New discoveries in human origins

Firstly, it's an absolute pleasure to be here in your beautiful country—a country that was at the heart of the western exploration of the world and the beginnings of that great Age of Exploration. I'm going to be talking about things today that take you from outer space to Inner Space and some of the adventures and explorations of my colleagues that I'm going to use to argue that we've yet to find the greatest Age of Exploration—that we are living in the moment of the greatest Age of Exploration.

I'm going to do that by demonstrating our own discoveries of my team, over 160 scientists involved in it, from institutions across the world, largely working in southern Africa. Now, the story I'm going to tell you is going to be full of these "wow" moments, and you're allowed to go "wow" anytime I show you a great picture. But those "wow" moments are also tempered with the idea that exploration is a marathon, not a sprint. It is not a moment of discovery, and I certainly paid my dues when I came to Africa first in 1989 and then moved on to South Africa in search of what were considered at that time the rarest sought-after objects on the planet—the remains of ancient human relatives.

Almost immediately in that exploration in 1991, I made my first discovery: two hominid teeth—two single teeth at the site of Gladysvale in South Africa. That launched my career. Two teeth. At that time, there were probably more scientists who studied the remains of ancient human relatives from Africa than there were fossils that we studied. Those two teeth actually got me into National Geographic magazine—my first exposure to that other organization of explorers. I thought this was my moment. It was going to launch my career, and the next time I did a brush stroke at that site, the jaw or half of a jaw of an ancient human relative would appear, and I would be able to dine out at cocktail parties and conferences like this for the rest of my life on that fragment.

It didn't happen. Seventeen years of continuing exploration, and that big discovery never came. I was making small discoveries, having a great career, moving up that sort of ladder of academia at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. But it was not until I became the last human being on Earth to discover Google Earth in 2008 and used it to identify missing sites across southern Africa that I had missed and other scientists had missed, adding hundreds of potential new sites using this free technology, that one day, on August 15th, 2008, investigating one of these sites 1 kilometer away from the site of Gladysvale where I'd spent 17 years looking, my son made the biggest discovery of my career.

He said, "Dad, I found a fossil." And I walked over, and 5 meters away from him, I could see sticking out of the side of that rock this picture taken seconds after he uttered those words—an image that would change my life and his forever. There, sticking outside, was a hominid clavicle—a little piece of the shoulder girdle. Now, that was a remarkable thing because, at that moment, I was probably the world's only expert in that bone. I'd done my Ph.D. on them. There had only been six discovered in all of history in the field of paleoanthropology, and I was looking at one. Matthew said I cursed; I don't believe that. But this would come from that discovery.

I said you are allowed to go "ooh" every time we do something like that. It was an extraordinary part of what would be skeletons of a brand new species of ancient human relative, Australopithecus sediba, 2 million years old. We would find first one skeleton, then a second, then multiple individuals at a site, and my life was changed. I suddenly was getting all the Nature and Science papers you could ever want. This skull and the fossils we found with it were on the cover of Science magazine three times. And for those of you who aren't academics, that's like if you were a rock star and you were on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine three times. It was incredible—living the dreams.

But I stopped exploring because I'd won the paleoanthropology lottery with this discovery. Who would keep exploring? It would take five years and me being actually locked out of the site as we developed a laboratory over the site to protect it because we were finding organic remains and other important material that I would realize that mistake—that I'd stopped exploring—when Matthew said, "Dad, I found a fossil." And so I enlisted some other explorers—amateur explorers and former students—to go into the networking labyrinth of caves just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, that I had put pins on with that earlier 2008 Google Earth study. They went out, of course, going to all the sites they didn't know first but eventually worked to some that they did know. And in that process, as they went into a cave called the Rising Star Cave System—a vast network of caves that was very, very well known in the region—they came and rang my doorbell one night at 9:00 in Johannesburg. I almost didn't answer.

And there, on the other end, was a former student named Pedro Boshoff. He said, "You're going to want to let us in," in a creepy voice just like that. And I almost didn't. Then I did. And then, when he and Steve Tucker, who's in this image here on the left, actually opened his laptop, I saw images that I thought, "No paleoanthropologist..."—you're allowed to go "ooh" every time there's something incredible—you should. There. That is the jaw of an ancient human relative. I knew instantly what it was. I could tell by the dimensions that the homemade sewing aid and tape measure that they used for the pictures showed that this was formed like something truly ancient. But here was the thing: first, they described it as being from an impossible-to-reach cave almost 250 meters into a system, almost 36 meters below the surface, but only after you descended through a chute-like slit and labyrinth narrowing to 16 to 18 centimeters in places, averaging 20 centimeters.

In this pristine cave, lying on the floor, were these fossils. No one in history had ever seen anything like that. Remember that skull I showed you of sediba that Matthew had been responsible for? The first one—that took 20,000 preparation hours to get from its state encased in a rock to that. These were just lying there. After going and visiting the site and sending my then 15-year-old, very skinny son down to look and make sure it was real—because I'm father of the year and like to risk his life—I did not tell his mother. And he brought pictures back, and he said, "Dad, it's beautiful. My hands were shaking for minutes before I could take a picture."

I decided I had to launch one of the most ambitious expeditions ever. I had to send human beings into a space that only very few could even fit in, have the skills to excavate these fossils, and they had to excavate what were potentially some of the most important parts of a skeleton ever discovered. So I did what any scientist would do when tasked with finding explorers of that nature: I put a Facebook ad out. You don't have to read that. It says I need skinny scientists. I need you not to be claustrophobic, work well in teams. I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do; I might kill you. I didn't say that. I'm not going to pay you, and you have to drop everything and come out to South Africa because we're launching an expedition in a place. I thought there were like three or four people who had the qualifications—PhD in paleoanthropology and things like that. I had over 60 applicants, and of that, I selected the five most qualified, which just happened to be women.

And we launched in November of 2013 the Rising Star Expedition. And within moments, we realized that this was an extraordinary discovery. There were fossils everywhere. As the scientists kitted up and went in, I would watch them on screens looking like astronauts in these remote spaces where I knew I would never be. My ego wouldn't fit through that sort of narrow process. And you'll see by the faces of these explorers very quickly that within the first days, we realized that we were in one of the most exceptional discovery moments in all of history. By day two, we had at least two individuals. By the end of the week, we had the largest assemblage of ancient human relatives ever found at a single site in all of history. And by the end of the expedition, we had found more individual fossils than had been discovered in the history of this field. And I think you can see the excitement of exploration in the field of history on the faces of those remarkable scientists.

This is not an easy place to go. This is the easy part. We move in and out of this on the way back into this deep chamber. This is called Superman's Crawl. You'll see Rick demonstrates admirably why you have to extend one arm out and slither it like this. Not the hard part. Once you are through this space, you enter an area called Dragon's Back. That's our kitting up area where we rope up, and then you begin the climb. I love looking at the claustrophobes in the room who are all cowering down. It gets worse. Don't worry, it gets worse. You then climb up this fallen rock face, climbing back up about 15 meters in height. If you fall over either side, you die. And there you enter the chute. Now it begins to get really hard. Now you have to descend. And I want you to look at Steve. Look at the width of his helmet. This is the easiest and widest part. You will journey 12 meters down vertically, traversing 6 meters at the same time, where your legs, your pelvis, your chest, your head, and your arms are in different positions all the way down. It's easy going down; getting up is another thing. No ropes, no nothing. Nothing will fit.

You want to see what it looks like when you come out of it? Remember that this is not the hard part. It looks like this. You may understand why until recently only 46 human beings had ever been in this space. And yet here, in this labyrinth of caves, was a remarkable assemblage of fossils. They were the only thing in the chamber. Nothing but them. No animals, no one else but them. It is a labyrinth-like system—difficult to traverse, difficult to move within, in and out, these extraordinary explorers and scientists. And we would continue to make discoveries even after that first remarkable expedition. We would name the chamber the Dinaledi Chamber or the Chamber of Many Stars in the Sotho language. And the fossils were stars—extraordinary fossils.

Skulls like this—slightly larger on the left, slightly smaller on the right—a tiny brain slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee. We were looking at extraordinary fossils that our field—a field of scraps and fragments—had never seen before, like these articulated feet, just literally articulated like that, buried slightly underneath the surface. They looked primitive in their anatomy, yet some parts looked more advanced. Their hands were like human hands. You can see the elongated, opposable thumb characteristic of us, but the fingers were more curved—a powerful grip. They were tiny. We had skeletons. They had a shoulder like an ape, a spine like a mini-Neanderthal. They had a pelvis like an ancient hominid—should have been 3 million years old—and long, skinny legs that ended in those very human-like feet and long, powerful arms but human, largely human, in length, ending in those powerful, prehensile grip hands.

We knew everything about them—multiple individuals, everything from neonates, infants, young children, teenagers, young adults, and the elderly. And yet they were alone. We knew they were primitive. We knew they were odd. And then we would begin to analyze this whole magic picture, as I describe, from the feet to the head. We had every single bone in the body except one and usually multiple times. That's the hyoid we were missing. We'll find that soon. Remarkable. And so we described a new species. We called it Homo naledi, putting it within our genus, although that was a controversial and debatable thing because the brain was so very small and many parts of the body were much more primitive than any other species that had ever been placed within our genus.

They were surprisingly tall. They averaged probably 4'7" to 5'3". That's pretty big. That's well within small human range. Yet sitting on top of that is that little pinhead. They were new. They were new to science. We didn't know how old they were. No one had ever had to date a situation like this. Our colleagues happily told us how old they were, though. They said these must be 2 to 2.5 million years old. They look like the most primitive members of our genus, yet they were lying on the floor and in the floor of this cave, just in soft dirt.

We had a problem. We had all these different hominids lying in this situation way back in the cave, all alone, and we could not understand how they got there. And so we did the first of many controversial statements we would make about this discovery. We said that in this case, the evidence points to them not being there because of some catastrophe. There's no evidence they were washed in there by water, killed by anything. They are the healthiest dead things you'll ever see. They didn't come there all at once. It wasn't some catastrophic collapse. They came in one by one by one. We could see that they were imposed over each other over time and time again. And so we said that we believe that this species, H. naledi, was deliberately disposing of its dead.

That went over like a lead balloon because that, at that time, was considered a human thing. It was our thing. In fact, after losing stone tools and mourning and the ideas of the creation of aesthetics, of possibly art, to animals over time, pretty much all we had left to identify ourselves, define us from the animal kingdom, was that we universally practice ritual mortuary practices—repeated mortuary practices. All humans do it. We also all use drugs—mind-altering substances—but that's a different thing.

But I was worried when we made that hypothesis that it would be something that we could never, ever prove. And then we dated them. As I said, our colleagues knew how old they were based on the brain size. They said they would be back here at 2 to 3 million years. H. naledi was not at 2 to 3 million years. It was at 250,000 years ago. That was staggering to the world. It violated the idea that we had been in this continuous, ever-increasing brain size race, where the bigger-brained species like first Homo habilis, then Homo erectus, then humans and Neanderthals would wipe out all other species around it. Yet there we were, H. naledi, at a much later date, when we thought only modern humans lived in Africa.

Why is that a particularly big deal? Well, at that time in history, the idea that the origins of modernity only sat in Africa, and in particular in southern Africa where we were making these discoveries at that time period, shortly thereafter we would see the emergence of the behavioral characters, at least as much as archaeology can lead you to that, that would lead to the rise of the human mind. Things like these artistic scratches on ochre that are just over 80,000 years or around that age—the infinite toolkit, bone points, potentially sewing needles, spears, hafted spears, all these types of things, adornment, and eventually, sometime after 80,000 years, the burial of the dead, indicating ritualized mortuary practice. Yet something staggering was a problem in this. You could place every single fossil of a large-brained Homo sapiens from that time period on probably one of the chairs you're sitting on now from that entire period.

And yet we were sitting with thousands and thousands of remains of this other species right in the middle of that space. I'm going to show you a cool thing. Not many people in the world have seen this image. I was sitting watching my excavators work a few years ago, staring over their shoulders through images that I would come to sometimes hate—these black and white images that would pop to color. And as one of my excavators, what had become known as underground astronauts, moved in front of the cameras and then moved away, it flipped to infrared, and I saw this. Do you see it? That is what they were excavating. That oval—that is all bones of an individual they were bringing to the surface. They had started over here where we'd done our original work and hit sterile ground until they hit this oval. And in that moment of looking in infrared, I saw the outlines of a hole that was dug into the ground. A hole dug into the ground that we quickly realized had a body in it. They were graves.

A nonhuman species, something patently not in our genus, was digging holes in the ground and putting bodies in them and covering them with dirt from those holes. We would then find more like these. This one in that entrance area beneath where Rick came through. You can see a horizontal grave dug into a slope. This one we took out intact in a plaster jacket. You can see the outline of it. We CT-scanned it in my wife's x-ray machine—she's a radiologist—and we saw an individual, a child about 13 years of age. We'd find two other faces in there—a neonate and this. Do you see those blue lines right there? That's a hand. Do you see the orange thing, which is conveniently labeled "rock"? That is a tool-shaped rock that no human being has ever seen except in this image. This is being produced at the synchrotron in Grenoble, France, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, and you are looking at what looks like a tool buried with the H. naledi in the hand of a 13-year-old H. naledi child. A nonhuman species is the only artifact like that in the entire system.

It looks like other things that seem important. This on the right is a tool from the site of Blombos dating to 80,000 years old and, because of the ochre-like scratches on it, is considered the very first art by humans on the planet. When we began to publish this, you can imagine I was quite nervous. I knew that this would not be popular with my colleagues in the archaeological community. This was now pressing beyond mortuary practices; this is talking about burial, ritual practices related to us. And so I lost 25 kilos after COVID and decided to make an attempt to get in, which I did. I got in. It was terrible. Getting out was worse. I became the 47th human being in there, and I was extraordinarily glad I did.

Because after the terrible, awful, horrible descent, I entered this chamber and began to narrate my journey. And as I looked at that passage to the Dinaledi Chamber, 7 meters beyond, you reach the other burial chamber. I looked at it and I said to myself in the narration, "It looks like a door." And then you hear me pause because I had seen something. Like any human, I look at a door, and what do we do? We look for the signs that tell us what the door means. And there, on the left of that passage, were signs—engravings that every one of my explorers had walked right by. They actually had something put in them. We'll take a closer look. You see the fish-shaped engraving here, the crosses, the upside-down scratches. That material seems to be a foreign substance that is brought in and imposed one after each other. There were ladder-like shapes. There were triangles, which you can clearly see over here. Squares, the ladders, they're carving your X's that are carved inside that look very similar, if you remember, to that earliest art.

They even knew about Twitter 250,000 years ago and drew hashtags. I'm kidding, please. Carving deep into a rock that is 4.7 on the Mohs hardness scale. A fingernail is about 2.5. That's halfway to a diamond and a log scale. There were pounding marks throughout it where they pounded it. You can see where they had erased with dirt older and then would carve through again. This stuff is deeply, deeply impressive into this incredibly hard, 2.9-billion-year-old rock. They are symbols done over and over. And remember, in a space where we have no evidence of humans being—we know every human that has ever been in that space, and there's no evidence of anyone else. Only they and their dead, buried in holes in the ground underneath them. That's polarized on the bottom, not on the top. And just look at the depth as they carve through this ancient fossil. That's a stromatolite. As they carve through, you can even see the order in which these deep scratches were made. Anyone that looks at Paleolithic art or engravings would see similarity in some of these. They look like the earliest form. And as I said there, Paleo, it says multiple carvings imposed on each other. This one, which I was showing you, is simply the last one. The reason I put it in blue is because I had an almost visual optical hallucination when I hit it with black light and it floated out. Maybe over drinks one night I'll explain why I think that happened.

They are remarkable, not just because they exist, but they are hundreds of thousands of years before we will see humans making those and other species. Do you see the one on the left? That one is the H. naledi. This one was done by a Neanderthal 60,000 years ago in Gorham's Cave. How incredible—one done by a creature with a mind the size of a chimpanzee and the other by a near relative of ours, Neanderthals. Maybe it's just because they're geometric shapes, maybe not. It is interesting when you look at them in firelight. And here we have simulated firelight, that the rock around them does not animate, but they do.

While I was in that chamber, I also was staring at these burials. And it had been a great question of how were they there? They couldn't see, of course, and no one thought a creature with a brain that small could see in the dark. And of course, they couldn't. Because when I looked up, I saw cache and soot on the ceiling. My explorers had never looked up. The evidence for fire was right above them. Simultaneously with that discovery, my mentee, Dr. Keneiloe Molopyane, was leading an excavation in Dragon's Back, where we used to kit up, and she found a fire hearth at the same moment. Burnt bone was then found throughout. It had been in front of us the whole time. Sometimes scientists can be blind too—blind by our own biases of what should and shouldn't be there.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I can tell you, we're finding structures back there—built structures like these piled rocks hundreds of meters back, and you can see bones that are inside of those. Why? We do not know as of yet, but they were using this space and place as a cultural site—a nonhuman cultural site—hundreds of thousands of years before ours existed, and they are likely not related to us. An independent evolution of that. Why are we surprised? Why does this cause hysteria amongst colleagues? It's large. I mean, we know that cetaceans have cultures. Crows, corvids have cultures. Chimpanzees, gorillas certainly have cultures. Elephants have cultures. And yet we had denied the idea that these lineages of ancient human relatives might have also had cultures that were as complex as ours.

And I think it is likely because of a tendency for even scientists to drive towards the very harmful idea of human exceptionalism. We must describe everything as if we are unique. But what these discoveries are leaning towards is that we got the record wrong, but in a most beautiful way. And if we missed things like this in what was probably one of the hardest fields of science to exist in all of history, where there were more scientists than objects, think of how wrong we've probably gotten everything else.

I often tell students that we have misdefined exploration. I say that humbly in this group because I think there's a sense that exploration is just going places where others have not been, seeing things, being the first. The first does not matter. What matters is being the first to understand. Understand, to comprehend, to truly be aware of what you have seen and recognized that no one else has before. That should be the definition of exploration.

And that is why I say this is the moment of that. You are the greatest age of explorers. With all due respect to this great city we sit in and great country, you are. Because for the first time in all of human history, you hold the sum total of all human knowledge in your pocket. You can understand, identify anything you see or find in places familiar to you and unfamiliar to you. And if you don't understand it, you can phone a friend. And now we will also see an age where artificial intelligence and machine learning will inform and instruct us and ask that powerful question: Has anyone else in all of human history ever seen this before? Have they understood it? Welcome, one and all, fellow explorers and colleagues and friends and visitors, to the greatest Age of Exploration. Take from me this, if nothing else, from this story: persistence. Never stop exploring.

Thank you very much, everyone.

Thanks for the transcript go out to RoosterRedux! Thanks to another frequent contributor for the link!

Where are the foramen magnums located?

H. naledi was not at 2 to 3 million years. It was at 250,000 years ago. That was staggering to the world. It violated the idea that we had been in this continuous, ever-increasing brain size race, where the bigger-brained species like first Homo habilis, then Homo erectus, then humans and Neanderthals would wipe out all other species around it. Yet there we were, H. naledi, at a much later date, when we thought only modern humans lived in Africa.

Remarkable! I believe that some day primitive fossils like these will be found with an even newer date.

I have one problem with human and near-human cave discoveries - bones, tools, sculpture, paintings - all of it.

There is literally zero light inside caves.

You cannot - literally - see your hand in front of your face.

How did pre-historic humans see inside caves? Why would they leave artifacts where no one else would ever see them?

Fire is out of the question.

Either the fire burns up all your oxygen, or it chokes you to death with smoke.

I have never seen this issue addressed before in the scientific literature.

Any explanation would be pure speculation.

Either the fire burns up all your oxygen

Or a troop of monkeys seeking shelter in a cave from a storm use up the available air and succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning

Depending on depth of the cave, light from the opening can carry far inside the cave.

Very interesting.

A primitive hominid managed to exist alongside modern humans up to 250,000 years ago.

They were, obviously, very capable creatures.

And, obviously, they succumbed to modern humans.

However, the populations of both were very likely very small at the time.

Fire is out of the question.

False assumption.

Most cave explorers and miners used candles (a very small fire) for thousands of years. Before that, torches were used.

Small fires of particular materials produce very little smoke and use very little oxygen. The article explains they found evidence of fires in the areas they were searching.

Re: "False assumption. Most cave explorers and miners used candles..."

Candles date back 3,000 years.

European cave art was created 30,000 years ago.

The fossils in the article were two million years old.

Interesting.

Reading this indicated to me this guy is a showman/charlatan type, kind of like a Neil deGrasse Tyson, but worse in a way. It was not scientific and overtly self-promoting.

So I look him up and see he finds little people, pre human supposedly, all over the place and his claims are “controversial.”

marktwain noted that torches were used before candles, and the fossils in the article are 250,000 years old, not two million.

All due respect, but you know not what you’re espousing.

Watch this https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/unknown-cave-of-bones-trailer

and read the following

https://www.science.org/content/article/israeli-cave-offers-clues-about-when-humans-mastered-fire

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ashes-oldest-controlled-fire

https://www.archaeology.org.za/news/2012/April/earliest-evidence-fire-use

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/04/1078358126/building-a-fire-in-a-cave-is-not-easy-early-humans-figured-out-how

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8143000/

and finally:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250497

and get back to those of us who understand the concept of ‘science’, because the evidence of repetitive activity in caves at innumerous sites around the globe demonstrates the folly of your statements.

That stated, I cannot deny the possibility - frankly, the PROBABILITY - that some early hominids might have feared, respected or otherwise deified caves in some reverence for those who died mysterious deaths due to CO poisoning (obviously unknown until 1716). Still, our ancestors persisted and stayed active at nearly all caves around the world throughout history.

The Indiana Jones hat worn at an indoor lecture clearly is a self-promotion device, however, if we didn’t have people in science willing to buck convention and say things they knew were going to be unpopular with their colleagues, we wouldn’t have quantum entanglement, continental drift, germ theory, genetic inheritance, Avogadro’s Law. heavenly bodies with elliptical orbits, or a heliocentric solar system (among others).

"...adding hundreds of potential new sites using this free technology....

Incorrect. G**gle might not be charging you fees directly for use of their technology but nothing they do is without cost, to you and to all of us. There is no free lunch, especially where G**gle is concerned.

According to wikipedia (I checked) all australopithecines were bipedal. I don’t think they could have reached that conclusion apart all australopithecine skulls having an anteriorly-located foramen magnum.

“he finds little people, pre human supposedly, all over the place and his claims are “controversial.”
^

He and 40+ qualified archeologists found “the little peoples” GRAVEYARD.

Bet on bruised egos surfacing worldwide...

They did use fire, because they didn’t have time travel to come up and ask your opinion.

I don’t agree with you at all.

Your analogy does not reflect the different types of science.

One hard.

Avogadro’s number, Mendelian inheritance had nothing to do with self promotion or controversy.

They exist because they are inherent physical properties.

“ He and 40+ qualified archeologists found “the little peoples” GRAVEYARD.”

Settled science, eh?

Must be true because Science.

Just like Al Gore says.