossil
I didn't think it was a hominin
I just thought
it was an antelope
because we find
thousands of those
I started walking
towards him though
because I had to see
what he had found,
and five meters away,
I realized that
sticking out of that rock
was a hominin clavicle
I couldn't believe it
I took the rock in my hand
and I was turning it,
trying to think
what else this could be
And as I turned
the back of it over,
there sticking out of the back
was a mandible and a canine
That's when I realized
that an extraordinary thing
had taken place
After almost 20 years
of searching
in the Cradle of Humankind,
Lee finally had
a major discovery
He had his son to thank,
but also a crew of Welsh miners
who had come through the valley
a hundred years ago
And they'd come through
this area
looking for limestone
to build Johannesburg,
and they would blast
these caves apart
looking for that rich, white,
pure limestone,
and they'd burn it
and make cement out of it
In the 1880s Johannesburg
was a gold rush town,
little more than a collection
of shacks
But it sat on some
of the richest gold seams
ever discovered
As the gold kept coming,
so did the gold prospectors
The town grew
and construction crews
were desperate for limestone,
essential for cement
and gold processing
Lime miners combed
the high veld outside the town
looking for seams of limestone
Although they likely
didn't know it,
these seams concealed remnants
of ancient cave systems
and were full of fossils
When they found
the limestone seam at Malapa,
they laid their charges as usual
They came in here
and put in three,
at the most four, blasts
One right below me here,
one over on the side,
one over there that I can see
Then, for some reason,
the miners never collected
the blocks of lime
and left the blast hole
largely untouched
I'm not sure why they did that,
but what they did do
in that process
was expose just the edge
of these remarkable skeletons
They damaged it just enough
so we could find this site
and could make these
fossil discoveries,
but not too much that
they destroyed the evidence
It really is a miracle
It was in one of the rocks
scattered by the blast
that Matthew found
the collarbone of a child
But that was just the beginning
The hole where the miners
planted the dynamite
would soon yield so much more
It was only once
I had the permit
and we came back on September 4,
a whole bunch of us
that we spent all morning
looking here
and we found nothing
We were even thinking of leaving
because we thought
there wasn't anything here
I stood over on the other side
of this pit,
looking down into that pit,
and I saw something sticking out
of the rock right down here
And what I saw stunned me
And I climbed down the pit
and looked right over here,
and there
sticking out of the wall
was the proximal humerus
of a hominin
I couldn't believe it...
I did my PhD on this
I climbed closer,
and as I got closer,
I realized there was a scapula
of the shoulder blade in place,
and I came even closer
and put my hand on the wall,
right here,
and two hominid teeth
fell into my hand
Then I said something,
and that started the second part
of this remarkable story
Everyone piled down in here,
at my feet was a proximal femur
in a block here
that clearly belonged
to the child
What was amazing was
it never crossed my mind
that this wasn't the child
that Matthew had found
How could you find two skeletons
in a site like this?
What it would turn out to be,
of course,
was a second skeleton,
the female skeleton
The child would be laying
right here,
just lying in position here,
and it would turn out that
there were other skeletons here
There's one sitting over there
There's a baby
just above me here,
and who knows how many
are in front of me here
It really is a treasure trove
of paleoanthropology
One by one,
they took out blocks of stone
they thought might have
hominin fossils in them,
remnants of our ancient
human family
The blocks were all taken back
to the University
of the Witwatersrand
At the medical school,
Lee's wife, Jackie,
a radiologist,
ran the blocks
through a CT scanner,
allowing the scientists
to peer inside
There you go, okay, that's good
What one of those blocks
revealed was stunning
A slice came through,
and you could see
an entire skull
I was dumbfounded
I could not in my wildest dreams
believe an entire skull
could be sitting
in this little rock
Then began the painstaking job
of freeing the skull
from the rock
that had encased it
for possibly millions of years
It took me three months
to get it out
I was the first one
that saw this
And you can't describe it
to anybody
It's beautiful
I mean, it's been in the ground
for 1 9 million years,
and you're the first person
to see that
I thought,
"Well, you're beautiful"
I basically brought this boy
back to life
Finally, the skull was free
Its small brain
and forward-projecting face
made it clear that
it was an Australopith
But details of the teeth
and other parts of the skeleton
made it unlike any found before
Many types of Australopithecus
once walked the earth
between about two
and four million years ago
Lucy is known as afarensis.
There's also
Australopithecus africanus.
This appeared to be
an entirely new species
Lee called it
Australopithecus sediba
after the waterhole
near which it was found
In the local language Sotho,
"sediba" means "wellspring"
The team was able
to radioactively date
the limestone layers in the cave
with great precision
The layer containing
the sediba skeletons
was 1 97 million years old
That makes these creatures
among the last of their kind,
living right at the end
of the fossil gap
between Australopiths
and Homo erectus.
Here at last was a creature
that could tell us something
about that transition
And the bones
were not just fragments
Here were two remarkably
complete skeletons,
a female and a child
Still encased
in the rock at Malapa
are fragments
of at least three more,
waiting to be excavated
This made sediba the most
complete evidence ever found
for what was going on
at the dawn of humanity
The Australopithecus sediba
fossils
are some of the most
spectacular skeletons known
for early hominids
They're absolutely amazing
We don't get two bones
associated with one another
very often,
much less several bones,
much less partial skeletons
So that makes these fossils
really special
Sediba was exciting
from the get-go
Right away, we knew that
we had parts of the skeleton
and we had parts of the cranium,
which helps us figure out
who this animal is
So that was really,
really exciting,
and initially, these upper limb
bones looked very primitive,
so we knew we were dealing
with something
that looked like it would be
a good climber,
kind of an ape-like creature
Peter Schmid's job is to
reconstruct sediba's skeleton
Unlike past fossil finds,
here, the skeletons
are so complete,
there doesn't have to be
much guesswork
By scanning and mirror imaging,
Peter can fill in any missing
bones with great accuracy
From the CT, we've got
a few thousand slices now,
and Aurore has to put everything
together to form a 3D model
And then we have to cut
the model
because the pelvis
we already casted,
so we only need the rib cage
But the right rib cage
we have already,
but we need now
the mirror image of that,
and the computer helps us to do
the mirror image in a second
Layer by layer,
a 3D printer then slowly prints
the rib cage in fine plaster
Beautiful
Finally, Peter has assembled
a complete skeleton
It's highly unusual
All Australopiths are a mix
of ape and human,
but sediba has a unique
mosaic of features
scientists have never seen
before in the same creature
The arm is very long,
like in a chimpanzee,
but the hand
is with short fingers
and a very long thumb,
like a human hand
which was never found until now
because this is the most
complete hand ever found
in this period
Job Kibii,
who was with Lee and Matthew
when they discovered
the skeletons,
has been working
on the sediba hand
He's found
an unusual combination
of ape and human features
here too
What's special
about sediba's arm and hand
is that we know sediba
has a very long thumb,
which is more chimp-like,
but sediba has
a very human-like hand
For example, sediba has a thumb
which is longer
relative to the other fingers,
which indicates
a human-like condition
Sediba's hand, with its
opposable thumb
and forefingers,
is so human that
it could've been a tool user
But since no tools were found,
that remains only
an intriguing possibility
From the reconstructed skeleton,
paleoartist Viktor Deak
can start to create
a lifelike digital painting
By virtually applying
tissue thickness markers
carefully calculated
from the known facial tissues
of living primates,
he can build up a realistic
impression of sediba's face
Once that was all done,
I have now gone ahead
and created a body for it,
and if you want to see,
we can check all that
by going transparent
and seeing, making sure that
the bones and everything line up
in the proper spaces
So here we have
a concept reconstruction
of how sediba
potentially could look like
The step from there
to a lifelike digital painting
is a short one
Finally, for the first time
in almost two million years,
the face
of Australopithecus sediba
looks out on the world
once again
But the true revelations will
come from the bones themselves
Because they are
so well preserved,
these fossils
will give scientists
unprecedented insights
into the lives
of these ancient creatures...
Everything from what they ate
to how they died
Such details might help explain
the Australopiths' transition
into our genus: Homo
They might also prove
or disprove
a highly influential theory
about the dawn of humanity
A theory inspired
by the very first discovery
of an Australopith fossil
The year is 1924
Anatomist Raymond Dart
teaches at the University of the
Witswatersrand in Johannesburg
His hobby is fossil hunting,
but he never imagines
he will find a human ancestor
Nobody at the time believes
we had evolved in Africa
Well, in the late 19th century,
fossils were found in Europe
with the Neanderthals
They were found in Asia
with the earliest known examples
of Homo erectus.
No one really had a sense
that anything interesting
occurred in Africa
Darwin and Huxley
predicted that our origins
would be in Africa
based on comparative anatomy
You know, they looked
at the skeletons
of chimps and gorillas,
and they looked at ours
and they went,
"Well, they're so close to us
"and they're more close
than anything else,
so it must have been in Africa"
And then the sort of
second generation
of evolutionary biologists
shied away from that
They started to find fossils
in Europe
They started to find fossils
in Asia
And, of course,
that tied in very nicely
with sort of racist,
imperialistic thoughts
of the day
They couldn't abide the thought
of it being in Africa
In late 1924, Raymond Dart
receives a package
He sees it's
from the mining town of Taung
in South Africa's
Northwest Province
And in that box is a fossil,
and this is a game-changing
fossil
It's been sent to him by miners
who noticed what looks like
the skull of a small ape
encased in the rock
Dart is fascinated
He begins the long,
laborious process
of revealing
the mysterious skull
He can see that
it is the skull of a child,
but like no child
he has ever seen before
It has ape-like characteristics,
but also some very human ones
And so as he cleaned this fossil
and he saw the hole
in the bottom of the skull
where the spinal cord enters
the brain underneath
that he had something like a
two-legged walker on his hands
And this he named
Australopithecus africanus,
and what that means is
"southern human of Africa"
Dart rushed into print
with his find
He claimed it is proof
that we evolved in Africa,
just as Darwin had predicted
He was unprepared for the
firestorm his theory unleashed
The Taung child sparked
an incredible revolution
Up to that point,
everybody said,
"Let's look to Europe
for our ancestors"
It was unthinkable that
anything as important
as the emergence of humans
could have happened in Africa
Raymond Dart was a feisty guy,
and when he was pushed back
by the British intelligentsia,
he became feistier,
more aggressive
in terms of his defending
of his views
Most scientists
disagreed with him
He really was seen
as an outsider,
but it absolutely
set the ball rolling
for, one, paleoanthropology
as a field in Africa,
and, two, vindication
of what Darwin and Huxley
had predicted
with actual fossil evidence
It showed once and for all
that our origins were in Africa
and only in Africa,
and that's huge
It totally changed the field
Dart was sure he had discovered
the missing link
between apes and humans
But it wasn't enough
to know what they looked like
He wanted to know
how they behaved
What sort of creatures
were they?
He understood that these great
questions about our ancestors
were also questions
about ourselves
The reason we are interested
in our own ancestry, I think,
is the reason that
you or I want to know
who our parents were
and who our grandparents were
or great-grandparents were,
because somewhere in us,
we realize that there's
a little bit of them in us,
so to understand
the quirks of our own behavior
and why we do things,
if not just why we look
the way we do,
comes from that ancestry
Paleoanthropology is just that
in deep time
We're looking way back
And so we're looking
at the things,
the sort of little bits
and pieces
that drive why humanity
is like it is today
Raymond Dart
was building a theory
about how the Australopiths,
our ape-like ancestors,
became human
His ideas about the dawn
of humanity were the touchstone
for thinking about our origins
for generations
In the 1940s,
more examples
of Australopithecus
began to be found
And a key site not only had
fragments of Australopithecus,
but also the bones
of many other fossil animals
And Dart noted that these bones
were broken in a special way
Dart became convinced
they were weapons
made by our primitive ancestors
Was this the key
to what first made us human?
Dart had been a young medic
in World War I
He had seen firsthand
the barbarity
humans are capable of
It made sense to him
that the origins of humanity
were steeped in blood
Raymond Dart's experience
in the World War
may have colored
his interpretation
of what these bones
and teeth meant
You know, it gave him a view
of the dark side of humanity
and the violence of humanity,
and he came up with this idea
that Australopithecus
had figured out that bones
and teeth were hard
and could be used as weapons
to kill other animals,
the sort of killer ape theory
of early humans
Dart believed that
the more aggressive
and adventurous
of our ape-like ancestors
abandoned their forest
environments
and moved into savannahs
There, they became hunters
and predators
His theory that
this violent transformation
gave rise to humanity
soon found an audience
far beyond the small world
of paleoanthropology
In the 1950s,
there was a drama critic
and playwright
named Robert Ardrey
who became very interested
in human origins,
and he went to Africa
and spoke with Raymond Dart
And Robert Ardrey,
being a dramatist,
could write like anything,
and he wrote this amazing book
published in 1961
called African Genesis.
African Genesis
became a pop science
publishing sensation
of the early 1960s
Ardrey's ideas, building
on those of Raymond Dart,
helped frame public debate
about the dawn of humanity
for the next 20 years
The very first sentence
in that book,
I remember it
because I read it as a teenager
and was enthralled by it:
"Not in innocence and not
in Asia was mankind born"
And in that one sentence,
he encapsulated
Raymond Dart's ideas
that it was an African genesis,
and that where we came from
was not
from an innocent creature
but from the most violent
of killer apes
One of Robert Ardrey's
greatest fans
was the filmmaker
Stanley Kubrick
At the time,
he was planning a film
based on the science fiction
novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It was to be a meditation
on human technology run wild
On a mission to Jupiter,
the spacecraft's computer turns
on the crew
At the beginning of the film,
our ancestors discover
the first technology:
weapons
Eventually, they will use them
on each other
This was the "dawn of humanity"
imagined by Dart and Ardrey
And so this sets up then
for Kubrick
the same conflict that Dart felt
For Dart, that first weapon
explained the emergence
of human beings,
while at the same time,
it explained the atrocities
of the 20th century
Are we killer apes at heart?
Is this what we will discover
about our ancestors
at the dawn of humanity?
The discoveries at Malapa
may finally provide evidence
to support or refute
Raymond Dart's theory
The sediba skeletons
are so well preserved,
they give the scientists a
unique glimpse into their lives
And that's the story
we're really after:
how did these individuals
really live
out there in the environment?
What did they do
on a daily basis?
Whether they were so-called
"killer apes" or not
can be seen in what they ate
The first direct evidence
comes from their teeth
At the Max Planck Institute
in Leipzig,
Amanda Henry is analyzing
calculus, or tartar,
fossilized
along with sediba's teeth
Calculus is what happens
when the bacteria in your mouth
form a film on your teeth
So it's this very thick,
layered,
heavily mineralized material
that forms around your gum line
and on all sorts of surfaces
of your teeth
And as it forms,
it traps bacteria and proteins
and remnants of your food inside
Just like the tartar dentists
remove from our teeth,
the calculus from sediba's teeth
provides a snapshot
of what they were eating
So once I have the calculus here
in this little powdered form,
I'm going to dissolve it
in a little bit of a weak acid,
and then we're gonna rinse
that acid off,
and hopefully
what we'll be left with
is micro-remains with
this mineral matrix removed,
and then we'll look at that
under a microscope
and see if we can identify
what was in the calculus
Amanda can see
what sediba was eating
when she discovers phytoliths,
the microscopic
remains of plants
Well, this is a phytolith
that we recovered
from the calculus
of the sediba individuals,
and we have a couple
of examples here
all from different plants
that this individual ate
Here at last is evidence
that will help support
or disprove Dart's theory
Well, this is the first time
that we've had direct evidence
of the kinds of foods
that any Australopith ate
We've had proxy information
before,
we've had sort of
vague categories
where the food's harder
or tougher,
but this is direct evidence
That's exciting
What Amanda can see
trapped in sediba's tartar
are microscopic remains
of many different plants
We have phytoliths from grasses,
we have phytoliths from the bark
or woody tissue of plants,
and we have phytoliths
possibly from fruits,
so all the evidence
suggests that
the foods that this individual
was eating
was coming from closed
forested regions,
so eating fruits,
maybe chewing on stems,
eating the grasses
that are growing in that area
The tooth evidence from sediba
indicates a diet very similar
to today's chimpanzees
While they may have eaten
some meat,
there's little to back up
Raymond Dart's theory
that they were killer apes
So later scientists came
and looked at the evidence
and found that
there were tooth marks
in the skull of
an Australopithecus individual,
and that was just really
compelling evidence
that Australopithecus maybe,
instead of being the predator,
was the prey
So our ancestors, or the early
hominin in South Africa,
were the victims,
rather than being the carnivores
that Raymond Dart
wanted them to be
The caves
in which he was finding
not only the remains
of human ancestors,
but the remains of many,
many, many other animals,
which he thought
were being consumed
and devoured by our ancestors,
were actually all the victims
of predators and carnivores
who were pulling all of those
animals into the cave
It seems Raymond Dart's vision
of our ancestors
as the first killer apes,
so famously portrayed
by Stanley Kubrick, was wrong
The sediba skeletons
are so well preserved,
they offer the team
a chance to investigate
not just the lives,
but the deaths
of these individuals
They can analyze the
two-million-year-old death scene
almost as if it were
a forensic case
I mean, we're looking
at the preservation
of organic material here
These animals are articulated
the way they died
The breakage patterns
may often be a result
of the moments before
or shortly after their death
So far, the team has excavated
the skeletons
of a female adult and a child
So the female was this one
And the juvenile
is all the bones in blue,
all of these
They were found very close
to each other
Aurore Val has been creating
a virtual reconstruction
of the scene
at the bottom of the cave
Besides the sediba skeletons,
there are the skeletons
of many other animals too
How did they all get there?
Two million years ago,
Malapa was a much deeper cave
Landscape erosion has reduced it
to a small depression
in the ground
But when Australopithecus sediba
was around,
it was a cave system
about 90 feet deep
Imagine a vertical shaft
going up
There's probably water dripping
down, roots hanging down
Right here is the curled-up body
of the female,
lying right there
is a child's body,
the 13-year-old boy
There are other animals,
all being eaten by bugs
and going through
the usual process of decay
This reconstruction shows
the sediba death scene
in great detail
Now the team want to know
how all these creatures died
Were they dragged in
by predators, or did they fall?
The man to answer that question
is Patrick Randolph-Quinney
He's an eminent
forensic anthropologist
more accustomed to working
on murder cases and mass graves
I'm involved
in looking at homicides
and involved in looking
at the forensic
identification process,
So, unknown remains,
giving them back their identity
and their name,
that's what I do for a living
The skull of the child
is the first piece of evidence
This is this fracture here,
and it's a fracture
that's actually separated
part of the body of the jaw,
and it runs up through the tooth
And basically,
if you're in an impact,
you jar your teeth together
and you create compression
on the tooth row,
and that provides force,
or generates force,
which goes down
to the tooth roots
And what this has done
is actually split
part of the corpus apart
So it's actually damage
consistent with effectively
an impact on the jaw,
and the energy has come
from the teeth
out into the bone around it
And that only happens
mechanically with fresh bone,
so this individual
was still functioning skeletally
when this happened
The mandible fracture
is a green fracture
that happened when the bone
was fresh, at or around death
It would be consistent
with a fatal fall
The fractures to the forearms
are even more telling
And if you look at MH2,
she's got a fracture that runs
through the body of this joint,
where it articulates
in the elbow with the humerus,
the bone of the upper arm
There are also other fractures
associated with the wrist,
in this portion of the ulna
and this portion of the radius
And we've actually got fractures
in the scaphoid and triquetral
bone in the wrist as well
And what this appears
to indicate
is putting your hand out
to stop yourself
This seems to be good evidence
the individual was alive
when she fell
The cave at Malapa
was probably a death trap
Were they searching for water
and lost their grip?
Perhaps they were trying
to escape in terror
from some predator
Whatever the reason,
they fell and died
either immediately on impact
or soon after
It appears that mud
then buried the bodies,
and as it hardened,
kept them from disintegrating
This is why they were
so well preserved
Then began the long,
slow process of fossilization
in which all organic material
in the bone
was replaced by minerals
Today, the sediba fossils
are still yielding insights
into the Australopith world
of almost two million years ago
But the most tantalizing
question of all
is still unanswered
How did these primitive
creatures evolve
into more advanced
human ancestors?
To find out,
scientists need to find
perhaps the most elusive
fossils of all:
the first members
of our genus Homo
For decades, the only fossils
that came close
were the fragmentary remains of
a creature called Homo habilis:
handyman
In the early 1960s,
fossils discovered
from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania
by the Leakeys
led to the definition
of a new fossil species
in our evolutionary tree:
Homo habilis...handyman
And what was significant
about that
is that stone tools
were connected
with what Leakey proposed
as the first human,
a member of our lineage,
the genus Homo
Like most scientists
at the time,
Louis Leakey thought
our evolution
was probably a gradual,
linear process:
a single chain of species
becoming progressively
more human
He decided the key event
that made our ancestors cross
the threshold to humanity
was not the invention
of weapons,
as Raymond Dart believed,
but tools
Since Homo habilis seemed to be
the first toolmaker,
he declared it the first member
of our genus: Homo
Here at last was the link
between the ape-world
of the Australopiths
and the human world
of Homo erectus.
So there was always this gap
between Australopithecus
and later members
of the genus Homo,
like Homo erectus
and Neanderthals,
and we didn't really know
what species in that gap
would have looked like,
and then along in the 1960s,
along comes along Homo habilis,
and it's slightly
bigger brained,
it's probably
a bit more bipedal,
and of course it had these stone
tools associated with it,
and it was argued very strongly
to be a contender
for early Homo, and it was
instantly controversial
and it's still controversial
to some people today
It's a bit of a mess
Because it became clear
probably in the 1990s
and moving
into the early 21st century
that Homo habilis, we really
didn't know what that was
One of the main reasons
for classifying it as human
was that it was found with tools
But that is now looking less
like a defining characteristic
of the genus Homo
We now know that even the more
primitive Australopiths
had the capacity to use
stone tools
Zeresenay Alemseged,
who discovered
a three-million-year-old
Australopith
called Dikika child, has found
what he believes to be evidence
of stone tool use
in the same period
If you were defining
Homo habilis as a toolmaker,
tool user,
then what do you make of it
when you see
that Australopithecus
was doing the same thing?
We know that there is
rudimentary stone tool use...
Not stone tool but stone use...
Among living chimpanzees
The confusion surrounding
Homo habilis has grown
It has been compounded
by the fact that so little
of it has ever been found
Colleagues have said, you know,
if you had a shoebox,
you could put all those fossils
that might be early members
of the genus Homo into it
and still have room
for a good pair of shoes
With so few fossils to go on,
scientists had little
they could say for sure
about the first members
of our genus, Homo
This was the situation
when the two young cavers,
Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker,
made their discoveries
in the Rising Star cave
When Lee saw the photos
from the fossil chamber,
he could only hope they would
clear up the confusion
Was it another sediba
or was it even Homo habilis?
The only way to find out
was to bring up the fossils
Lee knew there was
no time to waste
I had to make a decision,
and about, oh,
just before 1:00 a m,
I decided that history
would never forgive me
if I did not act right then
Just five weeks later,
the Rising Star excavation
was beginning to take shape
Its planning had taken
some ingenuity
Lee knew he would never be able
to get down to the fossil
chamber himself
In places, the chamber entrance
was less than seven inches wide
I put a call out
on Facebook saying,
"I need skinny scientists
"who are not claustrophobic,
who are cooperative,
"who can work together
"in a dangerous
and difficult environment
And I need you available
by the first of November"
I saw Lee's Facebook post,
actually,
and on a whim I applied for it,
and then the next thing I know
I got asked to interview
and from there,
just things started happening
really quickly
I saw a call that came out
on Facebook from Lee
that was looking
for skinny scientists,
skinny paleoanthropologists,
that weren't claustrophobic
and that would be able to fit
into a slot that was
about 18 centimeters,
and that was very intriguing
I didn't say what
had been discovered
I didn't say anything
about what I thought it was
They only knew it was me
in South Africa
and it was clearly underground
I thought I'd get three, four,
five applicants, I really did
I mean, how many people
in the world could be qualified
and fit that criteria?
Within ten days I had
57 qualified applicants
from all over the world,
most of them women
One morning I woke up
and there was a call
for tiny, experienced
archaeologists from Lee Berger
and I thought, "That's me"
I received the Facebook post
via a friend who saw that it was
an ad for a small archaeologist
with caving
and climbing experience
and she said, "That's you!"
I'm almost finishing a PhD
in physical anthropology,
osteology, so this is my area
I'm an archaeologist,
so I can study up quick
on the paleo stuff
I'm a Ph D candidate
specializing in evolutionary
biomechanics,
so more on the paleo-
anthropological side of things
It really seemed perfect,
in fact
When I read the callout
to my husband, he said,
"Well, they might as well have
just meant, you know,
written: 'Marina is wanted
over here ""
So
The Rising Star expedition
was to be a new kind
of paleoanthropology
tailor-made for the age of
social media and the Internet
I held Skype interviews, and
I did a few things in that,
with the 11 people
I'd short-listed
out of this spectacular list
of applicants
Lee explained a little bit
about how the cave was found
and shared with us
some video footage
and the initial photographs
that Steve and Rick took
And he told us about
the conditions of traveling
into the cave
So, you know, he wanted to make
sure that we really knew
what we were getting into
It was mysterious
It was very enticing
for that reason
You know, sort of wondering what
sort of circumstances there were
that necessitated asking
for small people
with excellent
paleontological skills
In the Skype interviews,
I wanted to see these people
face-to-face,
but I also wanted to test
some things
I needed to know that
if I shut the cameras off,
which I did for many of them,
I want to hear
if they could respond to me
Because I had already
designed by then
this system of communication,
I knew
I knew I was never going to
I will never set foot
in that chamber
Then maybe a day after that,
I was told I was a go
It was so fast, so fast
And I sent off emails saying,
"Congratulations, pack your bags
Expect to be here
in the first week of November"
Then I got the email
that said that I got it
and then characteristically
I bust out crying,
and just kept reloading
my email to make sure,
refreshing it, just like,
really, it's really there,
it's really there,
and I screamed so loud
It was a very quick process
The ad went up
and then the interviews
happened the next week,
and then I learned a day later
that I was accepted
to the project
All of a sudden I was
rearranging my schedule
and waiting for the plane
tickets and packing up
and reading quickly everything
that I needed to know and
so it was fast and furious
getting ready for this
My brain was just like a flurry,
like an explosion of glitter
and confetti
Just
It's everything, it's like every
best birthday and Christmas
and Hanukah and Kwanzaa and
it's everything, all at once
I figured if he thought
I could do it,
if Lee thought I could do it,
then I could do it
I had no illusions that
this was going to be easy
Nothing like this
had ever been done,
certainly in the African context
I knew, perhaps ever,
anywhere, and I knew
I had to have everything
from medical support
to safety support to the design
of the infrastructure
underground and above ground
and all the things that go on
with a scientific expedition
Yeah, let's get a bag
As the camp was set up, Pedro,
Rick and Steve readied the cave
for the excavators
Safety lines, lights, cables
and cameras were installed
The possibility for accidents
was ever present
Lee rehearsed safety procedures
over and over again
Critical issue is, no one panic
Yeah, yes, we see you
A command post was set up
from which he could watch
virtually every part of the cave
I really began to get a feel
for what I was putting
these young women into
as the cavers who were laying
over two kilometers of cable
And I think they were terrified
and I was terrified,
They were still untested
We took them through the caves
testing their capabilities
in this system
And so we reached the 10th,
which was my intended day
of going in
and we tested systems,
everything worked
It was a little sloppy
but it worked
We tested safety, it all worked,
and by the early afternoon
we were ready
You'd be surprised, I'm actually
a person of gentle soul
Is it weeping in the corner
like a Gollum?
Marina, Becca, and Hannah have
been chosen to go down first
Still, nobody knows
exactly what they will find
I've seen a skull,
I've seen the other pieces
I am pretty sure that we have
got quite a lot of a skeleton
of at least one hominin
That of course waits to be seen,
and it's going to happen
pretty fast now
over the next several hours
Anxiously watched by Lee and
the team in the command post,
Marina, Becca and Hannah
make their way
deeper and deeper underground
The descent is difficult
And as I looked down there
I thought, oh, you know,
I don't know if I'm
if I can do this,
but then once I was committed
to go down, it was actually
much, much easier
than I was dreading
just trying
to also slow it down a bit
because I've got
the GoPro running
It was just an amazing,
an amazing feeling to realize
how far away you are
from everyone up top
in the command center,
and to just fully realize
what you are down there to do
I became a little bit
overwhelmed,
but you also have to turn
that off in some sense
because you're only down there
for a limited amount of time
and you have a job to do,
a very important job to do
Going down the chute
for the first time was
honestly it wasn't as bad as I
thought it was going to be
And then you come
into a landing zone
and there's a hallway
to pass through
It's not really a squeeze,
but it's a narrow passage
to pass through
and then the chamber
opens up again
This is the entrance
to the cave here
So you start by descending down,
you know,
a fairly narrow shaft
and some tunnels
You get down into an area here
This is what we call
the Superman crawl,
which is a very narrow crawl
You have to crawl on your
stomach for about three meters
Then you enter
into another chamber
This is what we call
the Dragon's Back,
so that's the ridge climb
with the sort of four- or five-
meter drop on either side
You get up to the top
of Dragon's Back and you end up
at the top of the chute,
which is another sort
of tunnel access
that then you start the 12-meter
descent into the chamber,
so that's this area here
Once you drop into the chamber,
you're actually just
in a landing zone
It's another sort of antechamber
You then go through
another passageway
into the main chamber,
which we call UW-101,
or the fossil chamber
Marina is the first
to enter the chamber
There was a little bit of
trepidation, I have to confess,
and a lot of excitement
to be the first of the advance
scientists to go into the cave
The first thing that came
through my mind
when I went through
the final slot
into the actual final chamber
was Howard Carter's anecdote
about opening Tutankhamen's tomb
I think it was Lord Carnarvon
in the back saying, you know,
"What do you see?"
And Carter says,
"Things, wonderful things"
And it was that feeling
God, this place is beautiful
First of all,
the cave is beautiful,
just geologically beautiful,
and then you look down
and it was just a sea of bone
and it was obviously
just not regular bone
So, yeah, it was amazing,
amazing
And then I saw them enter
this chamber
We got the cameras set up and
you could see their feet moving
And it was surreal
Fantas
Fantastic!
There we go
Skull is being flagged
You can see the skull here
She's now flagging the mandible
And then the process started
The process
of doing science began
So we'll put pin #1
right beside the mandible
and that's where
we'll concentrate
Okay
Okay, das ist super.
Okay, thanks
Bye
Yeah, that's perfect right there
Okay, going to start scanning
Okay, scan
The first foray into the fossil
chamber lasts only a few hours,
enough time to start scanning
and flagging bone fragments
as well as to test
the safety systems
Okay, how did that go?
Let's see
It's mapping right now
Finally it's time to bring up
the first precious fossil,
the mandible
Uh, there, there, coming
I see what looks like a mandible
in the middle there
On the right
That looks fantastic
It's Becca who will take care
of it on the ascent
All right!
You got the fossil, huh?
Yes, I got the fossil
Well done
Here you go
And we have everyone else
Everyone's out Rick's out safe
They're all out Well done
And so first their safety,
in that they were out
was just this enormous
emotive relief,
and then the sense that they had
actually got this thing,
so now I was going to see
for the first time
what all of this was about
When they opened that little box
and we unwrapped this thing
that they collected,
every great idea we had
went out the window,
gone, you know
Suddenly we didn't know
what we had
When he had first seen
the jawbone
in Rick and Steve's photos,
Lee had decided it probably
belonged to an Australopith
One of the most striking
characteristics
of an Australopith's face is its
large, apelike jaws and teeth
As the Australopiths
transitioned
into the genus Homo,
their faces shrunk
Jaws and teeth became smaller
When he finally had
the jawbone in his hands,
Lee saw it was too small
to be an Australopith
It seemed quite human
Could it be a new specimen
of Homo habilis?
Or could it be a new
transitional species
between Australopiths
and early Homo?
These are the questions on
anatomist Peter Schmidt's mind
as he studies the mandible
from Rising Star
You have this molar teeth
and the very strange use
of the frontal part here
And luckily we got another piece
so with these two pieces
we have a hemi mandible
which is complete and then we
can put on the mirror image,
and we have sort of outline
Peter can then compare it
to the mandible of Homo habilis.
I will take this away
and you see this is the tooth
row of Homo habilis.
You see also that these are
massive teeth, but the tooth row
is straight and we have
a very strong shelf here
The mandible from Rising Star
is clearly more curved
It's not Homo habilis,
and it's not an Australopith
They don't know what it is
This is pure confusion
We don't know what to make of it
We realize all of our
preconceived notions
have to be tossed aside
We can't go into this thinking
it's going to belong
in this group
or belong in that group
We just have to start
from literally scratch
The team hopes that as more
fossils emerge from the cave,
the confusion will clear up
It's so solid
There is reason to be optimistic
Each descent reveals more bones
Where once they thought there
might be one individual,
they now see evidence
of a whole lot more
It was probably a couple
of hours into the first day
when we realized
it also wasn't one skeleton
Another femur
If I remember, right,
it started with a second femur
from the same side
and since there has never been
a three-legged hominin,
we knew there were two,
and then there were three
And I think it was by day two,
there were four
And we realized we were
in something
very, very, very special
All right, good luck with that,
Becca, we can't wait to see you
You've got something
we want to see
Every time the scientists in the
cave remove a piece of bone,
they find more bones beneath it
It's everywhere
I mean, it's all strewn,
all throughout
Not just the chamber, but
the passages leading to it
are littered with bone fragments
At the landing zone
where they stopped,
I'd get a call on the intercom
"We found another tooth"
It was just sitting there
I was trying to find a nice
place to sit, and there it is
It just caught my eye
Rick was sitting there
as a safety caver waiting,
and he kicked the dirt
and hominins fell out
You have to pass me up
some flags
Do you have enough flags?
By the afternoon of day 14
in the expedition,
we were overwhelmed
I'd started with one safe
to hold one skeleton,
day three we had two safes,
day four we had three safes,
day six, people were going,
"We need more safes"
Woo-hoo!
Tooth und more
I don't know whether
you should hug me
for someone finding something
in the other spot
Oh, man
By day 14, as we would get
fossil after fossil,
we were getting 40, 50, 60,
70 elements a day,
all that was flashing through
my mind as I was doing that
was that famous scene in Jaws
where Roy Scheider is chumming
and they hadn't yet
seen the shark
And he's sitting there chumming
and all of a sudden
this gigantic shark appears
And he goes, "We're going
to need a bigger boat"
We're gonna need a bigger safe
It's extraordinary
I think this year at Christmas
I'm just going to hang
one of these
instead of a stocking
As the fossils accumulate
in ever-greater numbers,
a picture of the creature
of the Rising Star cave
begins to emerge
This is part
of a juvenile pelvis
Thigh and hip bones tell them it
was an upright walking biped,
but its gait was primitive
From what they can see of
the exposed skull, it is small,
not much bigger than a chimp's
I'm gonna have to tell
them to leave that alone
But the teeth and jaws seem
more advanced: Homo-like
The team's excitement grows
It's beginning to look as if
they have found another species
from the dawn of humanity
But on which side
of the Australopith-Homo divide
will it fall?
One of the key fossils that will
tell them that is the skull
They are saving that until last
Distance is perfect
And I can see marker two
Record
Recording
In the meantime,
another extraordinary fact
is becoming evident
There are no other animals
in the cave
All the fossils
are human ancestors
This is unheard of
It was pretty surprising
that something completely normal
to every other excavation
I have ever been in
on the continent of Africa,
everyone I have ever heard of
on the continent of Africa,
wasn't happening here
We weren't getting anything else
other than hominins
When early hominins are
discovered in caves,
they are always found along
with the bones of other animals
that have either
wandered in and died
or been dragged there
by predators
They're mixed with antelopes
generally in huge abundance
Then you get, depending
on the circumstance,
some carnivores and other bits
and pieces, and rodents,
and the stuff that accumulates
when things die
and are eaten
and are dragged into caves
Apart from the bones
of a solitary owl,
there's not
a single other animal
in the Rising Star chamber,
only hominins
So how did these creatures
get in there?
The chamber is
very inaccessible,
deep in the dark zone of
the cave, with no entrance
other than the long,
narrow chute
The team believes it likely
was just as inaccessible
two million years ago
It is starting to look
as if the bodies might have been
intentionally placed there
Could this possibly be
some sort of burial?
There has never been evidence
of anything like this
linked to such
a primitive-looking ancestor
So we got that looming
in front of us
and don't have an answer to it
Until now, the earliest
known burials
are from about 100,000 years ago
and a much more advanced form
of early human
The team doesn't have a date yet
for the fossils of Rising Star,
but it seems unthinkable
that such a primitive-looking
creature
could be disposing of its dead
But that's what it looks like
And the age ranges of the
individuals are very similar
to what archaeologists find
in cemeteries
At the early stages
of this expedition,
they look like
a cemetery population:
very young individuals
and very old individuals
and nothing in the middle so far
It doesn't mean we're not going
to find it,
but that's what you see in a
cemetery when you dig it up
Right now it looks
a lot like that
Will it hold out to be that?
That will be a mystery
I want to see solved
And we're left with
this conundrum of, you know,
is what we are looking at
You almost don't want
to say it out loud
It's a mystery with
profound implications,
but one that will require
further analysis
before anyone is willing
to back it wholeheartedly
The excavation
is now approaching
its third and final week
Perhaps the most important bone
has been left until
near the end: the skull
Its shape and the size of its
brow ridges will be crucial
in telling them whether
the creature of Rising Star
is Australopith or Homo: human
We're going to go ahead
and bite the bullet
and take that skull out, okay?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, good, good
If only because it
gets it out of the way
Yes, I know
Not because you want it out
to see it, right?
Oh, I want it out!
A couple of reasons
we want to get it out
One, the skull
can tell you a lot
It can tell you
cranial capacity,
start getting an idea
of the shape of the skull
Is it Australopith-like
and pinched in the front,
or is it rounded
more like a human,
or is it something in between,
does it have
a sagittal crest neck?
We want to see that skull
And also the skull was probably
the most complex
initial extraction
It is fragile,
it's a thin piece of bone,
and it could break apart
We need to know whether we could
get something like that out
And we need to get it out to see
what was underneath it,
whether this was a skeleton
or whether there were
lots of individuals
associated with each other
So there was all this tension,
and it was a lot harder
to extract than we thought
Oh, I'm sure you'll find plenty
All right, stage on in after her
Good luck, everyone
Have a blast, huh?
Thank you Will do All right
Let's get you something here
Go get 'em!
Good luck
Happy hunting Thank you
Enjoy topside
The skull is extremely fragile
The team carefully scans
the area immediately around it
How big?
Yeah, those are perfect
Then they begin the laborious
process of removing
every tiny fragment of bone
surrounding the skull
Oh, we've got medium bags now
Finally, they delicately scrape
away the dirt to release it
We're done this easily
Got it
Everyone was feeling
all these points of tension
around the science of the skull,
when we knew it was imminent
coming out
We only had two people
down on the bottom,
and they were working on it,
Becca and Marina,
and working and working
and working, and finally
we kept trying to call them out
and they wouldn't come out,
because they knew they were
that close to the extraction,
and eventually it did come out
That's it
That's it
It's so fragile
With everyone holding
their breath,
praying that it doesn't break,
the skull fragment is finally
lifted and delicately placed
in a box
That's it
Then it begins its slow ascent,
leaving the cave
for the first time
in possibly millions of years
He's holding the box
Yeah, that's right,
he's holding the box,
so he can't do this, he's gotta
be much more careful than that
Yeah, all right,
there it is, all right
How fantastic
Wow
And all of those scientists
piled back in, all of the people
that spent so much time
and so much energy
coming to this moment,
went back in there,
and they lined up
in the most difficult places
up the Dragon Back to Base 1
and they knew there was a risk
that it could get damaged, if
dropped it could get destroyed
And this huge team effort
occurred as they handed this off
from one to the other,
as it moved its way
from this dark recess where it's
been for however long it's been
to the entrance of the cave
where those of us
not privileged enough to be able
to get into this system
had to wait with huge tension,
watching this passage
on the cameras
until there it was
There you go folks,
let's go get it
Great moment
It's like a Rocky moment
There is so much wonder,
no one's bored,
no one's too academic
to hold it in
Everyone is just brimming
with childlike excitement
Would you hate me
if I took this before I hug you?
Please take it
Oh, well done
I don't even want to hug you
with that thing in your hand
I'm going to give this
off to John
I'm constantly sitting there
and stopping myself and going,
"Oh my God, this is like...
It's old
"It's probably the first time
this fossil has seen
the light of the day
in millions of years,"
and so I'm continually sort of
having to stop and just think
for a moment and sort of
revel in it
It's the moment everyone
has been waiting for
They hope the skull fragment
will be the telltale piece
to identify the creature
of Rising Star
as either an Australopith
or a member of our own genus
Looking at a left frontal,
so it's this part, the orbit,
and then part of the brain case
behind the orbit
And that is
a very important piece
Large orbital ridges
with indentations behind them
would indicate Australopith
Smaller brow ridges
with evidence of a more rounded
skull would say Homo
We do have our genus
We do?
We have our genus with that
Yes, yes!
The team's verdict is clear:
they have a new member
of our genus
Did we do good?
We did good
Now the question is:
what can it tell them
about the mysterious
dawn of humanity?
We are certain that this is in
the genus Homo, our genus,
and we are certain
it's a new species
And that's where we are
right now
The idea that we've discovered
a large number of individuals,
males and females,
young and old, of a new species
in the genus Homo
In the next phase,
they'll have to piece together
and analyze the rest
of the fossil remains
Already they have
almost 2,000 bone fragments
from more than 12 individuals
The Rising Star discovery
is one of the most startling
and amazing discoveries
in all of hominin evolution
To have that many fossils
in one place is unprecedented
and took everybody by surprise
The excavation was planned
as a three-week operation
As it nears its end,
the scientists know
they will have barely scratched
the surface of what Rising Star
has to offer
I had never seen or dreamed
of anything
like the richness of this site
There aren't just hundreds
of bones,
there are thousands of bones,
it's clear
You can't blow on the ground
and it doesn't uncover
another one
They can't gently brush their
hand across it, and teeth,
and long bones don't fall out,
usually of another individual
This is going to take
a long, long, long time
As everybody goes home,
the Rising Star fossils are
carefully transported to the
University of the Witwatersrand
It was here, 90 years ago,
that Raymond Dart sparked
a firestorm
by declaring that the dawn of
humanity was in Africa
It seems fitting that it is here
too that the mysterious
early humans of Rising Star
will begin to tell their story
At a symposium six months
after the excavation,
researchers meet
for an intensive analysis
of the fossil material
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
They're in the
analytical phase here,
they're in the diagnostic phase,
and it's been an experiment
in, you know, working together,
bringing together some of
the brightest minds
on the planet with some of
the most current data sets
to analyze over 1,700 fossil
hominin remains
that we recovered
only last November
And it's been fantastic to watch
I mean it's this constant energy
of science
And you can almost feel it
in the room right now
We are total nerds,
it's nerd heaven here,
but I mean it is an
extraordinary experience
There's never been anything
like this before in the field
of hominin paleontology,
to get a group of young,
talented scholars together
to bring their new techniques
and their fresh outlooks
on the record
to newly discovered
fossil hominin remains
This certainly never happened
when I was a Ph D student
and I would have died
to have done this
As the analysis goes on, the
bones from the Rising Star cave
are finally ready
to be presented to the world
We've got a new species of
early human in the genus Homo,
and that's tremendously exciting
We've never had anything
in that transition period
between the late Australopiths
and the earliest members
of our genus in any kind
of abundance,
and boy, we have it
in abundance now
To members of the team,
the fossils suggest a creature
unlike anything ever found
before
We're looking at creatures that
are humanlike in their feet,
humanlike in their hands,
humanlike in their teeth,
everything that interacts
directly with the environment
is Homo
And everything that is sort of
central... you know, the trunk,
the architecture of the
vertebral column, the brain...
Those sorts of things
are more primitive
It's like evolution is crafting
us from the outside in
We've called the species
Homo naledi and "naledi"
means "star" in Sotho
and we've called the chamber
that the fossils come from,
it still has fantastic fossils
to be found,
the Dinaledi chamber,
which means the chamber of stars
Homo naledi is a strange mosaic
of ape and human,
small brained and small bodied
with chimp-like arms,
but with human hands, teeth,
small brows and long legs,
probably a long-distance walker
Naledi is
a surprise in very many ways
It's got an incredibly tiny
brain,
a brain that's more than
a third as small
as a modern human's brain is
Yet it's clear when you look
at the cranial shape,
the dentition, the legs,
particularly the feet
and even the hands, that this
thing is part of our genus
Here are creatures on the cusp
of becoming human,
but still very close
to the Australopith world
It makes the question
of how they got into the cave
even more intriguing
It looks like they got in there
because somebody put them there
Now, if we say that,
you have to understand
that's a very controversial
thing to say
And in so we approach it
very conservatively
We can show that there's
no signs of predation
We can show that there's
no predator that accumulates
only hominins in this way
We can show that they didn't
all get there at once
We can show there's not a flow
of material into the chamber,
and that's where we leave it
scientifically
You know, we can say, the best
hypothesis we can come up is
they were put there
If this is true, its
implications are far-reaching
They now know that
the Rising Star hominin had
a brain size in the range
between 450 and 550 cubic
centimeters
That's just slightly larger
than a chimp's
So if in fact the Rising Star
hominins are purposefully
disposing of their dead,
we're talking about
some small-brained hominins
who are doing this
And that begins to change
our thinking about sort of
the cognitive attributes and the
neural machinery that you need
to engage in that kind
of behavior
And that becomes really
interesting
The accumulation of Homo naledi
skeletons in the cave raises
the type of big question that
Raymond Dart wanted to answer
What type of creatures
were our primitive ancestors?
If the naledi skeletons
have indeed
been intentionally disposed of,
some sort of burial,
it would indicate already
quite advanced social behavior
This fits with new ways
of thinking about the transition
from ape to human
Many scientists now believe that
a key element of that transition
was the growth of ever-stronger
cooperation and social bonds
Psychologist Michael Tomasello
has spent a lifetime
comparing the social behavior
and capacities of chimpanzees
and human children
Well, there's social
and there's ultra-social
And all mammals are social
to some degree
Great apes are especially social
in the sense that they form
long-term relationships
with others
and have bonding relationships
with others, and they groom,
they support each other
in fights
So they're very highly social
creatures, but a lot of it
is organized around competition,
so a lot of it is organized
around coalitions to fight
over food and so forth
And in humans we of course
haven't lost our selfish
and competitive streak,
but we have become so much more
cooperative
Not perfectly cooperative,
but much more cooperative
The fact that we can
sit in an airplane
with 300 or 400 individuals
of breeding age
that we aren't related to
and not rip each other apart
is a uniquely human character
and it was evolved
on this landscape behind me
Because Africa is a harsh place
and we as early humans had
to evolve cooperation
in order to survive here
We didn't have big canines,
and sharp claws
We just had each other
Humans are the most highly
social primates
ever to walk the earth
We bond and form relationships
far more complex
than any other primate
So if the Rising Star chamber
is indeed a burial,
perhaps this would suggest that
here at the dawn of humanity
those more complex social bonds
had begun to take shape
This possibility will generate
fierce debate
as other scientists weigh in
But how do these discoveries
change the narrative
of human evolution?
There is an old refrain
in paleoanthropology
People always say we need more
fossils, we need more fossils,
we need more fossils,
but the fact of the matter is
more fossils just complicate
the picture
One compelling question
to be answered is
where do these new
fossil ancestors fall
on our family tree?
Dating the fossils is proving
to be difficult and complex
It will take time
The thing that's hard about it
is we don't know how old
those fossils are, and we can
tell what they look like
because we have so many of them,
but if they're 3,000 years old
or if they are three million
years old it's going to mean
a very different thing for how
it changes our understanding
of human evolution
Because we have a date,
things are a little clearer
with the Malapa finds
At 1 97 million years old,
most scientists believe sediba
is too late to be a
direct ancestor of ours
Our genus Homo was already
established by the time
sediba came along
But even if sediba
is not our direct ancestor,
it does show there were
many different types
of primitive ancestors living
together at the same time
Okay, yeah, yeah, keep pulling
Great, great!
The quality of the material
that Lee is uncovering
is really phenomenal
Sediba shows that we had
more than two or three species
in South Africa
1 9 million years ago
It's a very interesting find
It shows that there were
diversity
It's a beautiful material,
but I don't think that sediba
was ancestral to our genus Homo
Whether or not they are
our direct ancestors,
the fossils at Malapa
and Rising Star point us toward
a new way of thinking
about human evolution
We have the strong tendency
to want to draw simple lines
between species,
and make nice family trees,
and we have to understand
that that's our need
That's our desire
That's not necessarily
the way that nature works
It's very natural to think about
human evolution as a sort of
family tree in deep time
But evolution is much more
complex than that
Evolution is bushy,
there are different experiments,
populations try different
adaptations,
they try different ways
of being about the world
Paleoanthropologists talk about
the bushiness of human evolution
as a metaphor for the many types
of early hominins
and the difficulty of knowing
which one led to us,
but even that metaphor
may not do justice
to the way evolution works
Nature is messy
Nature is complicated
Nature does not really respect
our desire to put fossils
into neat bins and to sort of
name nice neat species
Both sediba and naledi
have a mosaic of Australopith
and Homo features
They seem to show
that at the dawn of humanity
there were multiple evolutionary
experiments with small-bodied,
small-brained,
upright-walking apes
Scientists now know some
of these varieties
of late Australopith
and early Homo lived together
at the same time
And some of them may have been
interbreeding
These aren't fully formed
species and there's a lot
of interbreeding between
these groups
Some adaptive features
are evolving in one group,
other adaptive features
are evolving in other groups,
and by interbreeding those
are coming together
And if that's the case we may
never be able to draw neat lines
between any of these groups
and later Homo
Perhaps now we need
a new metaphor to help us
understand our evolution,
one that expresses better
the dynamic and fluid nature
of it
Now perhaps the best metaphor
is a braided stream
And that's brought on
by discovery of these
mosaic hominins like naledi,
sediba, and others
They're showing us there's
lots of experiments going on
Some of these evolutionary
experiments died out,
others came together
and interbred
The ebb and flow of genes
through these groups
was probably so complex
that we may have to give up hope
of discovering a simple
linear evolution
So imagine in your mind
a glacier in the top of a valley
and what happens is as it melts,
it creates many, many rivulets
and some of them are large
and some are small,
and they all move off
down the valley
And almost inevitably at the end
of that valley is going to be
a lake, of which some,
maybe the majority,
but not all are contributing to
I think we have to begin looking
at these species we're finding
as almost individual channels
in a braided stream
It's clear they have something
to do with the end-population
and that's us, the billions
of human beings alive today
But it's hard to tell
which one's the most responsible
for us being here
The new finds on the plains
of South Africa are adding
a vital new chapter to the story
of our origins
The tantalizing gap
in the fossil record
at the beginning of our genus
is being slowly filled in
Finally, there is light
at the "Dawn of Humanity"