homo Naledi x’ story is changing our
story the story of human origins and in
fact this discovery is changing how
paleoanthropologists and scientists
think about and craft the story of our
past all of you have actually seen this
image before I’m hoping and it tells a
story it tells a really good story and
it’s a story about two cavers and some
bones but it’s also about how that
discovery led a paleoanthropologist to
place a very unusual call for excavators
of a particular type and how this call
brought six women myself one of them
together with a huge team of scientists
volunteers and cavers to undertake an
extraordinary three-week expedition in
South Africa
now the pictures and perhaps the video
give you a little idea of what it’s like
but as one of those people that had to
traverse that route every day I’ll give
you a slightly more personal idea of
what that was like so that is some of
the damage I am NOT the hairy ankle
thank you very much but the top three
pictures are of me at various stages
during the expedition but it really was
all worth it you saw the fantastic
results of our expedition just an
incredible treasure trove of material
that we couldn’t possibly have imagined
with images that really still send
shivers down my back when I see them I
was the first scientist into the chamber
once the remains had been discovered and
it really was one of those watershed
moments there’s a little narrow hallway
that then opens up into the denali
chamber itself and as I squeezed through
that hallway and looked into the dinna
letty chamber for me what flashed
through my head that very instant was
Howard Carter and what it must have felt
like for him to step into Tutankhamun’s
tomb for the first time both of us only
had a lamp to illuminate what was in
that space and I think for me I I really
felt like all I could see was what my
headlamp showed me and that was flashes
of bone everywhere I look
and I really thought wow this is what
Carter must have felt like when he saw
flashes of treasure everywhere he looked
it’s an exhilarating feeling and by now
you know that these remains actually
represent one of the most unusual and
incredible assemblages of material in
history and an entirely new species Homo
Naledi
when Homo Naledi was announced last
September it trended number two on the
Twitterverse briefly usurping the
Kardashians which I understand is quite
a feat but one of the reasons it made
such a splash was the volume of the
material I mean these 1500 and now 1700
specimens that we’d recovered was
unprecedented and what people maybe also
don’t realize is that all that material
those 1500 fragments that we recovered
during that initial expedition came out
of an area 80 centimeters by 80
centimeters by 20 centimeters deep
that’s the size of a child’s sandbox and
for a discipline making you know is used
to having making a fuss about one tooth
or finding a jaw that’s really was quite
traumatizing to the Paleo
anthropological community you see for
decades we believed the story that the
human fossils were as rare as hen’s
teeth that it took basically an act of
God or a lottery ticket or being hit by
lightning in order to find this material
but here was a situation where not only
was the material ridiculously abundant
but had been found by someone who’d been
electrocuted once before so what was
going on here but what a lot of people
forget about getting hit by lightning
twice is that you can increase your odds
tremendously by getting out there every
day with a lightning rod and what we
proved in finding sediba and then Naledi
is that experienced persistence and
knowledge really can pay off big-time
but if you don’t look you certainly
won’t find then we actually started
looking at the bones and within those
1,500 fragments that we were looking at
we had the skulls and the bodies of at
least 15 individuals and we had almost
every bone in the body represented more
than once and what we found was totally
unexpected
a combination of features that we
couldn’t possibly have imagined and
couldn’t have predicted in advance what
this meant though was that our
understanding of skeletal shape and
species identification kind of had to be
rethought because if we took just a
scrap of nollette ease jaw we would say
it was one thing but if we took a scrap
of its foot we would say it was
something totally different and then
there were parts of Naledi that were
unique to it so it was really one of
those situations where we had to start
thinking about those stories again and
trying to figure out what these features
actually were telling us it presented a
problem for paleoanthropology though
because it meant that scraps really
aren’t a good indication of the whole
anymore and it raises questions about
all those other little scraps that we’ve
been making stories about so
definitively for so long so it really is
challenging us to go back and look at
the material we have with new eyes and
maybe think about how we need to
reconfigure those stories in addition
new Letty’s mosaic of features raises
questions about how we view our origins
in the first place now we don’t have a
clear date for Naledi yet but even
though if nobody is old or if it’s young
either way it suggests that we don’t
really understand that human family tree
very well at all and then it reinforces
the fact that you know we we just need
to maybe think about that story again in
a different way not only is the tree
much bushier maybe then we originally
thought about it but our family tree may
not actually be a bush at all what we
may be looking at is more like a river
delta a whole bunch of rivulet coming
down from a common source some that
trickle down and dry out and we never
see them again
other rivulets come back and join
another rivulet to make a bigger rivulet
that continues on down and all of them
ending up in a big pool at the bottom
and that big pool is the now over seven
billion humans that we see on the planet
today and this analogy may stand the
test of time or not we’ll have to see
and as it turned out the next chapter
doing the analysis and description of
the material also knew
did a bit of a rewrite Li and the team
decided to open up the primary analysis
of the fossils to young scientists early
career scientists and not just a few
almost 40 researchers met in South
Africa to do the analysis of the
material and even in estimating for a
modest forty hour work week which we
certainly exceeded this amounted to
almost 10,000 hours of research
something that would take a single
researcher almost five years to match
but it did rattle a few cages because it
presented a new model for research one
that was more inclusive one that allowed
engagement and and discussion among each
other and it was really exciting and I
mean something in fact that I think our
discipline has been very sadly
neglectful of in the past and that
actually brings us to the last way in
which Naledi may be changing our human
story and that is in how we tell it how
anthropologists and scientists share
that information with each other and
with the public the scientific papers
that describe Naledi were released in a
open access journal called Elife shortly
thereafter we released all the
shapefiles for the fossils on a website
called morph row source hosted by Duke
University this meant that the primary
information on Naledi and basically
casts of all the fossils were available
to anyone who wanted them free of charge
our team really felt strongly that
because this material is not ours to
hoard its South African heritage it’s
actually world heritage this material
relates to the origins of all of us and
it was really important for us to share
that with all of us it’s a human
question for me the open access model is
actually one of the best parts of this
story in the last year
well since September I have done over
400 interviews and almost 60 talks on
Naledi and everywhere I’ve gone the
response has been the same excitement
interest and a real desire to learn
about human origins and scientific
exploration but I think one of the
things that I have seen in that is that
people maybe try kind of feel isolated
by scientific research
not because they are stupid or the
science is too hard but because perhaps
we as scientists have done a poor job of
telling the stories people cannot be
expected to know what they haven’t
learned and if they feel isolated from
that learning it develops into mistrust
and mistrust breeds breeds fear and fear
blocks curiosity it’s really up to us as
scientists and educators to make our
research comprehensible and accessible
to people and help them engage with what
we do in a really meaningful way science
really is all about adjusting one’s
views in light of new evidence and in
many ways by pushing the dark spaces of
South Africa Homo Naledi ‘z discovery is
pulling paleoanthropology into the light
of new ways of doing and thinking about
our science and as much as I love the
underworld that I work in
I think this research is really putting
a necessary and very positive spotlight
on human origins and giving
paleoanthropologists an opportunity to
tell some very cool news stories I hope
that you will help me share those with
the rest of the world thank you
you
story the story of human origins and in
fact this discovery is changing how
paleoanthropologists and scientists
think about and craft the story of our
past all of you have actually seen this
image before I’m hoping and it tells a
story it tells a really good story and
it’s a story about two cavers and some
bones but it’s also about how that
discovery led a paleoanthropologist to
place a very unusual call for excavators
of a particular type and how this call
brought six women myself one of them
together with a huge team of scientists
volunteers and cavers to undertake an
extraordinary three-week expedition in
South Africa
now the pictures and perhaps the video
give you a little idea of what it’s like
but as one of those people that had to
traverse that route every day I’ll give
you a slightly more personal idea of
what that was like so that is some of
the damage I am NOT the hairy ankle
thank you very much but the top three
pictures are of me at various stages
during the expedition but it really was
all worth it you saw the fantastic
results of our expedition just an
incredible treasure trove of material
that we couldn’t possibly have imagined
with images that really still send
shivers down my back when I see them I
was the first scientist into the chamber
once the remains had been discovered and
it really was one of those watershed
moments there’s a little narrow hallway
that then opens up into the denali
chamber itself and as I squeezed through
that hallway and looked into the dinna
letty chamber for me what flashed
through my head that very instant was
Howard Carter and what it must have felt
like for him to step into Tutankhamun’s
tomb for the first time both of us only
had a lamp to illuminate what was in
that space and I think for me I I really
felt like all I could see was what my
headlamp showed me and that was flashes
of bone everywhere I look
and I really thought wow this is what
Carter must have felt like when he saw
flashes of treasure everywhere he looked
it’s an exhilarating feeling and by now
you know that these remains actually
represent one of the most unusual and
incredible assemblages of material in
history and an entirely new species Homo
Naledi
when Homo Naledi was announced last
September it trended number two on the
Twitterverse briefly usurping the
Kardashians which I understand is quite
a feat but one of the reasons it made
such a splash was the volume of the
material I mean these 1500 and now 1700
specimens that we’d recovered was
unprecedented and what people maybe also
don’t realize is that all that material
those 1500 fragments that we recovered
during that initial expedition came out
of an area 80 centimeters by 80
centimeters by 20 centimeters deep
that’s the size of a child’s sandbox and
for a discipline making you know is used
to having making a fuss about one tooth
or finding a jaw that’s really was quite
traumatizing to the Paleo
anthropological community you see for
decades we believed the story that the
human fossils were as rare as hen’s
teeth that it took basically an act of
God or a lottery ticket or being hit by
lightning in order to find this material
but here was a situation where not only
was the material ridiculously abundant
but had been found by someone who’d been
electrocuted once before so what was
going on here but what a lot of people
forget about getting hit by lightning
twice is that you can increase your odds
tremendously by getting out there every
day with a lightning rod and what we
proved in finding sediba and then Naledi
is that experienced persistence and
knowledge really can pay off big-time
but if you don’t look you certainly
won’t find then we actually started
looking at the bones and within those
1,500 fragments that we were looking at
we had the skulls and the bodies of at
least 15 individuals and we had almost
every bone in the body represented more
than once and what we found was totally
unexpected
a combination of features that we
couldn’t possibly have imagined and
couldn’t have predicted in advance what
this meant though was that our
understanding of skeletal shape and
species identification kind of had to be
rethought because if we took just a
scrap of nollette ease jaw we would say
it was one thing but if we took a scrap
of its foot we would say it was
something totally different and then
there were parts of Naledi that were
unique to it so it was really one of
those situations where we had to start
thinking about those stories again and
trying to figure out what these features
actually were telling us it presented a
problem for paleoanthropology though
because it meant that scraps really
aren’t a good indication of the whole
anymore and it raises questions about
all those other little scraps that we’ve
been making stories about so
definitively for so long so it really is
challenging us to go back and look at
the material we have with new eyes and
maybe think about how we need to
reconfigure those stories in addition
new Letty’s mosaic of features raises
questions about how we view our origins
in the first place now we don’t have a
clear date for Naledi yet but even
though if nobody is old or if it’s young
either way it suggests that we don’t
really understand that human family tree
very well at all and then it reinforces
the fact that you know we we just need
to maybe think about that story again in
a different way not only is the tree
much bushier maybe then we originally
thought about it but our family tree may
not actually be a bush at all what we
may be looking at is more like a river
delta a whole bunch of rivulet coming
down from a common source some that
trickle down and dry out and we never
see them again
other rivulets come back and join
another rivulet to make a bigger rivulet
that continues on down and all of them
ending up in a big pool at the bottom
and that big pool is the now over seven
billion humans that we see on the planet
today and this analogy may stand the
test of time or not we’ll have to see
and as it turned out the next chapter
doing the analysis and description of
the material also knew
did a bit of a rewrite Li and the team
decided to open up the primary analysis
of the fossils to young scientists early
career scientists and not just a few
almost 40 researchers met in South
Africa to do the analysis of the
material and even in estimating for a
modest forty hour work week which we
certainly exceeded this amounted to
almost 10,000 hours of research
something that would take a single
researcher almost five years to match
but it did rattle a few cages because it
presented a new model for research one
that was more inclusive one that allowed
engagement and and discussion among each
other and it was really exciting and I
mean something in fact that I think our
discipline has been very sadly
neglectful of in the past and that
actually brings us to the last way in
which Naledi may be changing our human
story and that is in how we tell it how
anthropologists and scientists share
that information with each other and
with the public the scientific papers
that describe Naledi were released in a
open access journal called Elife shortly
thereafter we released all the
shapefiles for the fossils on a website
called morph row source hosted by Duke
University this meant that the primary
information on Naledi and basically
casts of all the fossils were available
to anyone who wanted them free of charge
our team really felt strongly that
because this material is not ours to
hoard its South African heritage it’s
actually world heritage this material
relates to the origins of all of us and
it was really important for us to share
that with all of us it’s a human
question for me the open access model is
actually one of the best parts of this
story in the last year
well since September I have done over
400 interviews and almost 60 talks on
Naledi and everywhere I’ve gone the
response has been the same excitement
interest and a real desire to learn
about human origins and scientific
exploration but I think one of the
things that I have seen in that is that
people maybe try kind of feel isolated
by scientific research
not because they are stupid or the
science is too hard but because perhaps
we as scientists have done a poor job of
telling the stories people cannot be
expected to know what they haven’t
learned and if they feel isolated from
that learning it develops into mistrust
and mistrust breeds breeds fear and fear
blocks curiosity it’s really up to us as
scientists and educators to make our
research comprehensible and accessible
to people and help them engage with what
we do in a really meaningful way science
really is all about adjusting one’s
views in light of new evidence and in
many ways by pushing the dark spaces of
South Africa Homo Naledi ‘z discovery is
pulling paleoanthropology into the light
of new ways of doing and thinking about
our science and as much as I love the
underworld that I work in
I think this research is really putting
a necessary and very positive spotlight
on human origins and giving
paleoanthropologists an opportunity to
tell some very cool news stories I hope
that you will help me share those with
the rest of the world thank you
you
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