Our incredible origins: The astonishing tale of Homo naledi

thank you everyone it's a great to be here and thank you for the great English weather greeting I was hoping for something a bit sunnier today I'm going to take you to it through an extraordinary story a tale of exploration and discovery in one of the fields of Sciences there's probably one of the most difficult Sciences in the world this field of science paleoanthropology the search for human origins when I first entered in 1989 you had less than a 1% chance of actually discovering a single remain of an ancient human during your entire career can you imagine the type of people who go into a science with that kind of odds against them in Discovery another statistic at that time was that there were actually more scientists studying these remains than there were actual fossil remains of ancient human relatives that made it a rather competitive sport and so when I started into this field in the late 80s I wanted to go to East Africa because all the discoveries were coming from East Africa that was the place it was even the East Side Story of human origins I quickly found out though at the advice of Richard Leakey and Don Johanson that there was going to be very little room for a young paleoanthropologists who wanted to discover fossils in East Africa and so I decided to journey to South Africa in fact South Africa been the birthplace of the search for human origins on the continent of Africa way back in 1924 when Raymond dart had discovered the tongue child but since 1948 the field had stagnated there'd been no new sights discovered the only fossils that were being discovered were from traditional known sites but I threw myself into looking for new fossil sites and within just a few months of arriving in South Africa I won the Paleo anthropological Lottery at a site called Gladys ville just outside of Johannesburg I found two hominid teeth now I know that doesn't sound a lot to all of you but to give you an idea of the scarcity of ancient human relative fossils those two hominid teeth made National Geographic magazine the first new hominid in sub Equatorial Africa in 48 years I threw myself into that site knowing that the next rock I turned over the net next breaststroke was going to reveal that half of a mandible or jawbone that was gonna make my career and I could dine out at cocktail parties at conferences for the rest of my life it didn't happen seventeen years would go by without a major discovery I was having a fine career I was advancing through the normal ranks of paleoanthropology but by the late 90s I began to hear at conferences wow I've never seen someone go so far on two teeth that was not a compliment in 2007 I found myself in an unusual position the world had changed around me paleoanthropology had convinced himself that there were no new great fossils to discover scientists even published that there were going to be no major alterations in the way we view human evolution that all the major fossil fields had already bagette been discovered and the only way forward was to invest in technology into the fossils that we had already discovered and so I found myself who had built a exploration sort of unit at the University of it Vadis around in South Africa in the invidious position of actually serving on a committee to replace myself to replace myself with a new director who would take us in the direction of technology using the new computers that were a period that could process big data sets that could actually examine these fossils that are existing things like geometric morphometrics and handle large CT data that was what was getting on the cover of journals like Nature and Science and so I found myself in December of 2007 sitting at home pondering where life was going to take me what was I going to do for the next stage of my career and like most people who are soul searching I was surfing the internet for that answer and it was at that moment that I became the last human being on earth discovered Google Earth there it was free satellite data and I stared at this going my gosh that's amazing because back in the late 90s I had won a grant from National Geographic to do something extraordinary and difficult to combine technology then available NASA satellite data with that amazing brand new technology handheld GPS and I knew there was a way of bringing those two things together of certain of it to find sites that might have great fossils in them and I'd spent three years of my life collecting data and here was a free way to test that data I found that little white box up in the corner I typed in those coordinates the first ones I typed in we're Gladys feel because I knew that site better than anyone on earth and up they went into space and down it came on absolutely nothing the next one I put in same thing didn't mark a site at all third fourth it didn't take me long to Google to find out why of course the US government had owned those satellites in the late 90s and they had actually put deliberate error into them so they couldn't be used for acts of terrorism and other things and that deliberate error combined with the primitive nature of the then handheld GPS as it created a sort of a compounding error I had wasted three years of my life I was sad but as I stared at that screen I began to see that I could see the sights that I had intended to math and so instead of making a sort of pathetic phone call to National Geographic I began moving the dots from the wrong place to the right place and in the process of that I began to learn what a cave site and what a fossil site looked like from outer space it was teaching me this error that it occurred and it also began to make me think wow it looks like there might be others out there but I knew that was impossible this region just outside of Johannesburg is perhaps the most explored area on and earth for sites like this for these fossils it's been explored continuously by every major scientist in the field since the mid 1930s but it was convincing enough that by March of 2008 I'd created a sort of map of where I thought there might be some more fossils and I of course went because it's human nature is far away from Gladys ville as I could possibly get I went about 25 kilometres way to the edge of those dull amides because this was an unexplored area that's when new discoveries were gonna be made and on the very first day out with my dog towel and a laptop and a 3G card I found 21 new localities now to put that in perspective in the previous sort of 70 80 90 years they'd only been about a hundred and thirty total cave sites found and eighteen fossil-bearing sites in that region and on day one I found 21 new ones I was addicted I started throwing myself into this journey of searching for new sites I became a professor in absentia it fits because it was a dick because every time I went out I'd find more I didn't spend the night making targets go into the field the next day and I would find more it was extraordinary so extraordinary that by July I'd found over 750 new localities and almost 70 new fossil sites that no one had ever seen before by that time I kind of finished the area and I'd moved back into the area around Gladys ville I doing that last because I knew there was nothing there to find I'd spent 17 years digging at that site I knew that area better than any human being on earth and on that day on August 1st 2008 I went to an area that had some trees and targets it looked promising one kilometer away from Gladys Vale and there I saw this hole in the ground a tiny little hole it didn't look anything like the kind of sites that we actually found fossils in in that area typically the big sites that produce hominids were gigantic sites full of thousands of fossils because your they're so low but a very first Rock I turned over at this site had a fossil in it fossil Antelope that didn't excite me very much because let me give you a little statistic by that time I'd done some calculations to tell us that for every one fragment of an ancient human relative that we discover we would find about 250,000 antelope fossils and I just found another one this had been the story of my life at Gladys ville for 17 years but I was on a mapping mission that day so I just took notes took a photograph and then walked up the hill and found 47 previously unidentified sites one kilometer from where I'd spent a big chunk of my life looking that bothered me a little bit I went back to the lab and I didn't tell you this but we'd had a terrible tragedy the young person that we had selected to replace me and to build this new technological era this new technological department of its University was actually killed in a motorcycle accident here in London and so we had already built these labs we'd brought in postdocs these people are rare and precious these experts in these field and so a young postdoc who is now without a mentor came into my office Joe Kibby a Kenyan and he said would you be my postdoctoral supervisor and I said to him no I wasn't being cruel I said Jobe you're a lab guy I'm a field guy but I've just found this site and if you're interested in maybe learning how to be a field guy it had trees it it intrigues me let's go out and look at it and so on August the 15th 2008 Joe and I and my then nine-year-old son Mathew a dog tau went out to the site and started walking up to it I told them the story of discovery and there we were standing right about where this picture was taken I said okay guys go find fossils they were all around us in the rocks and with that Matthew and tau take off this is a gigantic game reserve their antelopes leopards ever I thought they're off chasing those I'll see him at lunchtime I turn to Jim I said I wonder why this had been left by mine because miners had worked this area for line and they clearly found this place there were a couple of blast holes that was the rock I'd found was a loose one from blasting but they left it alone very quickly and as I finished saying that Matthew said dad I found a fossil there I could see it 15 metres off the site there shouldn't be any fossils there but you know because like all of you you want to encourage fossil hunting I had to go over and see what he found and so I started walking towards him and five meters away I knew his in my life were going to change because sticking out the side of that rock that he's holding was a hominid clavicle that's just collarbone the curved bone here I knew it from five meters away because serendipitously I was probably the world's expert maybe the world's only expert on hominid clavicles at that moment I'd done my PhD on them all six fragments as I took the rock from Matthew he claims I cursed I don't believe that I was looking at this and doing what anyone do what else can this be this can be common and clavicle that I studied for my PhD and I turned the rock over and there on the back was a jaw bone and a hominid canine and multiple parts of a hominid skeleton Matthew had not just found a clavicle he'd found one of the rarest things in all of history a partial skeleton of a hominid and let me say that us paleoanthropologists are very generous with that term we call any part of the head associated with any part of the body of a single individual a partial skeleton and at that time in history there were approximately seven known you would have heard of some like Lucy Turkana boy Littlefoot the others have are so fragmentary they have numbers Matthew had found one and it would turn out to be extraordinary the preservation of the fossils from this site that we would call malapa would be extraordinary and unprecedented the fossil that Matthew had found was part of a little boy that was probably between about seven and nine years old when he died two million years ago he was only one of a large number skeletons that we'd find the malapa site would be the first site on the continent of Africa where we would find multiple skeletons together first one then two weeks later I would find a second than a third than a fourth and a fifth and a sixth it very quickly became one of the richest sites in the world we were living the scientific dream my colleagues and I had won the scientific lottery billions odds chance to won and there it was and we had a brand new species something no one had ever seen before that we would call Australopithecus sediba we lived the scientific dream three special editions of the journal science and for those of you who aren't academics you know to get your fossil on the cover of the journal science or nature is like you know a rock star being on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine it's like what you live for it was all over the world dozens of scientific papers were produced my project grew from one scientist to a hundred over a period of three years we started discovering things at this little site that we had never seen before organic remains were preserved two million years we found skin we found hair attached to even the hominids themselves it was amazing but it was so amazing that we had to do something different I had to design a laboratory to build over the top of that fossil deposit and so for a period in 2013 I was locked out of the site we could not continue excavations and so I step back and I realized I'd made a mistake I'd not been exploring since Matthew its it said dad I found a fossil and I had this list then of almost 800 localities and all those localities are not just points on a map they're not just sites like malapa a huge majority of them are doorways into an underworld because when I look at this landscape where these discoveries are made I see something different than maybe you do you maybe see a rolling beautiful Savannah grassland what I see is a gigantic block of Swiss cheese because underneath this dolomitic limestone are caves kilometers and kilometers of them but they had hardly been explored and certainly no one had a map like I did there was a reason though that people didn't spend a lot of time in the deep underground there was an idea almost a mythology almost a truism at that time that the things underground were going to be young and worthless these were modern case what you wanted was caves like malapa on the surface those were the ancient caves that earth had eroded down to but I also didn't have any resources or facilities to actually explore these caves at that moment and that's when another serendipitous moment happened a pirate walked into my office wasn't a real pirate they kind of looked like hetero Boshoff a former student of mine back in the 1990s who had vanished ago diamond hunting in central Africa and had failed and there he was back in my office saying he'd made a terrible mistake in leaving paleoanthropology he loved it and he wanted to get back in and why was serendipitous was because Pedro had been a caving buddy of mine back in the 1990's it was an expert caver so I said I've got a job for you I want you to go explore this map but I want you to start in places that we think we know the best places like the sterk pentane Valley which had been excavated continuously since 1930s places like sterk pentane swore crowns because I found new caves there and I'd learned a lesson from malapa that sometimes you don't see the things you are most familiar with backyard syndrome can occur and so off he went and the greatest miracle of any of these stories I'm going to tell you actually occurred the university allowed me to buy a motorcycle for him and anyone who's worked with a university would understand why that's a miracle and off he went and quickly came back because Petro found out that he was no longer physiologically a pro to get into many of these cave systems but that means is he's a little bit too fat to get into these narrow spaces and so we discussed and decided to enlist two amateur cavers Rick hunter and Steve Tucker I have to digress for a moment tell you Rick hunter was a nearly unemployed part-time construction worker who had been thrown out of high school after blowing up his high school chemistry lab and he was a member of Mensa and Steve Tucker was an accountant by day but a amateur caterer by night and they were very physiologically appropriate and so off they went and they went into the sterk fontaine Valley as told and I would hear from them once a week or so and they weren't finding much at all the new sites I discovered because like any human they went after the new first that's where the good discoveries are going to be made right in the places we haven't been before they finished that area except for one cave site an enormous one called the rising star cave system and the reason they did that last was because they knew as I did there would be nothing in there the rising star cave system is perhaps one of the best known and best explored cave sites maybe on the continent of Africa every amateur caver in the region of Joe Bergin in South Africa has at some point trained in there it was completely mapped but they were being dutiful and off they went in exploration and they went into a chamber called Dragon's Back one evening September 13th exploring after four and a half hours they found a crag of rock that went up and that's why the Chamber's named dragon back it looked like the scales on a mythical dragon going up imagine they're 40 meters below earth this thing descends up 20 meters and up they go and at the top of it they see a little crack seven and a half inches wide and they look down this crack and then they slide into the crack and they realize it continues downward and so because they're my kind of crazy down they went 12 meters down skinny and in so much that if they even inhaled they actually would stop unfortunately the bottom that chute didn't open up into a large cavern they fell to their death otherwise this would be a very short story but they dropped into a relatively small chamber and then after passing through a long narrow passage they saw bones on the ground and they were a long way back in the system there should not be bones on the ground and so they began looking at them and they thought they might be interesting but they weren't sure remember they were amateurs they weren't experts they pulled their camera out and it didn't work it had been damaged by the humidity and so out they came and luckily they could get out traveling back that four and a half hour route they called Pedro said they thought they might find had found something interesting and he called me the next morning and I said look send me pictures cuz I hear that thing all type of thing all the time and usually someone's found you know a plastic babydoll head in their backyard and it's nothing important and I promptly forgot about it until October first at nine o'clock and evening when my front gate buzzer buzzed and in Johannesburg at nine o'clock that evening people don't randomly buzz your front gate Buster buzzers and I answered it and someone said you gonna want to let us in in a creepy voice just like that it was Pedro with Steve after considering my options for a little bit I eventually did let them in Steven opened up his laptop and I saw a picture like I never thought I would see in my entire life you are allowed to gasp when you see these things that was a hominid mandible and it was just lying there on dirt I've never seen anything like that in southern Africa you remember that beautiful skull that Matthew had found to get to that condition had taken twenty-two thousand person preparation hours it was a cased in solid concrete this is just lying there I could tell it was primitive I could see by the shape of the teeth the next slide they showed me showed parts of a skeleton I was looking at a potentially primitive hominids skeleton lying on the floor of a cave and then I saw this and you have to guess when you see that that is a skull its a skull I was blown away this was like nothing I'd ever seen we celebrated I sent them on their way couldn't sleep - am i decided to make a phone call I decided to phone a friend I found Terry Garcia head of missions at National Geographic and even though I had caller ID he answered his phone and I said Terry I've got something and I explained it in story I sent him a couple of these pictures and then I said if you are ever going to trust me trust me right now that's just explore speak for I need money Terry paused for a moment and said okay Lee do what you need to do that's grant agency speak for you no don't spend too much money and don't embarrass us I hung up the phone and immediately got cold feet here I just risked the entire reputation of my gigantic team with its great record on some pictures taken by amateurs in a place that I could never go and check but I did have someone I trusted who I thought could get down a seven and a half inch 12 meter shoot I then 15 year-old six foot four band very skinny son Matthew and so the next weekend out we went to rising star crawling through all these horrible spaces way back into this cave over 150 meters back in climbing up dragon's back where if you fall off you die getting to this little narrow thing and down Matthew went with Rick and Steve because I guess I'm going for father of the year and I sat there in the dark at the top shutting off my light to conserve batteries looking at this impossible situation what was I going to do if this was real how would I do this I began to build an idea of doing it like you did a deep-sea discovery like the way my colleague James Cameron or Bob Ballard explores I'm seeing I could see remote cabling is a command center with cameras and audio and such like that but who was I gonna get to get in there to do this in this incredibly dangerous space and then I heard scrabbling and Matthew came back up his head pops out of the hole and because I'm going for father of the year I didn't say you know are you okay I went and and he handed me the camera he said dad it was beautiful he said my hands were shaking for three minutes before I could take the first picture and it was extraordinary it was truly extraordinary so there was that skull it was real but it also disturbed me because you see all those little white bits up there those white bits of broken bone and Steve and Rick and Matthew swore that they had not stepped on this someone had been in that chamber and stepped on some of this material and I didn't know how recently and so I went home and that Sunday I was pondering how am I going to find people to do this I mean I have colleagues and stuff but this is going to take not only people with PhDs and stuff that can actually work on potentially some of the most precious material but they have to fit and so I did what anyone would do in that circumstance I put a Facebook ad out you don't have to read the Facebook ad basically says I need skinny scientists and these skinny scientists who will drop everything come to Johannesburg within the next three weeks I'm gonna launch an expedition I'm not going to pay you but I will feed you and I'm going to risk your life and I sent that off thinking there would probably be you know five or six people qualified to do this in the world caving desirable within ten days I had almost 60 qualified applicants over 80% of them were young women from that extraordinary group of applicants a shortlisted and picked six of them that just happened to be young women and on November the set we put a 60 person expedition into the field a 60 person expedition that laid three and a half kilometers of cabling built command centers built caving tents built a science tent all to recover this all the safety procedures in place and on November the 10th we watched with trepidation as the first ones entered the first scientist entered the cave being led by Matthew to show who would show them where the material was on the ground we had brought in new technology and I was watching images like this and I was watching images like this and we also decided at that moment to bring this to the world and so we went live on the Internet and by the end of this expedition I'll tell you we had over a million followers watching this because I thought this was maybe the first and possibly last time in history anyone would ever see a fossil hominid being discovered because these are the rarest sought-after objects on the planet and during one of the blog sessions with National Geographic I made a grave mistake someone said what is it like to watch them what are these people like and I said they're like astronauts I would see them disappear in their kit and then they would appear in black and white on these thermal cameras and they were a journey into this remote place where I can never be but but they're like underground astronauts oh I wish I'd never said that the hate mail I have received in the last year's of they're not astronauts their spiel Ian odds are they're Trog Lynott's or what I apologize but it happened and it took off and they were extraordinary and brave and they were applying technologies had never been applied before white light scanners 3d mapping of this because everything we had to do had to fit who's seven inch slot had to be rugged enough to work in this hundred percent humidity environment underground by the second day we knew I was wrong it was not a hominid skeleton it was more than one hominid skeleton we had three right femurs and are no human relatives with three right legs by the end of the week we knew that something extraordinary was happening we had found more individual hominid remains than any other site in the history of the search for human origins on the continent of Africa it was palpable the excitement we knew that this was for paleoanthropology our Howard Carter moment you can probably see it on the expressions of their faces that this was a great moment of discovery and it kept getting better it also was very confusing because they were only bringing hominid fossils up and I began to be suspicious that they were sort of cherry-picking down there and they assured me they were not there were only hominid fossils in this remarkable chamber we started working from 6:00 a.m. into the evening often finishing at 6:00 or 7:00 in the evening actually not on purpose though because you see we were working in shifts and I would send that last shift in usually about two o'clock in the afternoon with the idea of them coming out at 5:00 because they're working in these cramped conditions in this tiny space is very dangerous very difficult very stressful and usually about 4:30 I'd say okay guys start packing it up and they say just just a minute we're just getting this last one by 5:30 IV all right you know it's really time to come up and you know they'd be we're almost done with this it just coming up in a moment by six o'clock or 6:30 I'd be okay it's time to finish they say come and get us and that wasn't gonna happen it was an extraordinary moment of science by the end of the expedition we had discovered more fossil hominid remains than in the entire history of the search for human origins on the continent of Africa a three and a half week expedition to something designed to find one skeleton now I'm a pause for a moment because many people think I'm exaggerating when I about the dangers of this and just because we haven't killed anyone speaks more to actually our safety procedures and protocols that does this I'll show you the kind of journey to the cave and chamber this is one of the easy parts we call this Superman crawl for obvious reasons because you extend your arm above your head to fit through this is nothing Rick is going through now I can get through that this is about halfway there and these remarkable scientists and technicians and cavers and safety cavers were making that journey back and forth up to nine times a day a 240 meter journey that would take about 45 minutes for an experienced caver and that's all before descending that chute from this point on they journey through some other squeezes they climb dragons back and there at the top they have to take the journey down that chute now I'm using this picture for a very deliberate reason I want you to understand that I am an equal-opportunity child abuser that's my daughter Megan up there she would sit at the top of the chute and in a position we called chute troll mining the communication link between us and the command center and down below 20 15 meters down below her with the people excavating the caves and she would go up and down that chute as many as 10 times a day in order to carry fossils up because it was too narrow to even put equipment in do you want to see what it's like inside of that shoot the claustrophobe should probably look away at this moment this is what happens as you drop out of that chute into the chamber below that's you've been doing for the previous 12 meters all the way down and he's still smiling this chamber was remarkable we would name the chamber the dinner Letty chamber in tribute to the rising star cave system dinna Letty in the suti language means chamber of stars and as I said at the end of the expedition it had instantly become the richest fossil hominid site discovered in all of history on the continent of Africa perhaps in the world we'd recovered well over 1,500 individual remains representing at least 15 individuals from a surface collection and a 1 meter by one meter by 20 centimeter deep excavation the floor appeared to be literally made of these fossils and they were truly extraordinary it was a strange-looking creature had a flat face it had a tiny brain that we could measure at about 450 to 500 cubic centimeters we seem to have males which were heavily built and females that were lighter built but they were very close in size much like human sexual dimorphism is we had many individuals beautifully preserved in dentition almost 200 individual teeth from this area we had beautifully articulated remains like this foot which was one of six feet almost everything I we were had was the most complete that ever been found in the entire fossil hominid record we had the most complete hands ever found all eight of them that were recovered and this is just a tiny percentage of this remarkable sample that had come out of this chamber well how do you study a sample this large in a field that had previously been confined to scraps where I myself had done my entire PhD on the shoulder girdle of hominids on 13 fragments from across the continent and so we again went to social media and to our colleagues and we found a nest of early career scientists the best and brightest with datasets that they were willing to share in an open way something not traditional in paleoanthropology over 40 scientists that we brought together in Johannesburg from all over the world including some of the members of the sediba team because they were already world experts in analyzing skeletons and we went to work on that and in the end we described an extraordinary creature a new species another one to science except this one was in our genus we were certain we would call it home on the letti and it truly was a mystery to behold it had a tiny brain about the third the size of modern human brains that you can see imposed in the background it had bizarre ape-like shoulders in fact almost given like shoulders it had a chest like an ape a spine that was tiny but resembled in some ways Neanderthal spines as you went down its arm its arms became more and more and more human-like until you hit that hand which was incredibly human-like in the wrist and almost superhuman in the proportions of thumb was elongated but the fingers were curved curved like the most primitive ancient human relatives we had that dated to four or five million years old the legs were equally bizarre from a primitive pelvis they were primitive at the top and became more and more advanced more human-like until you reach those feet which were the most human-like that anyone had ever seen outside of humans we would call this species Homo Naledi Naledi means star in the c2 language and there you can see it there over on the right hand side a strange skinny elongated almost pinheaded creature that shared many things with us and many things we haven't seen it looked like one of the most primitive members of our genes it was more primitive than homo erectus who you see in the middle there but less primitive than australopithecines like Lucy who you see there a strange mosaic it seemed to say that maybe human origins hadn't happened the way we thought was this a replacement for Homo habilis the roots of our genus we knew more about this species because we had everything from infants to the elderly over 15 individuals and every bone represented except the hyoid in the throat multiple times but we didn't know how old it was when we published it many of our colleagues told us how old it was they said that it's primitive it's got to be at least 2 to 3 million years old and we said don't know it's just lying here on the floor of the cave and of course it's sitting here in this chamber that's almost impossible to get to and through all of our research we cannot find another entrance they appear to have been using the same sheet we use to get in and so when we published Homo Naledi we came out with a hugely controversial hypothesis we said there is only one reason we can think of why there would be only Homo Naledi inside of this chamber because despite what you may have heard mono specific assemblages of vertebrates terrestrial vertebrates are almost unknown except in one species ours and the reason is is we separate our dead from the environment it's almost a universal truism of humans it's almost one of our identifying features and we were claiming that we had discovered the first clearly non-human species of hominid of bipedal ape that was also deliberately disposing of its dead that did not please many people they said it was impossible they said it's a single occurrence you can't make a claim like that on one incurrence so we found another one a hundred and ten meters away in another chamber that we would call the Lacetti chamber we found this remarkable skeleton and two other individuals except this time they're tucked into alcoves in the walls of the cave exactly the same Anatomy and I can tell you here that we've actually found more situations like that this rising star cave system is full of these incredible creatures and when we announced this remarkable skeleton we also announced that we had finally got a date after 11 different techniques five different labs double-blind we came up with the remarkable idea that homo Naledi was not two million years old as it should be by its Anatomy or three but it was between two and three hundred thousand years old why is that remarkable because it kills a lot of sacred cows we had thought that human evolution had worked in a progressive thing with ultimately larger brain hominids always replacing perhaps driving to extinction the models that went before them at two to three hundred thousand years in Africa we know by the archaeology that modern humans are arising there all this early technology even in southern Africa is becoming more and more complex it's a hallmark of this big brain in the evolving idea inside of the human mind that is modern human origins but Homo Naledi is sitting there in africa with all those tools in archeology around it and almost no evidence of a large brain dominant anywhere near it was startling and disturbing had we got it wrong but we now know that there are multiple species of hominids across the world at that time some of them very odd the Flores hobbits and Indonesia you might have heard of some of you may have heard just earlier this year the 350,000 old large brain hominids at jailor Hood in Morocco and Neanderthals are emerging at this time in Europe what is homo Naledi well the answer is if no idea we don't know where it fits in this picture if it fits into our evolution is it a kin of ours or is it part of us I'm so glad we didn't find homo Naledi 10 or 15 years ago because we were able to apply technologies to these fascinating questions about this extraordinary species that didn't exist technologies like these this is lidar underground cave and we can add that to augmented virtual reality and will be releasing next year high-resolution augmented virtual reality so you can enter those chambers and explore them and discover in them in the way we are we are able to look inside the heads of these skeletons with the highest resolution scanners down to 50 microns pulling things out like the brains of these hominids which impress themselves on the inside of skulls extraordinary images that are telling us more about these creatures in the past how they lived how they thought and we have seen home on a ladies brain and almost no Letty's brain is perhaps the most complex brain we have ever seen outside of human brains and the andito brains yet hitched in this tiny package had they figured out how to get beyond some of those issues of an expensive brain tissue we don't know because we've not found Homo Naledi outside of this occurrence Homo Naledi is going to lead us into a disruptive age of paleoanthropology it's it's out of time and place my colleagues who guessed that that deposit was going to be two to three million years old weren't wrong Homo Naledi must have originated and it's that primitive but it remained invisible to us coming down through time imagine that we missed an entire complex species that must have existed for two or more million years and then we found it what does it mean for other things that we might have missed and so I had learned I am a slow learner but I had learned something from the malapa experience in Australopithecus sediba I had learned that sometimes we don't see the things that we think we know the best sometimes we don't see our own backyards sometimes we think the best discoveries are in these far-off places that others haven't explored and so we didn't stop exploring and so the new maps of what the cave sites that we're looking out there are not in just the hundreds but in the thousands we have found over 250 fossil localities in the most explored area on planet earth 250 fossa localities other scientists hadn't seen and they thought that the age of exploration in this field was over we are also finding extraordinary new fossils and I do not exaggerate when I say this we are finding fossils like this that is a block that is about 90 centimeters by 60 centimeters and every bone you're looking at is a hominid bone that block right this moment is in Lockheed Martin in Dallas Texas being scanned in a military micro CT scanner so that we can look inside of it and we can see the remains of the bones that we know are there because we put it in a medical CT scanner and what we're going to do with this because we sit in this amazing moment of discovery is we're going to leave that in there and we're going to digitally prepare using researchers from across the globe actually competing with artificial intelligence to bring these bones from inside out print them and share them with other scientists in public live as we do it over the next six months and then we can preserve this material for future generations of scientists who may be able to do things with discoveries like this that we can't imagine now and that's the place we are in this story that I've told you as a number of messages deeply within it one is that there's always a way to do something without destroying it some of you may be thinking why didn't you just open that shoot up Lee so you could happily walk in there with your nan physiologically appropriate body the reason is is because sometimes we do better things when we challenge ourselves as humans why would we jump to destruction when we can use technology and advanced technology and find extraordinary humans that can actually do this work extraordinary humans that we can become inspiration for this and the next generation who are true explorers at the front end of science making discoveries risking their lives and bringing us information about ourselves you know I speak to audiences all over the world many of them children and something that deeply bothers me is that almost universally particularly children will say the age of exploration is over that was that was the age of when people went out and ships to new lands and found new islands that weren't occupied who who climbed the mountains for the first time who went into deep jungles to make discoveries of lost civilizations but those days are gone if I go into this all I'm gonna do is just stand on the shoulder of these giants and make tiny contributions I think many scientists and many fields think like this I want you to take from this though that that is a lie it's a lie that we as humans have convinced yourself this story about the discovery of sediba and Naledi tell us that's lie that first sight was discovered in the most explored area on planet Earth for sites and objects like this and it was so easy to do a nine-year-old could do it the second site the dinna letty chamber in the rising star cave system was inside of the most explored cave possibly on the continent of Africa in a place that someone else had been that clearly had not recognized what extraordinary things were beneath their feet they were not prepared for discovery that is what we need to do we need to use stories of science and exploration sciences like this to not only encourage but to inspire this generation in the next that there are still things to be discovered we must teach people how to be prepared for discovery we must make them believe in discovery we must teach children that you don't need to do extreme things to get on the pages of things like new scientist you don't need to climb the south side of Everest naked with a dead parrot on your shoulder to be a first there are great discoveries right in front of us we must build in ourselves in humanity and in our children the spirit of exploration and we must never stop exploring thank you very much everyone [Applause]

Channel: New Scientist

Views: 148,088

Keywords: Homo naledi, lee berger, HUMAN EVOLUTION, paleoanthropology, Rising Star, human, ancestory

Id: gspjzX0Pq3U

Length: 50min 40sec (3040 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020