WSU: Exploring Our Humanity with Lee Berger

thank you very much it's a great pleasure to be here today i hope you're all enjoying the world science festival and university as much as i am i'm going to take you on a journey today a sort of journey of discovery that my colleagues and i have been engaged with largely over the past six years which is resulting in some fairly dramatic sort of changes in our understanding of both the quantity of fossils that are available in the search for human origins as well as the quality and leading to some new surprises at the end of the lecture i'm also going to give you some private insight in some of the newest discoveries that are about to come out that the world doesn't know about yet and hopefully you'll see why we we think it's a very bright future for the search for human origins um however i want to caution something before i get into this story parts of the story are going to sound like eureka moments or lucky moments they aren't they often have a deep background to the discovery that was the engagement of many many years if not decades of individuals hard work and perseverance to find so it's important to note that even though sometimes i might tell the story as if it's in a moment please be aware that behind that are these great depths of scientific endeavor and particularly exploration endeavor my colleagues and i have been privileged to be engaged in the cradle of humankind just outside of johannesburg this is an area that has been known since the 1930s for its early fossil hominids it was part of the searches by raymond dart and then later by the great robert broome that would lead to the discovery of many many extraordinary fossils but largely from just a tiny number of cave sites in a dolomitic limestone area starkventane swartcron's chrome dry for anyone who's familiar with those sites were the dominant sites that resulted in a recovery of something like about a third of the evidence of early hominid fossils on the continent of africa now that requires me to tell you a little bit of sort of factoids behind this field one of the fascinating things about paleoanthropology is that it is a field of science that's often described as one of the hardest because we seem to be seeking some of the rarest sought-after objects on the planet and it ends up as a science that remarkably perhaps at times has had more scientists than it does fossils that it studies that often gives it an aberrancy it can often lead to sort of personality traits where people work very hard to either protect the fossils that they've discovered for the teams and the effort they've been put in or clubbishness can actually occur within our field we're trying to sort of alter those situations i came to africa in 1989 first to kenya then moving to south africa because i wanted to find fossils and i first made my first major discovery at a site called gladysville in 1991 and that site uh i recovered two fossil hominin teeth from the site now that doesn't sound like a lot to you but in a field of scraps that discovery actually made national geographic magazine because it was the first new early hominid site that had been discovered in 48 years in southern africa that led me to the idea that there was more out there to be found i threw myself into gladysville a very traditional site and i began playing those lottery odds lottery odds in paleoanthropology are horrific and i'm going to tell you a little bit more insight into the minds of people like me who do this subject in east africa my colleague don johansen tells me that there is something like a one in 10 million chance of finding a early hominid fossil if you know that they're already on the landscape generally what that translates to is about one in every 10 million of the fossils they find in east africa is an antelope fossil or some other animal fossil to the rare fragments which are almost always teeth about 80 percent of the record up until recently has been isolated teeth if you can imagine that because they preserve better in southern africa we have remarkably better odds of finding uh hominid fossils it's about one in 250 000 antelope fossils largely to actually uh discover an early hominin but we have a additional problem instead of them just being on the landscape or eroding out of soft sediments ours are generally encased in solid concrete like rock called breccia so that while we find them in a higher percentage in these cave sites it can take 15 20 000 person hours just to recover one of the fossils from that hard rock so we have to pay it back in time as opposed to the statistical odds which sort of evens things out i spent my career in southern africa after discovery of gladysville searching for additional sites running the gladysville operation i eventually made quite a few small discoveries but really nothing more than scraps that was pretty good for paleoanthropology where science of scraps and even small contributions even maybe over a dozen small fragments of hominids would have put me probably in the top two or three percentile of fossil finding discoverers that were alive at that particular time i also won a great grant from national geographic in 1997 their gold medal for exploration and i used the money there to apply new technologies which had just emerged hand-held gps was just available at that time to actually map sites for the first time using satellite technology and also using available satellite digital maps from nasa you cannot believe how revolutionary this was as i tried to merge these two technologies to find new sites that might have these early hominids in them those maps cost about 10 000 us dollars a sheet and that sheet was covering an area about a 150 000 map size we had to have these enormous computers to run them i had to buy special computers which were the largest in the university i think they they had to run something like 80 megabytes of data at once to actually process one of the these maps and they cost a fortune at that particular time but out i went mapping these things i didn't find that many new fossil hominid sites in fact i found none during that process but i did find four new sites in this cradle of humankind area just outside of johannesburg which i thought was pretty good because it being perhaps the most explored area on planet earth for these fossils there had only been over the years about 14 fossil bearing deposits found in and about a hundred cave sites found in the region so finding four new sites with this technology and good old-fashioned groundwork was pretty good particularly in an area that people had been over by the time we moved into the 21st century though those sites that i had discovered i'd gone into and we didn't find a whole lot out of those the world had begun to change firstly paleoanthropology went through some of its darkest days there were the idea that that our field was a field of depleting resources there were papers published if you can imagine in 2000 by the leading scientists in the field saying there were no new fossil discoveries to be made that we had the general pattern of hominid origins worked out there would be no new fossil fields found on the continent of afghan we should quit training young paleoanthropologists in fact it was a declining resource can you believe that in a field as recently as 2000 by 2005 that kind of attitude had uh swelled into our organizations and i'd built a a organization on exploration but hadn't found those big fines and in our fields big fines are about getting on into nature and science and journals like that for many fields of science those were the criteria and perhaps are the criteria of of success and the bits and pieces we were finding didn't do that what was getting into those journals though were things like the virtual and digital analysis that was emerging that was the age of the pc as we got sort of 2005 2006. that was the age of the development of morphometric geometrics and these things and so the analysis of existing fossils looked like the future and my university began to move in that direction i found myself interestingly chairing a job search to replace myself that's a great feeling by the way if you're ever doing that um and and eventually found a replacement our committee found a replacement a young man named charles lockwood who was going to introduce these these new digital technologies because we did hold something like a third of the fossil assemblages for the fossil record held in africa and begin to move us in that direction so by 2008 uh by 2007 in 2007 we had an idea a plan in place we've begun to hire people we're bringing people in our new director had not arrived yet and i found myself soul searching and a loss for what to do and so like many people of that era so long ago i began surfing the web for inspiration for what would be my next thing if you couldn't get funding and you really couldn't for exploration activities and that was at that moment in december of 2007 and i'll never forget that moment when i was staring at the computer and became the absolute last human being alive on planet earth to discover google earth and so i did what everyone else all of you did when you first discovered google earth what did you do you look for your house right see if you're lying naked by the swimming pool you can't say that to new yorkers i guess but yeah you that also doesn't go down well in year the you can do that in south africa and i wasn't you then start putting in places that are familiar to it eventually you find that little white box where they've got those where you can put gps coordinates you shoot up into space and come down right on top of where you intended and i had some of the most expensively obtained gps coordinates in the world and so i put the first one in was actually for the side of glassville shoots into the sky and lands on nothing second gps coordinate nothing third nothing fourth nothing they were all wrong um it didn't take me long to google why the us government had owned those satellites back when i was doing that handheld gps survey and they put deliberate error into them that combined with the poor resolution of the handheld gps is at that time it created a form of a compounding error i'd wasted three years of my life mapping i was not looking forward to making the call to national geographic about that grant either but so what i did was i started correcting those numbers and as i did i began to realize that patterns were in the position of caves because i could see the cave sites and fossil sites that i'd intended to map the resolution was magnificent down here something like five meters and i began to see that the fossil sites in cave sites seem to be laid out in patterns and then i began to see that the fossil sites themselves seem to be clustering together around some sort of phenomena that error had not been made i would have never seen that pattern it was it was the process of that correcting and in the process of doing that i learned what a cave site in a fossil site looked from space and it made me realize that if well that's one this looks like one even though i knew it was impossible because everyone and their brother have for the last 80 years walked over this region i myself it's been three years doing it but it bothered me a month uh enough so that in march i actually loaded my dog into the car a laptop a 3g card jumped in went out into this area went as far away from gladysville as i could get because i knew that area better than anyone right into the city limits of a little town called krugerdorp where the dolomites peter out and on the first day found 21 new cave sites that no scientists had ever mapped that got me addicted i was hooked so i started making targets and going out one day at first then two days then sometimes three days a week they were wondering what had happened to me in the office they weren't really missing me very much because they were replacing me and by by by july of that year i had found 600 new cave sites in the most explored area on planet earth including over 70 fossil deposits remember i told you we had prior to that only 18 including the four that i had discovered 70 if you can imagine that i was blown away i thought that this was going to be my life's contribution i mean the additive value of all these potential fossil sites was great by that time i'd moved back in to the area around gladysville and of course what was happening to me elsewhere happened to me in a place that i knew the best my own backyard where i'd spent 17 years i started finding cave sites and i started finding fossil sites on august the 1st i walked up next to this lightning struck tree and found a small pit in the ground and there right next to a road that i'd driven on maybe 250 times in the last 17 years i found a little fossil site one kilometer away from gladysville astounded me but i was on a mapping expedition i moved up into the valley behind here and on that same day found more than 40 cave sites that no scientists had found right in a valley right next to where i'd been working what i didn't tell you was that we had a tragedy a week before that happened the young man who was going to take over this position as director and lead us into this new area was killed in a motorcycle accident in england and we were at a loss we'd already brought in post-docs we'd already hired equipment we were devastated because we were moving in that direction for sure one of his young postdocs that was going to study under him came into my office when i came in the next day and said you know could i be his postdoctoral supervisor and i said no not being unsympathetic to the situation it was just that he was going to be a lab guy i said you know i'm a field guy i've just made the discovery of this site if you want to learn how to be a field guide why don't we go out there and see what this site has to offer it bothers me it's so close to where i've been working for so long and so out we went august 15th job kibby the post doctoral student my nine-year-old son matthew my dog tal got back to the site started walking up to it i told him the story you'll be thankful shorter than i told you of how i discovered the site stood over and i said okay go find fossils when you find them call me over i'll identify them and let's see what this site has to offer with that matthew and tao run off this is the center of a huge game reserve there's leopards and and there's giraffe and zebra and stuff like that i thought he was going to go chase those and i'd see him back at lunchtime and he runs off and i was looking at job and i said you know i think the miners left this alone because they probably found it like i did they found it first and then they moved up the hill and they destroyed all those other caves and as i said that matthew shouted out he's now 50 feet off the side he says dad i found a fossil he was off in the grass the fossils were around me not over there and i almost didn't go luck but he's my nine-year-old son and like any of you you want to encourage fossil hunting so i started walking over towards him he was right at the base of this lightning structure that's on the images here it was holding a rock five meters away from i knew that his and my life were going to change forever because sticking out of that rock he was holding one of those classic pieces of concrete like breccia was a clavicle a hominid clavicle i knew immediately what it was it's this bone right here the reason i knew is because clavicles are very easy to identify very few animals have them in africa bats and moles have them this was too big and primates have them and of course only amongst primates hominids have sigmoid or s-shaped and at that moment i was probably one of the only world's experts on clavicles i did them for my phd matthew says i cursed i don't believe that i took the rock i turned it over and perhaps i might have cursed it though i shall never admit it because on the back side of that was sticking out a mandible and other parts of the body of a hominid it was clear what matthew had discovered was perhaps the rarest thing as i said about eighty percent of what we find are isolated teeth at that time there were probably two and a half thousand or three thousand remains individual remains of early hominids from all of africa those little skulls and mandibles you see in things like national geographic are extremely rare literally there are just a few dozen what are really rare partial skeletons people like me have a warp sense of what a partial skeleton is that's the association of any piece of the cranium directly associated with any piece of the body of the same individual and at that time there were about seven that had been discovered you would know some of their names lucy turkana boy littlefoot the dakika child and you start running out of numbers and names as you get beyond that and there i was probably holding one well indeed matthew's discovery would start a great period of adventure for us i would eventually call the site malapa and we would take that skeleton out three weeks later when i had the permits to actually work on the site from the south african government we went back and i found a proximal humerus and a scapula after looking at the site for several hours there were 14 of us out there we couldn't find anything and then all of a sudden i saw one lying in the side of this little pit and i realized that i'd found matthew's skeleton because what's the odds a clavicle and no one had ever found two skeletons in the same place at the same time of these early hominids that wasn't though the same skeleton it turned out to be a second one a female skeleton the one on the right is the one matthew found it turned out to be a child that in developmental ages around nine or ten years of age coincidentally the one on the left is when i would find a female skeleton we would eventually find four additional skeletons at the site of malapa without excavating they were literally lying on the surface it was an outrageous largesse something i had never dreamed as a paleoanthropologist it felt like i had won the lottery and i suppose with the kind of odds we did i perhaps believed that as many people did we would find other miraculous things as we would work through this site we'd find that the site of malapa had organic preservation you're going to be seeing published in scientific literature shortly the idea that we have found the first fossilized skin and hair associated with an early hominid at two million years of time depth we've also found that the entire site was comprised of organic material we published in nature a couple of years ago the calculus and tartar that were on the teeth and inside of that food particulates we had for the first time actually what an early hominin had put in its mouth and chewed just unbelievable but that posed a problem too because i couldn't just willy-nilly sort of go through this site so we began publishing it i put together an open collaboration open access team we brought together one of the largest teams in the world almost 100 scientists and we began publishing these papers and within 18 months we announced this new species australopithecus sediba and then over the past five years we published well over 35 scientific papers and finally got those covers of science that we'd always been looking for in future papers in nature in fact 15 papers in science over the time because of the large collaborative group and and so all my efforts were concentrated into that i also had to do something special at the site so i began the development of an extraordinary laboratory to protect the site act as a scientific platform so we could work with this potential organic material and what appeared to be lots and lots and lots of skeletons of all ages of this remarkable material that occurred i finally got funding for this structure back in early 2013 by all by by may of 2013 we began construction on site and i suddenly found myself with nothing to do i'd met my research goals we published everything completely over the time construction was going on at the site in a very delicate way and i realized i'd made a huge error the last time i'd been exploring looking for something new was that moment when matthew said dad i found a fossil because i'd won the lottery let me tell you a little lesson if you take nothing else away from this lecture today there is a truism in the fact that it is incredibly rare to win the lottery it is almost in borderline impossible to win it twice it is certain if you don't buy a lottery ticket i brought together a group of people then through a coincidence some of the young people that had worked for me previously were looking for work several of them were destitute they'd gone looking for diamond mining up in the in in west africa with little success as is true now one of the interesting things about this area which i didn't explain is most of the fossil sites like malapa are literally sitting on the surface they're the remains of ancient caves but when you look at that you probably see a hilly terrain with classic african sort of image to it i see a giant block of swiss cheese because underneath that terrain are literally kilometers and kilometers and kilometers of cave sites now these are often not the kind of cave sites you might have in your mind these giant systems they're often these narrow passages the light blue on this gives you some idea of the sort of network of small caves that are underneath this area the blue lines up at the top to give you some scale there is about 1.5 kilometers of narrow squeezes and so i enlisted these guys to actually get out in the field and begin finding and searching underground for fossil deposits whereas i had spent those years looking across the surface i'da tried an underground exploration back in the late 1990s but with little little effect and the reason for that was we weren't really trying that hard there was the idea that things underground would be young because they're the living caves and what we really wanted were the things that were eroded the remains of ancient caves otherwise you're just going to be looking at the abode of living animals i had learned something from malapa another thing for malapa was you know sometimes the best things to find are in your own backyard so pedro steve and rick who you see pictured here i sent out into the field but i said here's what you're going to do you're going to start first in the places we think we know the best you're going to go first into the stark fontaine and swarcron valley because we've known those sites forever they're the longest running excavations on the continent of africa strikefontaine perhaps in the world now if you noticed steven rick who were amateur caves at that time are physiologically appropriate for this exercise you have to be because these caves are not what you're envisioning as i said earlier they often require moving through these incredibly narrow areas like the one you see steve going into now and so steve and rick and pedro started working these areas they did a very human thing they started with all the dots that i had created back in the late 90s that they'd never been into and they didn't find very much they finally worked their way through in the starkvintain valley to the last cave they wanted to go into a cave called the rising star system the reason they wanted that last is they knew that cave better than any other cave it perhaps was the most explored cave on the continent of africa for the last 50 years every amateur caver in south africa has trained in that cave as part of their training because it's just right it's close to the city it's got just enough difficulty so everyone's been there completely mapped but they went into this cave following my instructions to do them all and one evening in late september well mid-september actually around september 16th they found a climb off to the side called dragon's back labeled dramatically on the on on the map and there they found this slot that you see steve going down into they look down into that let me give some scale that is about 17 and a half centimeters which is about seven and a half inches wide you can get a scale of his helmet there to realize he turns it down he was about he was about 35 meters underground as they looked down this little slot and of course being my cavers they went down the slot both of them not knowing what's at the bottom not knowing whether it opens up they followed that slot that seven and a half inch slot down for almost 60 feet underground and came out into a chamber and there on the chamber they started seeing small fragments of bone there you can see them in white as they move down about 20 meters through this narrow passageway they came out into a more open area and there they found some bones lying on the surface they thought those bones looked like the ones that i had trained them to look for and so they realized they'd left their camera out they came two and a half hours and they could only go in a little bit later but in the meantime they called me and i said they thought they had made a find and i said guys get me pictures and stuff because you know i get called every week with you know baby dolls buried in the backyard that people say are mummified hominids and things like that and even for my own people i won't see pictures so back they went i'd almost forgotten about it on october the 1st i was sitting at home in a way working on the internet about nine o'clock at night and the doorbell on my gate went i picked it up and pedro went you're gonna let you're gonna want to let us in almost in a creepy voice like that and i almost didn't but i did let him and steve come in and they came in with photographs we put them in the computer and turned them on and i was astounded because that may not look like much to you but when i saw that i realized that this is extraordinary that is a primitive hominid mandible i could tell by the tooth proportions i could tell by the scale that they'd taken inappropriately left if you notice it says home sewing aid only the that that they were big teeth and that i could see from all the material around it that it looked like there was a skeleton there just lying on the surface i've blown away i couldn't believe it never seen anything like that in south africa i'd never heard of anything like that in history they told me about the site a little bit more i was worried because it's effectively a very public cave we celebrate a little bit i sent them home i couldn't sleep 2 am i picked up the phone and i called a friend that friend was terry garcia national geographic society vice president of missions and i said terry near a computer and i sent him pictures and i said listen terry if you have ever had the chance to believe in me before believe in me now let's explore speak for i need money he paused you could probably hear him sigh and he said do what you need to do that's grant agency for you can spend some of our money but don't overdo it so i then got cold feet because someone had given me the chance and all i had really seen was a home sewing aid juice only measure with some fossils so i needed to get better photographs better scale photographs before i actually now invested what would be a very expensive operation i knew i would never get down into this system and so i did what any person would do i trained my now skinny six foot four fifteen year old son to take those photographs and i sent matthew down into that chamber along with steve and rick after climbing through i can get right to the edge and i can look down into this little slot there i sent my son down just under a week later there i sat in the dark waiting 30 minutes 40 minutes thinking i'd killed my son until i hear scrabbling coming up and out pops matthew's head out of this little slot he's looking at me and because i'm going for father of the year i looked at him and said not didn't say are you all right i went and and he went daddy it's beautiful it's so incredible my hands were shaking for three minutes before i could take a picture i looked at those pictures and it was incredible it was clear there was a skull embedded in the dirt there were limb bones there it was outrageous so that was a saturday i went home next sunday i made a decision to activate that expedition because i was worried that someone was going to get in there i could see some of the material been broken it had fresh breaks someone had stepped on that material down there and so i had to find people who could get down a seven and a half inch slot 40 meters underground excavate in a professional way this material and so i did what anyone would do with that problem at hand i put a facebook ad out i was looking for skinny people who could work well in groups in tight spaces underground with caving experience climbing experience can't be claustrophobic you have to be a team player highly specialized work oh and you have to have a master's or phd in paleoanthropology or archaeology or a related field i figured there were probably about three people in the world that had that within 10 days i had almost 60 applicants 80 young women from that i selected a most extraordinary team of young women from all over the world who were all physiologically and academically appropriate that was by mid-october on november 7th i put a 60-person expedition into the field they flew out not knowing what they were actually doing i laid three and a half kilometers of underground audio visual cables so that i could be there and communicate through this excavation we invented technologies that we would use to actually not only monitor the excavations communicate with those science but actually map using 3d white light scanners underground we create a science tent a cavers tint and a laboratory to process this skeleton that was going to come up on november the 10th down they went for the first time it was dramatic stuff we were seeing visions like this as they moved into this highly highly dangerous area we had safety cavers on board we had medical doctors in place everything in place you would need for a dangerous dramatic excavation and then the first material started to come up all collected first line on the ground just like you see it there being mapped in using white light lasers it had this hyper accurate real-time live mapping that we could watch and instruct as we were on the surface on the second day i knew i'd made a mistake it was not a skeleton it was many skeletons because what had come up by the second day was a second individual we had two right femurs hominids and humans don't have that then we had three then four by the end of the week working in shifts underground of six to eight hours where only two people could work at the front the confines are so narrow there we had discovered more early hominid fossils from this single chamber they've been discovered from the richest site in all of southern africa they've been excavated for almost 80 years stir fontaine more individual specimens in one week came up out of the ground we had the time of our lives we were clearly in the middle of something extraordinary by week two we had to build larger science tents the joke became we need a bigger safe we began to see not just hundreds of fossils but approaching a thousand fossils by the end of 21 days of this extraordinary experiment we had quite literally uncovered in these shifts of remarkable people working now day and night in what was clearly an extraordinary environment the richest early hominid assemblage ever discovered in history we had by the end of the 21 days more hominid fossils have been discovered in the previous 90 years in all of southern africa all from one little chamber now i know some of you might think i am over emphasizing the danger of this so rick and steve are going to give you a little tour of the route into this chamber as we work our way towards this particular chamber this is not a particularly difficult squeeze i can get through this believe it or not this one's only about 24 centimeters so rick is going to take us this one we call by the way we call it postbox because you get delivered through it very often if you get stuck you have to be pulled through this particular area you journey along a route that that has a number of these type of squeezes some of the areas once you get through these these smaller squeezes are a lot easier to maneuver through you can actually stand up as you'll see rick do in just a moment he's going to walk you along the base towards dragonback so some of the areas are quite they've got lots of space around you like these sort of areas this is at the base of dragon's back where you have to begin a climb but first you have to slide under some of these areas now these caves are very dangerous for another reason we we often don't think about and that is because they're shallow caves that they're only 30 or 40 meters underground that the dirt and areas are quite loose above them and you're always in danger of rock fall or one of these actual rocks be becoming loose so when you're doing a maneuver like this you have to take your helmet on if the rocks above you shift at all you can be in a small bit of discomfort the what they're going to do now is actually climb dragon's back and take you up to the top of that chute and then drop you down into the chamber itself dragon's back is an extraordinary part of the climb when we had we were doing the expedition we would rope it off but when we're not doing it we don't rope it off and if you fall at any one of these areas you will fall between 6 and 12 meters to the ground and you will probably die you'll get a little bit of idea of the height as you stare down this part of the chute as you can see steve's light down below as rick squeezes through these and some of the dangers are like this loose rock which you're about to see this loose rock actually fell on a national geographic photographer and injured him quite badly recently oh and rick can dislocate his shoulders i just want you to see that isn't watch the watch him do this how about that or something these are the reason i show you that is that these people really are quite heroic as they risk their lives to make these discoveries the young men and women who are are doing this work have become a new generation of explorers many of them are now permanently on our team and we are now running permanent exploration entities into the field now right my teams are actually in the field right now we're also looking at new ways of handling this largesse never before had we had this many hominid fossils we were a field of scraps so what we brought together now using social media but also context is early career scientists combined with my pre-existing team that discovered sediba so last may we brought out 35 early career scientists who had never had the chance nor probably ever would have the chance to be involved in the original descriptions of early hominids and we engage them to produce papers and those papers i'm pleased to announce are going to be seen very very shortly they will be appearing in nature probably within the next eight weeks i'm going to show you something the world hasn't really seen yet here's some of the beautiful glimpse of some of the fossils that we've discovered the quality and preservation is extraordinary 1754 individual elements we've recovered we recovered those from the open floor of the cave and we did an excavation that consists of an excavation one meter by 40 centimeters and that's what we recovered the cave is full of thousands of remains it is going to be an extraordinary extraordinary experience and they are some of them in remarkable condition from this little cave we are seeing something extraordinary happen we are seeing a revolution in the quantity and quality of fossils that are appearing we've left the cave now locked it down secured it barred it up and we put monitoring devices in it but i'd also learned a lesson from malapa i'd quit exploring when i won the lottery at malapa i did not quit exploring after this i actually built the teams and more aggressively put them out in the field because now we had a new search picture and i'll fill you in on a little secret malapa might have been a miracle the rising star chamber proved it probably wasn't and the more than five new early hominid sites we've discovered since then prove that it absolutely is not true this stuff was right in front of us all the time this particular site is eight hundred meters from the side of swarkrons a site dug continuously since 1947. it is less than a mile from the site of strickfontaine the longest-running most intensive dig in the history of paleoanthropology and the fossils were lying effectively right on the surface albeit a chamber deep underground that someone else had been in before we got there and hadn't recognized the material the sites are littered across the region we have not found just dozens of new fossil sites but hundreds of them now we now realize that we had blinded ourselves with the idea of bad luck we'd believed that it was lottery odds that were going to lead us to these discoveries and so we talked ourselves into quit looking once you put teams back out in the field you find out that the fossils are there here's a couple of lessons to end this on one is avoid backyard syndrome what is backyard syndrome i use it like this if i did an interesting experiment and asked you to look around this room and memorize it and then we walked out and handed two sheets of paper and said draw this room and draw your backyard you draw this room better than you draw your own backyard you draw your backyard as an amalgamation of how you see it without the detail because that's the way our brains work it keeps us from exploding from we look at new places where danger and things might be and we memorize them and then we discard that very quickly that's how you have a post-it note on your fridge from 1998 and not realize it's there we must avoid backyard syndrome because that's what this story is about we scientists quit looking because we knew we'd already looked or others had the second message of this is that we need to train the next generation and this generation and all of our generations that the age of exploration is not over with i don't know how many of you felt like this but certainly i talked to children all over the world and there's this idea that the age of exploration was the age of sailing ships or the age of being first somewhere the age of first person on an abandoned island or the first person into a jungle first person to climb a mountain that the great discoveries had been made and that what scientists would do is to stand incrementally on the shoulders of giants i certainly thought that in paleoanthropology that would be my lot but these discoveries challenge that they challenged the idea that if you want to get into the pages of national geographic or the cover of science that you'll have to do something like climb up the south side of everest naked with a dead parrot on your shoulder there are still things to be discovered yes indeed we as humans may have traversed pretty much every part of this world but what these discoveries in the middle of the most explored area on planet earth for these very objects say is that we haven't understood what we were walking over let me remind you that these fossils were so easy to find that a nine-year-old could do it what does that mean for other sciences in my field what does it mean for places further from here these conditions exist across big chunks of africa big chunks of europe asia the americas this is a new area these subterranean environments so if it's true in my field of science it's got to be true in every field of science we need to teach our generations that technology is not going to do this alone you cannot just sit behind a computer and explore in discovery it can aid you but you've got to use it as a tool you've got to use this magnificent power that's been placed in front of us as a tool to make discoveries you got to use the ability to communicate with crowds across the world of experts to make discoveries but eventually you need to get up from behind the computer and get back out there and look if i leave you with nothing else is it become an explorer a real one avoid backyard syndrome and make incredible new discoveries because they're still out there to be made thank you very much everyone

Channel: World Science U

Views: 549

Rating: 4.7647057 out of 5

Keywords: Homo naledi, Lee Berger, naledi, Explorer, Author, Award-Winning Researcher, evolution, paleoanthropology, early hominin fossils, Royal Society of South Africa, Australopithecus sediba, New York City, NYC, world science festival, short, World, Science, Festival

Id: t56TrYf3YM4

Length: 44min 57sec (2697 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020