MARINA ELLIOT:<i> Homo Naledi's
story is changing our story,</i> <i>the story of human origins.</i> <i> And, in fact, this
discovery is changing</i> <i> how paleoanthropologists
and scientists</i> <i> think about and craft
the story of our past.</i> ( audience applause ) All of you have actually seen
this image before, I'm hoping, <i> and it tells a story; it
tells a really good story;</i> <i> and it's a story about
two cavers and some bones,</i> <i> but it's also about
how that discovery led</i> <i> a paleoanthropologist to
place a very unusual call</i> <i> for excavators of
a particular type.</i> ( audience chuckling ) <i>And how this call brought six
women, myself one of them,</i> <i> together with a huge
team of scientists,</i> <i> volunteers, and
cavers, to undertake</i> <i>an extraordinary three-week
expedition in South Africa.</i> <i> Now, the pictures and
perhaps the video give you</i> <i>a little idea of what it's like.</i> <i>But as one of those people
that had to traverse that route</i> <i>every day, I'll give you a
slightly more personal idea</i> <i> of what that was like.</i> So that is some of the damage. I am not the hairy ankle,
thank you very much. ( audience laughing ) But the top three
pictures are of me <i> at various stages
during the expedition.</i> <i>But it really was all worth it.</i> You saw the fantastic
results of our expedition. <i> Just an incredible
treasure trove of material</i> <i> that we couldn't
possibly have imagined,</i> <i>with images that really still
send shivers down my back</i> <i> when I see them.</i> 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 Dinaledi
chamber itself. And as I squeezed
through that hallway and looked into the
Dinaledi chamber, for me, what flashed through
my head that very instant was Howard Carter <i> and what it must have
felt like for him</i> <i>to step into Tutankhamun's
tomb for the first time.</i> Both of us only had a lamp to illuminate what
was in that space. And I think, for me,
I really felt like all I could see was what
my headlamp showed me, and that was flashes of
bone everywhere I looked. 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. <i>And by now you know that these
remains actually represent</i> <i> one of the most unusual
and incredible assemblages</i> <i> of material in history,</i> <i> and an entirely new
species: Homo Naledi.</i> <i> When Homo Naledi was
announced last September,</i> <i> it trended number two
on the Twitterverse,</i> briefly usurping
the Kardashians, which I understand
is quite a feat. <i> But one of the reasons
it made such a splash</i> <i>was the volume of the material.</i> <i>I mean these 1500, and now 1700,</i> <i> specimens that we'd
recovered was unprecedented.</i> And what people maybe
also don't realize is that all that material,
those 1500 fragments that we recovered during
that initial expedition, <i> came out of an area 80
centimeters by 80 centimeters</i> <i> by 20 centimeters deep.</i> <i> That's the size of
a child's sandbox.</i> And for a discipline as
used to making a fuss about one tooth
or finding a jaw, that really was
quite traumatizing to the paleoanthropological
community. You see, for decades
we'd believed the story that the human fossils were
as rare as hens' teeth, <i>that it took basically an act
of God or a lottery ticket</i> <i>or being hit by lightning in
order to find this material.</i> But here was a situation where
not only was the material ridiculously abundant
but it'd been found <i> by someone who'd been
electrocuted once before.</i> ( audience laughing ) 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 Lee proved in
finding Sediba and then Naledi is that experience,
persistence, and knowledge really can pay off big time. But if you don't look,
you certainly won't find. <i> Then we actually started
looking at the bones.</i> <i>And within those 1500 fragments
that we were looking at,</i> <i>we had the skulls and the bodies
of at least 15 individuals;</i> 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 Naledi's jaw, we would say it was one thing, but if we took a
scrap of its foot, we would say it's 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, Naledi'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. <i> But if Naledi is old
or if it's young,</i> <i>either way, it suggests that
we don't really understand</i> <i> that human family
tree very well at all,</i> and that it reinforces
the fact that we just need to maybe think about that
story again in a different way. <i> Not only is the tree
much bushier, maybe,</i> <i> than we originally
thought about it,</i> <i>but our family tree may not
actually be a bush at all.</i> <i>What we may be looking at
is more like a river delta;</i> <i>a whole bunch of rivulets coming
down from a common source;</i> <i> some that trickle
down and dry out</i> <i>and we never see them again;</i> <i> other rivulets come back
and join another rivulet</i> <i> to make a bigger rivulet
that continues on down;</i> <i>and all of them ending up
in a big pool at the bottom;</i> <i>and that big pool is the now
over seven billion humans</i> <i> that we see on
the planet today.</i> 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 needed a bit of a rewrite. <i> Lee and the team
decided to open up</i> <i>the primary analysis of the
fossils to young scientists,</i> <i> early-career scientists,
and not just a few;</i> <i> almost 40 researchers
met in South Africa</i> <i> to do the analysis
of the material.</i> <i>And, even in estimating for
a modest 40-hour workweek,</i> <i>which we certainly exceeded,</i> 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
discussion among each other. And it was really exciting, and 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. <i> The scientific papers
that describe Naledi</i> <i>were released in a open-access
journal called eLife.</i> <i> Shortly thereafter, we
released all the shape files</i> <i> for the fossils on a
website called MorphoSource,</i> <i>hosted by Duke University.</i> 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, it's
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. <i> For me, the open-access
model is actually</i> <i> one of the best
parts of this story.</i> <i> In the last year,
well, since September,</i> <i>I have done over 400 interviews</i> <i>and almost 60 talks on Naledi;</i> <i>and everywhere I've gone, the
response has been the same:</i> <i>excitement, interest, and
a real desire to learn</i> <i> about human origins and
scientific exploration.</i> But I think one of the things
that I have seen in that is that people maybe
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 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. <i> Science really is all
about adjusting one's views</i> <i>in light of new evidence.</i> <i> And, in many ways, by
pushing the dark spaces</i> <i> of South Africa, Homo
Naledi's discovery</i> 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 new stories. I hope that you will
help me share those with the rest of the world. Thank you. ( audience applause )
