extraordinary people doing extraordinary
things by the end of a 21-day excavation
we had discovered the richest early
hominid site ever discovered this site
is one mile away from the site of sterk
frente it’s less than half that distance
from the second best known site in the
entire continent of Africa the side of
Swart krons 800 meters away it was right
under our nose it was an incredible
environment of science there we had a
fossil tent where we kept joking that we
need a bigger safe and we had to buy
more boxes and more bags and we ever
envisioned we’d set up a thing to find a
skeleton and we had first hundreds of
remains and by the end of it
thousands of remains of hominids we
would work late into the night
I sometimes couldn’t get the scientists
out of the cave as they excavated four
shifts of six or seven hours in these
cramped humid conditions and no one
could go get them anyway so they could
just stay there as long as we want some
people have said well it really isn’t
that dangerous
rick is going to demonstrate to you
though the just because we did not kill
anyone that this is every bit as
dangerous and extraordinary a risk as
has ever been undertaken these are the
easy parts you’re looking at this was an
original thing we called Superman crawl
which you go through I can get through
that so that’s not a particularly tight
squeeze in the scheme of what we’re
doing here for those of you who are
squeamish about closed spaces you may
look away because it gets worse the this
is the type of journey that these
remarkable scientists the runners the
people who assisted us would take on a
daily basis usually three four five
times
getting to these sites some people said
to me why haven’t you opened this cave
up I hope you can begin see how fragile
this cave is you do not want to do any
opening of caves in that environment
because if you do you may destabilize
the entire system and it could collapse
and secondly I didn’t want to do that
who was it for me
to destroy a cave that’s potentially
millions of years old just so it could
be large enough that my ego can get in
there when there is technology and
extraordinary people who have the
capability of doing that work today here
this is kind of a normal narrow passage
you’re going to see the chute and parts
of it here and you’ll get an idea of the
depth as you see Steve Tucker’s light in
the distance as we look down into the
chute you get an idea of how narrow
those spaces are that they are
traversing down you’ll see how dangerous
some of the loose rocks are this rock
that Rick is about to touch actually
fell on the National Geographic
photographer and shattered his fingers
as he was under there
oh and Rick can dislocate his shoulders
watch I just show you that for fun
extraordinary people doing extraordinary
things by the end of a 21-day excavation
we had discovered the richest early
hominid site ever discovered in the
history of the planet more fossil
hominids had come out individually
they’d been discovered in the previous
90 year history of the search for human
origins in southern Africa all because
of these remarkable scientists we would
name a new species Homo Naledi Homo
Naledi was an incredible creature a
brain the size of the Norns
primitive characters and advanced
characters teeth that are remarkable and
being a little bit human-like and
primitive in so many other ways things
we’d never seen before we would
eventually find 15 individuals 1574
fossils from an area that big by that
big the entire floor is comprised of
these fossils we had every age group
represented from near fetal aged infants
to the extreme elderly with their teeth
worn right out and everything in between
males and females
we had fossils like this field has never
seen before that is the most complete
foot ever discovered in the history of
paleoanthropology one of six this is the
most complete hand ever discovered in
the history of paleoanthropology one of
eight the assemblage was remarkable
remarkable in its diversity remarkable
in its preservation remarkable in its
quality we simply had seen nothing like
it all lying on the floor of this
chamber we would name a new species Homo
Naledi
it’s a crazy creature brain the size of
an orange ape-like shoulders human-like
arms ending in a human-like hand with
the most curved fingers we have ever
seen outside the most primitive hominids
four or five million year old
equivalents it’s bizarre its thorax
start ape-like becomes more and more
advanced its pelvis is
that of Lucy wide and flared so we know
what its legs and feet look like they
should be primitive too but they are at
the top and become progressively more
and more and more and more human-like
until you reach the feet and those are
the most human-like feet ever discovered
since humans look at the size of that
head that is a normal sized modern human
in the background that is an adult
female of Homo Naledi about 450 cubic
centimeters we had truly never seen
anything like this to give you an idea
of how strange they would have looked
that’s Lucy on the left in the middle is
a very famous skeleton culture Khanna
boy of Homo erectus and there you can
see a relatively human like this there
on the right is that almost without
being derogatory pinheaded look of Homo
Naledi with it’s very strange profile
and it is not an aberrancy because we
have multiple individuals and they all
look exactly alike we now know more
about this remarkable species perhaps
than almost any other species of
primitive human relative that’s ever
been discovered we very quickly realized
something was strange going on with the
way in which these fossils were in that
chamber during the course of the
excavation we had found on the first day
to be transparent three bird bones there
were ow that were lying on the surface
that were clearly much younger somehow
it got in there and then we found during
the course of the excavation a few tiny
rodent incisors mixed into the sediment
and nothing else nothing but hominids
now we had on the team world experts in
many many different things but all of us
had the same basic training in Physical
Anthropology forensic anthropology
archeology all related to human Balaji
and those senior members of the team
knew that there was something very
strange from word go when you see an
assemblage like that we of course began
trying to eliminate the obvious it’s got
to be a predator accumulation but there
are no predatory damp marks of damage on
in
of this phone there’s no marks of
scavenging we knew very early on that
the material had not been transported in
there was no sign in the sediments of
water transport we also could tell from
the way they were set that they’d come
in one by one by one over time there was
time involved in this over on the right
hand side of this image is where that
chute is you can see that the floor
slopes away from that and quite
literally from that point all the way to
the end are these bones of Homo Naledi
literally from underneath the chute we
have used I can tell you
ground-penetrating radar and other
methods we can find no other entrance
and we were left eventually with the
unlikely conclusion that in fact this
must be some sort of deliberate body
disposal site that we had for the first
time found a species other than humans
that in a ritualized and I mean repeated
fashion had taken its dead into a
chamber and secreted them there over
time to prevent whatever from happening
to them for whatever reason and that is
the hypothesis we put forward that’s a
fairly remarkable thing because until
that moment on September 10 last year
when we announced the existence of Homo
Naledi and this situation we had seen
deliberate body disposal as sort of the
last bastion of what identified us is
human
when Jane Goodall wrote to Louis Leakey
saying I have seen a chimpanzee using
tools
he said prophetically we are going to
have to redefine what it means to be
human
we had precious little left until
September 10th except we deliberately
disposed of our dead and whatever that
means and should this hypothesis hold
true the first time in history you are
meeting another species that did just
that what these discoveries tell you is
that we may have walked or set foot over
most of this planet but we have not seen
what we were walking on we’ve not
understood what we were looking at there
are extraordinary things to be found and
if it is true in a field like
paleoanthropology then it must be true
in every field of science we need to use
discoveries like this to inspire this
and the next generation to be explorers
to get out in the field to look to
prepare yourself to make discoveries to
use the technology to inform you but to
physically go out and make those
discoveries we need ladies and gentlemen
to inspire exploration thank you very
much
you
you
things by the end of a 21-day excavation
we had discovered the richest early
hominid site ever discovered this site
is one mile away from the site of sterk
frente it’s less than half that distance
from the second best known site in the
entire continent of Africa the side of
Swart krons 800 meters away it was right
under our nose it was an incredible
environment of science there we had a
fossil tent where we kept joking that we
need a bigger safe and we had to buy
more boxes and more bags and we ever
envisioned we’d set up a thing to find a
skeleton and we had first hundreds of
remains and by the end of it
thousands of remains of hominids we
would work late into the night
I sometimes couldn’t get the scientists
out of the cave as they excavated four
shifts of six or seven hours in these
cramped humid conditions and no one
could go get them anyway so they could
just stay there as long as we want some
people have said well it really isn’t
that dangerous
rick is going to demonstrate to you
though the just because we did not kill
anyone that this is every bit as
dangerous and extraordinary a risk as
has ever been undertaken these are the
easy parts you’re looking at this was an
original thing we called Superman crawl
which you go through I can get through
that so that’s not a particularly tight
squeeze in the scheme of what we’re
doing here for those of you who are
squeamish about closed spaces you may
look away because it gets worse the this
is the type of journey that these
remarkable scientists the runners the
people who assisted us would take on a
daily basis usually three four five
times
getting to these sites some people said
to me why haven’t you opened this cave
up I hope you can begin see how fragile
this cave is you do not want to do any
opening of caves in that environment
because if you do you may destabilize
the entire system and it could collapse
and secondly I didn’t want to do that
who was it for me
to destroy a cave that’s potentially
millions of years old just so it could
be large enough that my ego can get in
there when there is technology and
extraordinary people who have the
capability of doing that work today here
this is kind of a normal narrow passage
you’re going to see the chute and parts
of it here and you’ll get an idea of the
depth as you see Steve Tucker’s light in
the distance as we look down into the
chute you get an idea of how narrow
those spaces are that they are
traversing down you’ll see how dangerous
some of the loose rocks are this rock
that Rick is about to touch actually
fell on the National Geographic
photographer and shattered his fingers
as he was under there
oh and Rick can dislocate his shoulders
watch I just show you that for fun
extraordinary people doing extraordinary
things by the end of a 21-day excavation
we had discovered the richest early
hominid site ever discovered in the
history of the planet more fossil
hominids had come out individually
they’d been discovered in the previous
90 year history of the search for human
origins in southern Africa all because
of these remarkable scientists we would
name a new species Homo Naledi Homo
Naledi was an incredible creature a
brain the size of the Norns
primitive characters and advanced
characters teeth that are remarkable and
being a little bit human-like and
primitive in so many other ways things
we’d never seen before we would
eventually find 15 individuals 1574
fossils from an area that big by that
big the entire floor is comprised of
these fossils we had every age group
represented from near fetal aged infants
to the extreme elderly with their teeth
worn right out and everything in between
males and females
we had fossils like this field has never
seen before that is the most complete
foot ever discovered in the history of
paleoanthropology one of six this is the
most complete hand ever discovered in
the history of paleoanthropology one of
eight the assemblage was remarkable
remarkable in its diversity remarkable
in its preservation remarkable in its
quality we simply had seen nothing like
it all lying on the floor of this
chamber we would name a new species Homo
Naledi
it’s a crazy creature brain the size of
an orange ape-like shoulders human-like
arms ending in a human-like hand with
the most curved fingers we have ever
seen outside the most primitive hominids
four or five million year old
equivalents it’s bizarre its thorax
start ape-like becomes more and more
advanced its pelvis is
that of Lucy wide and flared so we know
what its legs and feet look like they
should be primitive too but they are at
the top and become progressively more
and more and more and more human-like
until you reach the feet and those are
the most human-like feet ever discovered
since humans look at the size of that
head that is a normal sized modern human
in the background that is an adult
female of Homo Naledi about 450 cubic
centimeters we had truly never seen
anything like this to give you an idea
of how strange they would have looked
that’s Lucy on the left in the middle is
a very famous skeleton culture Khanna
boy of Homo erectus and there you can
see a relatively human like this there
on the right is that almost without
being derogatory pinheaded look of Homo
Naledi with it’s very strange profile
and it is not an aberrancy because we
have multiple individuals and they all
look exactly alike we now know more
about this remarkable species perhaps
than almost any other species of
primitive human relative that’s ever
been discovered we very quickly realized
something was strange going on with the
way in which these fossils were in that
chamber during the course of the
excavation we had found on the first day
to be transparent three bird bones there
were ow that were lying on the surface
that were clearly much younger somehow
it got in there and then we found during
the course of the excavation a few tiny
rodent incisors mixed into the sediment
and nothing else nothing but hominids
now we had on the team world experts in
many many different things but all of us
had the same basic training in Physical
Anthropology forensic anthropology
archeology all related to human Balaji
and those senior members of the team
knew that there was something very
strange from word go when you see an
assemblage like that we of course began
trying to eliminate the obvious it’s got
to be a predator accumulation but there
are no predatory damp marks of damage on
in
of this phone there’s no marks of
scavenging we knew very early on that
the material had not been transported in
there was no sign in the sediments of
water transport we also could tell from
the way they were set that they’d come
in one by one by one over time there was
time involved in this over on the right
hand side of this image is where that
chute is you can see that the floor
slopes away from that and quite
literally from that point all the way to
the end are these bones of Homo Naledi
literally from underneath the chute we
have used I can tell you
ground-penetrating radar and other
methods we can find no other entrance
and we were left eventually with the
unlikely conclusion that in fact this
must be some sort of deliberate body
disposal site that we had for the first
time found a species other than humans
that in a ritualized and I mean repeated
fashion had taken its dead into a
chamber and secreted them there over
time to prevent whatever from happening
to them for whatever reason and that is
the hypothesis we put forward that’s a
fairly remarkable thing because until
that moment on September 10 last year
when we announced the existence of Homo
Naledi and this situation we had seen
deliberate body disposal as sort of the
last bastion of what identified us is
human
when Jane Goodall wrote to Louis Leakey
saying I have seen a chimpanzee using
tools
he said prophetically we are going to
have to redefine what it means to be
human
we had precious little left until
September 10th except we deliberately
disposed of our dead and whatever that
means and should this hypothesis hold
true the first time in history you are
meeting another species that did just
that what these discoveries tell you is
that we may have walked or set foot over
most of this planet but we have not seen
what we were walking on we’ve not
understood what we were looking at there
are extraordinary things to be found and
if it is true in a field like
paleoanthropology then it must be true
in every field of science we need to use
discoveries like this to inspire this
and the next generation to be explorers
to get out in the field to look to
prepare yourself to make discoveries to
use the technology to inform you but to
physically go out and make those
discoveries we need ladies and gentlemen
to inspire exploration thank you very
much
you
you
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