I’d come to South Africa I’d launch
myself into exploration and out I went
looking to combine these technologies
satellite imagery in handheld GPS
started mapping sites I saw that cave
sites formed in linear lines I saw
fossil sites clustered together
intrigued me so much I put together a
list of targets print them on an a4
sheet loaded my dog into the car and on
the first day out I found 21 new cave
sites became an addictive process by
July that year 2008 I found more than
600 cave sites
I discovered more than 60 new fossil
sites and I thought this was my legacy
that’s fantastic
this will be my gift to future
generations of these discoveries began
in a situation that I found myself in
back in the 1990s a situation where
exploration appeared to have been
finished in the field of
paleoanthropology in the search for
human origins I found my own University
closing my exploration program I found
myself in a situation of assisting in a
job search to find a new director to
push the paleoanthropology the human
origin study in a new direction towards
technology towards the application of
using modern technology to study
existing fossils not to find new ones a
young man that was going to take over my
directorship position and lead us in the
new direction was killed in a motorcycle
accident in London but we had already
invested in that direction we had post
doctoral students computers everything
and one of them a young Kenyan named
Jobe Kibby came into my office and said
would I be his postdoctoral supervisor
now with this tragedy I said no because
I can’t be you’re a lab guy I’m a feel
god but I just found this site it’s
bugging me so you want to learn to be a
field guy let’s go out to the site and
see what has to offer
August 15 2008 Jobe myself a dog towel
my then nine-year-old son Matthew
walked up to the side I got to the edge
of it we’re looking around I said go
find fossils and with that off Matthew
and towel win and I was talking to Joe
man I said you know I don’t know why
they left this little hole miners had
actually found this and split a couple
of blasts into it but then they left it
and as I finish saying that Matthew
who’s now 15 yards off the site in the
middle of grass says dad I found a
fossil I almost didn’t go and look
but he’s my 9 year old son and I like
all of you you want to encourage fossil
hunting so I started walking towards him
and this is what I saw and five meters
away I knew his in my life were going to
change forever it’s sticking out of the
side of that rock I saw a hominid
clavicle Matthew says I cursed I don’t
remember that and I turned the rock over
and there sticking out of the back of it
was a jaw a tooth and that would lead to
an extraordinary time Matthew had found
a skeleton one of the rarest things you
can ever find that skeleton would be
part of this skull we would eventually
find another one and then another one
and then another one and then another
one we would call that little site
malapa and it would for a moment in
history be one of if not the richest
early hominid site on the continent of
Africa skeletons in remarkable pristine
condition the organic material I threw
myself into this this was a paleo
anthropological equivalent of winning
the lottery we don’t find these things
over the years following that 2011 2012
2013 we would have the time of our
scientific lives something like 15
papers in the journal science more in
the journal Nature
dozens of peer-reviewed articles it was
living a scientific dream it was our
version of a scientific lottery all from
a little site that looks like that a
hole in the ground and I realized at
that moment this was about
June July of 2013 that I’ve made an
error that error was pretty fundamental
and pretty simple I had not been
exploring since Matthew had said dad I
found a fossil I had literally won the
lottery why would you fair enough to say
that I was putting together this great
scientific team we were producing this
research but I’d not gone back out and
gone to those hundreds and hundreds and
hundreds of sites that I discovered
walking those hills and so I decided to
go back out in the field then if you can
imagine that this landscape is less than
45 minutes outside of the city of
Johannesburg it looks like that and when
you look at that you probably see one of
these beautiful rolling African
landscapes
but that’s not what I see I see a giant
block of Swiss cheese because underneath
that dolomitic limestone are a network
of hundreds of kilometres of caves but
most of them are not these big cavernous
type caves that some of you may envision
when you hear the word cave most of them
are these small narrow trenches ins and
splits in the ground forming along
ancient fault lines and I was thinking
how am I going to do this I had done
cave exploration in this region back in
the 1990’s and I had looked and squeezed
my way through these things in the 90s
and did not found much as I was thinking
of how I would move forward with a
exploration program to take my surface
images and move them underground
a pirate walked into my office it was a
former student of mine Pedro Boshoff he
had gone off diamond prospecting in
Central Africa and failed and it come
back destitute and said I made a mistake
I paleoanthropologist my love please can
you give me a job I want to get back
into it and I said you know your timings
good I want to get underground and Pedro
quickly found out something that I
already knew that liked me he had no
longer become physiologically
appropriate for much of this underground
work
these are narrow squeezes but I said you
know get out there and go to the areas
we know the best I had learned something
from a lapa and so he went to the caving
club and found two young men who were
physiologically appropriate on the right
was Rick hunter who was a member of
Mensa who’d been kicked out of high
school for blowing up the high school
science lab that is a true story and was
working as a builder and on the Left
Steve Tucker an accountant by day we
showed them what we were looking for
kind of cast photographs and sent them
into some of these deeper recesses Steve
and Rick went into the site that they
expected the least from perhaps the
best-known cave site in South Africa if
not in Africa the rising star system it
was completely mapped or so they thought
until they work their way on that late
evening up an area after spending four
and a half hours going through torturous
sort of little squeezes and crevices up
a thing that’s called Dragons back on
the map a series of collapses it’s knife
dead they were 40 meters underground
they climbed about 20 meters to look
down a little slot so seven and a half
inches wide into the darkness and of
course they went down down more than 60
feet into this narrow slot squeezing
their way and not knowing if it was
going to open up at any time and down
you drop at the bottom they entered a
little narrow passage and there they
began to immediately see small white
bits on the ground that looked like
bones they followed them in which led to
a slightly larger chamber and there they
saw material on the ground they thought
looked a lot like what I told them we
were looking for October 1st 2013 I was
sitting at home the front intercom at my
gate went I picked up the intercom and
there a voice said you gotta want to let
us in it was creepy just like that
it was Pedro and I opened the gate
eventually and let him in and there
Steve opened up his laptop and I saw the
most extraordinary pictures I thought I
would never see in my life
you
myself into exploration and out I went
looking to combine these technologies
satellite imagery in handheld GPS
started mapping sites I saw that cave
sites formed in linear lines I saw
fossil sites clustered together
intrigued me so much I put together a
list of targets print them on an a4
sheet loaded my dog into the car and on
the first day out I found 21 new cave
sites became an addictive process by
July that year 2008 I found more than
600 cave sites
I discovered more than 60 new fossil
sites and I thought this was my legacy
that’s fantastic
this will be my gift to future
generations of these discoveries began
in a situation that I found myself in
back in the 1990s a situation where
exploration appeared to have been
finished in the field of
paleoanthropology in the search for
human origins I found my own University
closing my exploration program I found
myself in a situation of assisting in a
job search to find a new director to
push the paleoanthropology the human
origin study in a new direction towards
technology towards the application of
using modern technology to study
existing fossils not to find new ones a
young man that was going to take over my
directorship position and lead us in the
new direction was killed in a motorcycle
accident in London but we had already
invested in that direction we had post
doctoral students computers everything
and one of them a young Kenyan named
Jobe Kibby came into my office and said
would I be his postdoctoral supervisor
now with this tragedy I said no because
I can’t be you’re a lab guy I’m a feel
god but I just found this site it’s
bugging me so you want to learn to be a
field guy let’s go out to the site and
see what has to offer
August 15 2008 Jobe myself a dog towel
my then nine-year-old son Matthew
walked up to the side I got to the edge
of it we’re looking around I said go
find fossils and with that off Matthew
and towel win and I was talking to Joe
man I said you know I don’t know why
they left this little hole miners had
actually found this and split a couple
of blasts into it but then they left it
and as I finish saying that Matthew
who’s now 15 yards off the site in the
middle of grass says dad I found a
fossil I almost didn’t go and look
but he’s my 9 year old son and I like
all of you you want to encourage fossil
hunting so I started walking towards him
and this is what I saw and five meters
away I knew his in my life were going to
change forever it’s sticking out of the
side of that rock I saw a hominid
clavicle Matthew says I cursed I don’t
remember that and I turned the rock over
and there sticking out of the back of it
was a jaw a tooth and that would lead to
an extraordinary time Matthew had found
a skeleton one of the rarest things you
can ever find that skeleton would be
part of this skull we would eventually
find another one and then another one
and then another one and then another
one we would call that little site
malapa and it would for a moment in
history be one of if not the richest
early hominid site on the continent of
Africa skeletons in remarkable pristine
condition the organic material I threw
myself into this this was a paleo
anthropological equivalent of winning
the lottery we don’t find these things
over the years following that 2011 2012
2013 we would have the time of our
scientific lives something like 15
papers in the journal science more in
the journal Nature
dozens of peer-reviewed articles it was
living a scientific dream it was our
version of a scientific lottery all from
a little site that looks like that a
hole in the ground and I realized at
that moment this was about
June July of 2013 that I’ve made an
error that error was pretty fundamental
and pretty simple I had not been
exploring since Matthew had said dad I
found a fossil I had literally won the
lottery why would you fair enough to say
that I was putting together this great
scientific team we were producing this
research but I’d not gone back out and
gone to those hundreds and hundreds and
hundreds of sites that I discovered
walking those hills and so I decided to
go back out in the field then if you can
imagine that this landscape is less than
45 minutes outside of the city of
Johannesburg it looks like that and when
you look at that you probably see one of
these beautiful rolling African
landscapes
but that’s not what I see I see a giant
block of Swiss cheese because underneath
that dolomitic limestone are a network
of hundreds of kilometres of caves but
most of them are not these big cavernous
type caves that some of you may envision
when you hear the word cave most of them
are these small narrow trenches ins and
splits in the ground forming along
ancient fault lines and I was thinking
how am I going to do this I had done
cave exploration in this region back in
the 1990’s and I had looked and squeezed
my way through these things in the 90s
and did not found much as I was thinking
of how I would move forward with a
exploration program to take my surface
images and move them underground
a pirate walked into my office it was a
former student of mine Pedro Boshoff he
had gone off diamond prospecting in
Central Africa and failed and it come
back destitute and said I made a mistake
I paleoanthropologist my love please can
you give me a job I want to get back
into it and I said you know your timings
good I want to get underground and Pedro
quickly found out something that I
already knew that liked me he had no
longer become physiologically
appropriate for much of this underground
work
these are narrow squeezes but I said you
know get out there and go to the areas
we know the best I had learned something
from a lapa and so he went to the caving
club and found two young men who were
physiologically appropriate on the right
was Rick hunter who was a member of
Mensa who’d been kicked out of high
school for blowing up the high school
science lab that is a true story and was
working as a builder and on the Left
Steve Tucker an accountant by day we
showed them what we were looking for
kind of cast photographs and sent them
into some of these deeper recesses Steve
and Rick went into the site that they
expected the least from perhaps the
best-known cave site in South Africa if
not in Africa the rising star system it
was completely mapped or so they thought
until they work their way on that late
evening up an area after spending four
and a half hours going through torturous
sort of little squeezes and crevices up
a thing that’s called Dragons back on
the map a series of collapses it’s knife
dead they were 40 meters underground
they climbed about 20 meters to look
down a little slot so seven and a half
inches wide into the darkness and of
course they went down down more than 60
feet into this narrow slot squeezing
their way and not knowing if it was
going to open up at any time and down
you drop at the bottom they entered a
little narrow passage and there they
began to immediately see small white
bits on the ground that looked like
bones they followed them in which led to
a slightly larger chamber and there they
saw material on the ground they thought
looked a lot like what I told them we
were looking for October 1st 2013 I was
sitting at home the front intercom at my
gate went I picked up the intercom and
there a voice said you gotta want to let
us in it was creepy just like that
it was Pedro and I opened the gate
eventually and let him in and there
Steve opened up his laptop and I saw the
most extraordinary pictures I thought I
would never see in my life
you
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