Radiolab - The Skull

Episode Date: May 15, 2014

  Today, the story of one little thing that has radically changed what we know about humanity’s humble beginnings and the kinds of creatures that were out to get us way back when.   Wits University Professor Lee Berger and Dr. Chris Stringer from London’s Natural History Museum explain how a child’s skull, found in an ancient cave, eventually helped answer one of our oldest questions: Where do we come from? Then Lee takes us on a journey to answer a somewhat smaller question: how did that child die? Along the way, we visit Dr. Bernhard Zipfel at Wits University in Johannesburg to actually hold the skull itself.   We wanted to give you a chance to hold the skull, too. So we did a little experiment: we made a 3D scan of it. If you visit our page on Thingiverse, you’ll see the results. Anyone with access to a 3D printer can print their own copy of the skull. (We printed a bunch, with help from our friends at MakerBot—there’s even a purple one with sparkles.)   We also collaborated with the folks at Mmuseumm, a tiny (really tiny, it’s in an elevator shaft) museum in Manhattan. You can visit them to see the 3D printed skull, along with the other wonderful things in their collection: mosquitoes swatted mid-bite, toothpaste tubes from around the world, and much more.   Thanks to JP Brown, Emily Graslie and Robert Martin at the Field Museum in Chicago for scanning the skull. Thanks to Curtis Schmitt and shootdigital for refining the scan. Thanks to Bre Pettis and Jenifer Howard at MakerBot for guiding us through the world of 3D printing.    

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts.

From W. N. Y. C. C? Yes. And NPR. Hey, I'm Jedi Boomrod. I'm Robert Crilwood. This is Radio Lab.

And today we're talking about things. I don't think there'll ever be another specimen that'll be exactly like this one. Actually, our next podcast is a full hour about stories that grow out of particular things, objects. But today we have a preview, sort of. So that's the place, right? This is the place? It's a story about a thing. It's in this vault.

It lives inside a steel vault, inside this huge laboratory at Witts University in Johannesburg, South Africa. We asked a professor there, Dr. Bernard Zepfeld, to pull it out and show it to our reporter, Patricia Hume. And this is the original specimen. This is it. We have it right in front of us here. I mean, I handle this a lot, but I get goose flesh every time I take this out. The reason it gives him goose flesh, or goose bombs, is because this object seems to completely upend two basic questions about, you know, human history.

Amazing. Where do we begin? And when we began, who was trying to take us out? Producer Andy Mills takes the story from here. Right. With thunder and vigor? And gusto. With gusto.

Yes, I'd like to with gusto, please. All right. It's one of those discoveries that almost didn't happen. And here to help me tell you the story. Okay, I'm Professor Lee Berger. Is Lee. I am a research professor at the University of the Vitvotter Sron and Johannesburg and an explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society.

An explorer in residence. That's a weird title. It seems like you shouldn't. You should be one or the other. It's almost an oxymoron, isn't it? Yeah. Lee says that our story begins back in the 1920s in South Africa at a place called Tong.

Tong. It's T-A-N-U-G. Ta-U-G. Ta-ung is the property in Swana. The Western way of saying is Tong. It's a desert area on the southern edge of the Kalahari escarpment. Kind of like your stereotypical picture of Africa. Red rocks, Beobab trees, roaming gazelles. And back in the 1920s...

The place was crawling with Europeans. digging mines. You say we're blasting away with dynamite, drilling with big steam drills, and huge explosions would take place. And one day these miners, they're blowing their way through a bit of this hillside, and as the rock falls away and the smoke clears,

they realize that they've opened up this cave. An ancient cave. And inside of that cave. They found dozens of these strange-looking rocks, almost like animal bones. One of the miners, he takes those bones, gives them to a geologist. Geologist box them up.

And sent them to this Australian guy who is living in Johannesburg named Raymond Dart. And that's probably the first miracle in this story. Raymond Dart was a neuroanatamus, a comparative neuroanatamus. One of the only ones in the world. This was a guy who knew his fossils. And when this box arrived, he was actually wearing a three-piece suit.

He's going to be best man at a wedding, in fact, later that afternoon. But he's like, that can wait. So he reached into the box, shuffled through some antelope skull, It was full of baboon skulls, monkey skulls, until he got to this one rock. Now, to you or me, this would have just looked like a big chunk of limestone. But Raymondard immediately realized he had something special. And he actually went and got his wife's knitting needles and started scratching away at this rock, much to his wife's disgust.

He then spent the next several months. Delicately chipping away at the limestone until... The rock literally popped free. and there he stared into a perfect little face. You can see here, the face is quite flat and human-like. A lot like the face of a child. A human child. But humans have a larger brain.

According to Dr. Zepfeld, this child's brain was smaller than a human child. It was closer to the size of a chimpanzee. So it had features of a human. It had a brain more like a chimpanzees. Stranger Still, Dart, who remember studied this sort of thing, he looked at the foramen magnum. That's the hole in the base of your skull, where your spine goes in. He knew that for creatures that walk on four legs,

that hole is generally towards the back of the skull, so they can look forward. But here, the hole is on the bottom, which suggested to him that this creature walked up right. It was not a monkey. It wasn't an ape. As we know apes today, it was certainly not a modern human being. This was something in between.

If you were walking across a broken woodland where Little Tongchow might have lived, you would have seen a person off in the distance. As you approach, though, you'd begin to see that something was wrong with the proportions. Arms were probably a little longer, legs a little bit shorter. The head was too small. And as you stepped closer you'd see, the little Tongchow's body would have been covered in this thick hair. Potentially even fir, more like an ape than one.

we have. But it would be like no ape you've ever seen because it would be standing there in very much the way you would be standing, staring at it, on two legs. So if this is a little bit human and a little bit apes, sort of kind of in the middle, it seems, did he feel like this was the quote, missing link? Well, we don't use that term because evolution doesn't happen that way. But certainly, Dart did. He, in fact, wrote a book called Adventures with the missing link. And right after he discovered the skull, he sent a paper off in amazing speed to the journal Nature. It was published in February of 1925. He thought that this was going to revolutionize everything.

But he was wholeheartedly rejected by the great scientific community of Europe. For two reasons. First, we already knew that humans didn't evolve in Africa. Yeah, Africa was backward. That was the belief, says Chris Stringer. I'm a research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. And he explained that back in the early 20th century, People of the time felt that if you look in Europe, you can see all this wonderful cave art painted many thousands of years ago.

They preferred to think that Europe or Asia were more likely centers of our origins than Africa was. Second, scientists already found a skull that they believed belonged to the quote-unquote missing link. It was something called Piltdown Man. It was this ancient man fossil thing that they found in a golf course in England, So in their minds it was the right place. And also, in Piltdown Man, you've got this very large brain and a brain case that looks really quite like a modern human one. Which made sense to them.

You know, clearly European ancestors would have had big brains because they're European. Yeah. I mean, the tongue individual had a small brain. Way too small. This thing was too primitive. It didn't look right. So Dart?

He spent the next 20 plus years. Arguing, look, people. This is our ancestor in getting nowhere. Until in the late 1920s, other fossils started showing up. In China, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia. And these other fossils, they were from roughly the same era as the Piltdown Man. But their brains, their teeth, their bone structures, they were all totally different. So this was very weird.

I mean, you know, how do you explain that? For decades... Nothing else like Piltdown Man turns out from anywhere in the world. So some forensic experts at the London Museum of Natural History, they decide, maybe we ought to go take a closer look at Built Down Man. They started looking at the material under microscopes. And right off the bat, they found that one of the teeth clearly showed the marks of a metal file.

That it had been filed down to look flat. No. Piltdown was a fraud. It was a fake. A forgery, a hoax. And the hoaxers were never caught. There were questions in the houses of Parliament about the competence of the natural history. Museum that its experts had been fooled for all this time.

Because this wasn't even a very good fake. They had taken the jawbone of an orangutangutang. They took some modern human skull pieces. They then stained that material dark brown, so it looked the same color. No. They even fake stone tools. And all this time, right there in front of them, was the Tong Child. It is estimated and it's purely an estimate of being around 2 million, 2.2 million years.

old. Which still today is the oldest, not quite yet human fossil that we have. This would be probably the greatest, or one of the greatest discoveries ever. Been argued to be the most important single fossil ever discovered in the history of humankind's search for ancestry because... It brought to the fall that humanity originated in Africa. That every human on earth is an African. We are all of African. origin. But, but more than just where we came from, which I think is totally cool. Yeah. Super interesting. We can, we can look at the skull and we can see things about, you know,

what life was like for this like little version of us that lived so long ago. We look at the teeth, we can see what it was eating. Was it eating like what we eat? Yeah, its teeth are like surprisingly similar to our teeth. So yeah, it wasn't, like, hugely different from what we eat. But I think the most exciting thing that it can tell us is, you know, not just about what our life was like, but what was lurking in the shadows waiting to take us out. You can tell that from the skull? Yeah, I mean, this, this skull is, it's kind of at the center of this murder mystery. I.e., who killed the Tong child. At the time when, when Raymond Dart made that discovery,

he had this sort of gut feeling that this Tong child was killed. by one of its own. You know, because this is like 1924. We were between two wars, World War. One had occurred with the horrible destruction. Dart was actually a medic in that war, and he walked away convinced. The humans were inherently evil creatures. That were inherently violent and that we were probably a lot worse in the past.

And in fact, the opening of 2001 is space auditsy. Where you see the monkeys kind of beating you other with the bones was based on Raymond Dart's theories of the violent origins on the continent of Africa. So that was Darts' like pet theory that maybe Tong got clubbed down by his brother or his neighbor. But that ignores one big thing. In that limestone mine where the Tong skull was found, there were also all these other skulls,

baboon skulls, monkey skulls, there was this like little collection of bones, more like what you would expect to find in a predator's den. So not a tongue-like creature, but maybe a cat, big cat. At least a large mammalian predator, then because that's perfectly acceptable. If we're tough, they're tough, it's okay to be killed by something mean and vicious. So that became the new theory. Because what else do humans have to fear, right? Well, what? Now, here's where I think maybe you come into the story.

For some reason, when you arrive many, many, many years later, this idea that the cat did it. Seems to disturb you. I was addicted to that story as anyone else. I'd been brought up on it through my anthropology classes. Every book I ever read said that. But one day... In 1994...

He bumps into a completely new idea. In an almost eureka moment. Because there I was at Gladysville. An excavation site in South Africa. Lee and his team were doing what they do, digging for fossils. I'd just finished excavation. All my team had left. and I was sitting there watching the sunset.

And I looked up on the hillside, and there was a troop of vervet monkeys. They were a small gray monkey, and they were coming down to forage down the hill. And all of a sudden I heard an alarm call. And I looked up in the sky, and there came a huge eagle. The monkeys scattered as this eagle swooped around the edge of the hill.

And as it came down around the edge of the hill, I realized it was a trap, because coming around the other edge of the hill was that. eagle's mate. And it zoomed in and whacked one of those large monkeys right in front of me. And everything went silent. The other eagle landed. This eagle's sitting on top of a now dead monkey. And the eagle staring at me. I'm staring at it probably with my mouth open. It looks at me for a moment. And then it leaps off the edge of this cliff with this dead monkey and flies away with it

down the valley. And I had an idea. So I got into my car. I chased the direction it went. I knew where it was going. I knew where these Black Eagle nest were. They were up on a cliff face. I crawled up under crossing a river, crawled up under the nest. And there was this pile of bones. Huge pile of bones.

Hirax's little antelopes. A baboon skull. A baby baboon skull. And almost every one of the bones there had these amazing marks on them. Keyhole-shaped cuts. Where the eagles have driven their talons into the skulls. These big eagles can have killing talons that are five, six, seven inches long, if you can imagine that. I got in my car back to the lab in Joe Bird.

He whips open the drawer that contains those skulls and bones that were found with the Tong Child skull. And... The exact same marks. Couldn't believe it. There's even like a little mark on the Tong Child skull itself. A year later, 1995. and a colleague they published a paper that blamed eagles for the death of the tongchow. And it was received like a smelly wet blanket by the field. Why?

Why would they not say, oh, of course. Because it was entrenched idea. You know, Lee says maybe subconsciously they felt like our ancestors are being demoted again. That is that, you know, we were not the masters of our universe. Because cats just feel tougher than birds? I don't know. But according to Lee, the big cat scientists were like... You know, it's been published.

It's been published. A leopard did it. For 40 years. We even got into a debate in the hallowed pages of the journal Nature on the load-lifting capacity of birds of prey on whether or not birds of prey could lift something as large as the tong child. And these debates, they went on for years. He couldn't convince people.

We needed something more. Until one night It was about 9 o'clock at night. Years later. I was at home seen in my little study. He was reading an academic paper about eagles and how eagles sometimes when they kill little mammals, they'll reach into their eye sockets and pluck out their eyes.

To get at the nice, juicy brain on the inside. And in the paper... There was this really beautiful image. Well, it's beautiful to people who study dead things, but a beautiful image of a skull of a primate with the interior sockets of its eyes, with these jagged marks in it. These very particular scratch marks

on the underside of the eye sockets. And I was staring at these images and I went, oh my goodness, or something to that effect. I got into my car, drove down to the lab, opened up the safe,

pulled out the tongue child, turned the face over, and there they were. On the base of the inside of the eye socket were these jagged, rigid marks that you had to have done by reaching into the orbit, the exact same marks. You can see little squiggle marks, almost like little exclamation marks and little commas. No one had noticed that before. And imagine I'm sitting in the middle of this anatomy department, in the middle of the night, in a vault containing million-year-old fossil.

It was a magic moment. It was fantastic. All right, so now you know a little bit about how this creature lived and how it died. I mean, beyond solving the murder mystery, what does that tell you? Well, first to say, solving the murder mystery is kind of cool. That's always a neat thing. Totally. And there's nothing wrong with just doing that. But have you ever thought why when you're standing out on a playground or standing out in an open field and a shadow passes over you?

Do you know that feeling that occurred, whether it be from an airplane, or whatever. First, you get that tingly feel on the back of your neck and then you yank your head up. You ever wondered why you do that? Yeah. You do that because the little Tong child

died two and a half million years ago because he didn't look up quick enough when that happened. Producer Annie Mills. One thing we should say, one very important thing we should say is actually we did an experiment with the story. We hooked up with some people at MakerBot

and some very nice folks at the Field Museum. In Chicago. And we had 3D scans. made of the Tong Child's skull. I'm actually holding one right now. Me too. Mine's purple. Mine's pink.

Why is true as pink? I don't know. That was the color of the plastic they used. But these are amazing replicas of the Tong Child's skull. I mean, you can see all the ridges, you can feel the scratches and the eyes. Imagine if you could listen to the story you just heard while holding the tongue child in your hand. Well, that's exactly the reason we did this. We have partnered with a museum called Museum that's spelled with four M's, two in the front, two in the back.

museum. It's this tiny little elevator shaft-sized place here in Manhattan where they display all these sort of like oddities, you know, like little objects from Saddam Hussein's palace. They have pool toys that were banned from Saudi Arabia.

Right. And they will also be displaying our 3D replica of the Tong's skull. So if you go there, you can actually hold the skull, you dial in a little number, and you can hear part of the piece. While you're standing there. Yeah, and I can tell you, it's a very different

experience to listen to the story while holding this thing. Not only that, if you have a 3D printer of your own and you go to RadioLab.org, you can download a scan, a 3D scan of the Tong Skull, and you can print your own. Thanks again to MakerBot and to shoot digital for helping to make that happen. Props to Lynn Levy for conceiving of the whole idea. Go to our website, radio lab.org. I'm Chad Aboomerad. I'm Robert Prelwick. Thanks for listening. Hi, this is Lisa Beck, calling from Fort Worth, Texas. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. This is Cliff Friedman calling from the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Radio Lab is supported by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform dedicated to providing a simple way to create a website, portfolio, or online store for business or personal use. Squarespace provides templates and drag-and-drop tools to create professional websites. Users create sites that are mobile-ready, including 24-7 support, domain names, and e-commerce, all on the same platform. For a free trial, visit Squarespace.com slash RadioLab.