The Ancients - Homo Naledi: The First Burials?

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

Uncovered a decade ago in the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa, Homo Naledi's discovery has impacted paleoanthropology in ways nobody could expect. Upon first discovery, it was assumed this small brained hominid lived millions of years ago - yet when dating of the fossil's was completed, it transpired that Homo Naledi lived at the same time as early Homo Sapiens. So what does this mean for human evolution, and why (and how) were these fossils found so deep inside the Rising Star Cave system?In this episode Tristan welcomes both Dr Lee Berger, and Professor Chris Stringer, to the podcast to talk about the discovery of Homo Naledi, and what it means for paleo-anthropologists and archaeologists around the world. Looking at the wall engravings, charred animal bones, and charcoal discovered - is there evidence that these small brained ancestors had complex thoughts and actions, or is there more yet to be discovered?Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.For more Ancient's content, subscribe to our Ancient's newsletter here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. In 2013, one of the most exciting discoveries in the field of human evolution was made deep in a cave system in South Africa. Hundreds of fossils were discovered, belonging to an ancient species of the Homo genus, a small-brained human relative until then unknown.

Homo naledi. There has been a lot of interest around Homo naledi over the past decade, as more and more work on the fossils has been done. But it's also fair to say that this story has its fair share of controversy right now. The amazing team that have been excavating the fossils have made some massive claims. They believe that they've discovered evidence of burial. That Homo naledi deliberately buried their dead in this chamber more than 100,000 years ago. Now this is a big statement. Burial, until now, was something that was only associated with large-brained humans. The claim that a small-brained

hominin had the complexity of thought to do such an act has been met with scepticism. However, regardless of the ongoing debate, the larger story of Homo naledi, the discovery, the remains, the mystery, well it's absolutely incredible. And so in today's episode, we're doing something special. The lion's share of it will be an interview with Dr. Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist who has been leading the Homo naledi excavations in the Rising Star cave system. excavations in the Rising Star cave system. Lee is here to tell the story behind what we know so far about Homo naledi, and why he is convinced that his team have found evidence that these hominins were burying their dead more than 100,000 years ago. Following this, we have a quick chat with a great friend of the podcast and a leading light in human evolution, none other than Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum. Chris is here to give his thoughts on Homo Naledi

and why the years ahead are so exciting for learning more about this ancient human relative. The discovery and story of Homo Naledi is an absolutely fascinating one that is adding even more complexity to the current knowledge of human evolution and so it was a great privilege to interview both Lee and Chris for today's very special episode. I really do hope you enjoy it and first off, here's Lee. Lee, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. It's absolutely fantastic to be here. I've just come downstairs from a planning meeting where we're planning out the next expedition,

putting together a global art team that's going to be investigating these symbols, putting together a faunal team and launching a whole series of expeditions into the space. It's an exciting time. Lee, you are so enthusiastic about it. And it's such a great adventure story, isn't it? A story, this new type of human that is adding further complexity to the story of human evolution. This is a great moment, I think, in history. We're at a time when the levels of discovery across the planet related to human origins are unprecedented. And it's not just the African story of human origins. It's the Asian story.

It's the North American story. It's the Indonesian story. It's the Pacific Islands. There's no part in Europe, too. I forget to leave that out. But no part of it is almost every week we're seeing these transformational discoveries. And that's, of course, happening because of technology, the ability to look at molecular data, the ability to explore using space sciences and other techniques. But it's also because there are more explorers. I think

our generation has just freed itself from a legacy that there was nothing left to find and that is exactly it's bursting that bubble isn't it and it almost seems it's a although it's not completely because of new scientific advancements those advancements in science means you're able to now go and discover these you know find these new fossils from these people the homonyms living hundreds of thousands of years ago, along with the teams going and exploring these places, for instance, in your case, deep at the back of cave systems. There is so much more to discover in the years ahead. I have often said that the underground world is another last frontier of the unexplored.

is another last frontier of the unexplored. And I know that's trite, and I know it's overused. It's overused in ocean exploration with the ideas that my friend Bob Ballard and Sylvia Earle rightly say, you know, less of the world has been explored under the oceans than anywhere. But humans are like that with caves, too. We are not creatures of the subterranean environment. You know, despite the word caveman, we are creatures of the near underground environment. We go into the twilight zone, but we do not venture into the deep, dark recesses of the underspaces. And that's really been a phenomenon of the last, you know, 50, 60 years of exploration.

And truly, I think in the area like paleoanthropology, human origins, I think it's a factor of the last, oh, you know, two decades. last, oh, you know, two decades. And we are just beginning to see that these spaces are like these protective wombs of history. And they preserve these sort of moments and incidences in pristine nature that give us the kind of insight that when I was a young student, I thought would never happen. You know, I thought it was going to be a world of bones and not just a world of bones, a world of fragments of bones. You know, where if you found a piece of a mandible, you'd spend the rest of your life going to cocktail parties and telling people about it. That's not true anymore. And, you know, we're seeing things like we discovered. That's not true anymore. And, you know, we're seeing things like we discovered, you know, we're seeing carvings on the walls above graves of dead ancient human relatives. They're not humans. Phenomenal. Well, let's take a step back on that story then, Lee, because I'd love you to explain this incredible story behind the discovery of Ho naledi. I mean, take it away,

Lee. This is absolutely insane. Way back in 2013, I found myself in a very interesting position. I'd been living the scientific dream. I had the site of Malapa, which I'd been working on for five years then. It was the discovery of a lifetime, multiple skeletons, a two-million-year-old hominid called Australopithecus sediba. I built this worldwide team of over 100 scientists, and we were living the scientific dream. All the covers of science and papers in nature you could ever want. But I'd quit exploring because I'd won that paleoanthropological lottery. And we got locked out of that site. And so I found myself thinking, well, what am I going to do while I build a new structure, a laboratory over the site? And I realized I hadn't been exploring.

And I had this fantastic map that had been a map I was creating when I discovered the site of Malapa back in 2008. when I discovered the site of Malapa back in 2008. And so I engaged a former student, Pedro Boshoff, and then ultimately two amateurs, Steve Tucker and Rick Hunter, to use that map and explore the deep underworld spaces of this Dolomitic region outside of Johannesburg. And within a remarkably short period, almost within two months, And within a remarkably short period, almost within two months, they brought me pictures back of this space in what was described as this incredibly remote, difficult to get to place. cave that you had to then slide down and crawl through this labyrinth passage that's 12 meters long that goes down to 17 and a half, 18 centimeters. It points to it. And you come out into this underground space. And there they showed me pictures of what I realized were primitive,

ancient humans, you know, just lying on the floor. And that image sticks with me even today because it was an image that, as Steve opened up his laptop, that probably no paleoanthropologist ever dreamed you'd see. These were rare. And I then took my then 15-year-old, very skinny son. Some of you may know that he was involved in the discovery of Sediba. He discovered the first fossil of that. And I knew I couldn't get down into this space. The description of it was horrifying.

And we climbed back in the back, and I sent him down with a camera to verify that this was real. And it was. You can guess I'm not going for father of the year. I did not tell my wife that I was doing that and once seeing the space I had to figure out how to do it and so I did I guess what our generation does I put a Facebook ad out looking for skinny scientists

and then began designing this incredibly dangerous adventure that we would call the Rising Star Expedition. And that expedition was launched with six remarkable candidates that were scientists that all just happened to be women in November of 2013. So things happened very, very quickly with huge support infrastructure. And within a week, we had the richest fossil hominid site in all of history. support infrastructure. And within a week, we had the richest fossil hominid site in all of history. That turned into the study that became the Homo naledi discovery, that we announced a new species of hominid, a tiny brain. Imagine this. It has a brain a third the size of a human's, but it's basically a little larger than chimpanzees. We had dozens and dozens of individuals all from this chamber, something like 1,500 fossils on that first expedition from an excavated area of about a meter by 50 centimeters.

It was unbelievable and still is unbelievable. And we had no explanation thought that they were deliberately disposed of there by their own kind. That may not sound surprising to a lot of people who don't follow this field. that was doing something that until that moment, we really had claimed only large brain hominids, like humans and maybe Neanderthals, controversially did, was astounding. And then we would, but everyone thought it's impossible too because that hominid looked like it should be,

you know, two million years old, two and a half million years old based on its anatomy, in some ways more primitive than Homo habilis. Then we found out the date. And the date was 230,000 to 330,000 years before present. At the same time that modern humans had thought to be the only thing in Africa, and at the same moment, that archaeology was telling us that the signals of modernity were arising in Africa. So at that time, just to stress that point, because it is so fascinating, isn't it, Lee,

that this small-brained hominin that initially you said you might believe to be some two million years old, when you get those dates back, which must have been fascinating when you got those dates back, is actually living at the same time as we're starting to see modern homo sapiens in Africa. That is absolutely insane and game changing. It was profound at times. It still is profound. I still don't think that we as a field have really

absorbed the impact of what that means. It means, let me just put this to you though. We cannot at this stage now with certainty tell who made what archaeology. We cannot assume that Homo naledi is the only example like this in Africa. Naledi is the only example like this in Africa. If there's two, then there could be three or four, how many other things are out there? People, you know, some will go, well, we would have seen him by now. We didn't see Homo Naledi. And we didn't, no one, including me or any other people predicted it was coming. We had predicted that the evolution of the large brain, everything was centered around that,

was so profound and so powerful that humans eliminated all other competitors. And now we know that's not true. Now we know that's not true. I'd love to ask a bit more about the excavation of this area deep in the cave. I mean, in such a difficult area to access and a small area i know you mentioned that quite a lot of the remains are on the surface but still

how do you go about i love this logistic stuff how would you go about the the doing of an excavation in such a difficult location when i was sitting up there in the dark back in 2013 waiting for my son matthew to climb back out from where I'd sent him to his death, I had to think, how was I going to do this? I don't think there's probably been another paleontological or archaeological dig done like this in history. I mean, the logistics of just working with it is dangerous. It's hard to get to. The people have to be. But luckily, I've been around National Geographic and Explorers all my life.

And, you know, there is sort of can-do attitude. But I had a lot of models to look at. I'm a big fan of NASA, big fan of the history of NASA. And I'm a big fan of deep sea exploration like Bob Ballard and James Cameron do. And so I had a sort of instant model in my mind of how I was going to approach the logistics. I based it on those. Anyone who watched those early days, I had a base camp. I had a command center.

I had cables and wires strung and I had monitors where myself and other scientists who couldn't fit into these spaces would be supervising built right on what you see on a ship that's got remote operated vehicles or the NASA sort of command center. And then I had safety points along the way that we would watch the journey. And then I had monitors and cameras there so we could communicate back and forth and basically could be there live during that whole thing. It was, I built that whole expedition though to recover one skeleton because I thought it was one skeleton. And, you know, by day two, we had three right femurs and suddenly, you know, by day two, we had three right femurs, and suddenly, you know, dominance don't have three right legs.

And you knew it was, you know, more than one, and then it became this thing. And, you know, it's still challenging even today. I mean, we're 10 years on from this. It's remarkable to me to even think of that. But it is still challenging. I mean, every day, every meeting, like the one I just walked out of, is about the logistics, about the challenges we're going to face, how we're going to overcome it. And now we're going to improve on the last time we were in there. Because every time we now enter this space, it gives us more. We didn't realize they were graves because who would? Who would

even look for that in an excavation? Who would be digging up a hominin with a brain slightly larger than a big orange and think that the possibility that it was mortuary practices? That's why we didn't recognize them initially. We were digging it like it was a sedimentary layer full of bones are all of our original scientific papers describe that and took you know finally we realized that all the anomalies that were there were only answerable because we were really deluding ourselves right in front of us were holes dug in the ground with bodies in them well let's focus in on this now lee because this is extraordinary it's a new research that has been published very recently you've already highlighted how it seems that hominoledi you know

they purposefully have put these bodies down there at the back of this cave system what's doing the excavations more recent excavations, made you and your team take that next step, go from they purposefully put these remains there into this seems to be a deliberate burial? There are two sort of, like often happens in science, two sort of moments collided at once. One was that there were all of these anomalies. There were these things

that were in our work that contradicted each other. We had, yeah, I remember only until recently, only 46 human beings had ever been in that space. That's who could fit. And there were these problems like, you know, one geologist said, no, there's fluvial movement. But the sedimentologists and the studies didn't show any fluvial movement. They were doing that to explain downward movement of bones in these very dense areas of bones. We had some bones that were vertical, like femurs that were standing straight up. And there were clearly within where the bones were, there was downward movement within the space. But you would move into the sediments aside of that,

and you'd take a sample, and there would be no evidence of any movement whatsoever. There was no energy action going on. There were no signs of carnivores. And there were all kinds of little problems. I won't go into those in depth, but there were a bunch of them, anomalies, contradictions. And we were excavating back in 2017, moving into 2018.

And I was sitting in the command center and I had Dr. Kanelwe Moliopane next to me, one of the next generation of underground astronauts. And I was watching two excavators working. And that day, they had moved the camera so that the camera normally sat very low. And one of the cameras sat low to the side so I could watch what they were doing and make comments or be annoying to them as they're digging. And they had moved it to above their head and behind them. And we had hit this strange thing during the previous weeks. We had been digging away from that original excavation of this huge, dense area of bone, what we call the puzzle box, and suddenly it had gone sterile. All the sediments had nothing in them. They hadn't moved or anything. And then we hit bones again. And as the excavators

began to work these new bones out, it was clear that they had an edge around them. But that didn't really strike us. I was thinking in my mind, maybe there's some kind of channel in here. But again, there wasn't any geological sign of that. And as they moved this camera behind them, these were infrared security cameras. That's what we were using at that time, just very simple devices. One of the excavators moved in front of the camera for a moment, and it shifted to infrared. You know, so it was black and white was my image all of a sudden. You've seen those grayscale things. all of a sudden. You've seen those grayscale things. And as they did, suddenly I could see over their shoulder the delineated edge of this bone feature. And I could literally see how it had been dug. I could see the clods of earth that had been tossed to the edge of it. And, you know,

that had been tossed to the edge of it. And, you know, that's why, you know, I know you know this, but predators often see in black and white because you can often see these sort of movement and edges better than when you can see in color. Color often loses and washes out. And I realized it was a feature that had depth. And I already knew from the bones coming up that it was probably only one individual that they were taking out of there over the last week or so. We moved very

slowly. And I turned to Kenny and I said, I think it's a grave. And we sat and we talked about it. And I was showing her the outline of the thing. and I ordered the excavation stopped, and then, of course, we threw the book at that and could see that there was a sedimentary layer, and then it was interrupted, and parts of that same sedimentary layer were mixed in with a body. All that downward movement and things that we'd been struggling with were because a fleshed body had been sitting in a body, all that downward movement and things that we'd been struggling with were because a fleshed body had been sitting in a hole covered in dirt and had decayed. It is a sort of fluvial movement if you count the decay of flesh and blood as a liquid movement downward. And of course, none of us had dared even go there. And yet there it was.

And, you know, we did the geology and the sedimentology and all the things. And, you know, we have come to the conclusion that this and all of the deposits are holes dug into the ground with Homo naledi bodies in them covered by the dirt that came from that hole. Now, a lot of people don't like that. at all. Now, a lot of people don't like that. You know, it is, and you've probably seen some of the critics of that, largely because it's a small brain hominid. We have met, I assure you, every standard that a human burial would meet to prove that it is. But I understand that people are saying, well, you need a higher level of evidence. I'm not sure. I think that's a little bit of human exceptionalism flowing in there. But, you know, because I do often point out to people,

if I described to you exactly the same situation and it was all human bodies, would you have one second of doubt that this was a cultural space? Would you be invoking that, oh, they were being driven there by predators or again and again and again and again, even though we have everything from infants to the elderly and all of that? We wouldn't be invoking that at all. We would know it's a cultural space because it's human. But because this is our first encounter with a non-human cultural space of this magnitude, it's very difficult for a field that has hundreds of years literally of invoking human exceptionalism and almost built around the idea of, well, how do we define human exceptionalism? to suddenly face something very, very profound, something almost sacred to us, the idea of complex mortuary practices, rituals that are created over and over around death.

That's our game, and we're not going to give that up very easily, I don't think. Well, that's great, Lee. And I mean, as you've highlighted there, the significance of this, as you've mentioned, a small-brained hominin that isn't modern homo sapiens doing a burial naturally this is such a a game changer you know if it is absolutely true and i know it's still at its early stages but it seems like you you're very much you're ready you're prepared that there will be you know that level of controversy and there is that level

of controversy because it is something completely new but you're ready for it it, you know, and you're absolutely believing in what you've discovered and what you believe it is. Yes. And I mean, we don't have a little bit of evidence, you know. This isn't one feature. I know that one feature gets the highlight because we worked on it the most. All of those original things we were digging in were burials. We actually, if you go back and read the literature that we produced in a different way, with the idea that, you know, you read like Ashley Kruger's thesis and the publications that came out of that, where he did the complex 3D mapping of the spatial distribution of bones and was saying, you know, something geological, perhaps fluvial action, is driving these into small clusters. There must have been depressions in the floor that these bones are clustering in.

Somehow they must be moving into clusters because there are these five or six clusters that overlap. Because they were holes with bodies in them that had been dug through each other. We just could not see it. People who aren't in this field don't really understand how profoundly brainwashed we are about how we look at different types of excavations, how we approach. Hominid excavations of ancient hominids and small brain hominids are done like dinosaur excavations. That hasinids and small brain hominids are done like dinosaur excavations. That has to stop, though.

Because if there is even the remotest chance that our team of 37 scientists is right with the evidence that we present, then we have to change the way we do this field. We have to dig every single site as if it is a forensic case. The null hypothesis cannot be anymore that it's natural. You know, that cannot be the null hypothesis. That, I think, has done a great deal of damage. And I think the one thing that's going to come from this discovery is that null hypothesis will be erased. I'm James Patton Rogers, a war historian, advisor to the UN and NATO, and host of the Warfare podcast from History Hit. Join me twice a week, every week, as we look at the conflicts that have defined our past and the ones shaping our future.

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Join us on the Warfare podcast for a history hit twice a week, every week, wherever you get your podcasts. Lee, it is absolutely fascinating. A bit more on the bones that you discovered within these features of these particular Homo naledi. Do we know anything about how old these particular humans were that were buried? We do, and I'm not going to let you use human. Ah, okay. Apologies. They are not within our grade. So in the one main feature, the feature one that's seen in Dentaletti Chamber,

is there's a main body that appears to be one single adult. Adjacent to that is another feature of a juvenile that we only have exposed a small amount of, that part of it has dribbled over the top of this feature, but it's separated by about 30 centimeters from that. by about 30 centimeters from that. All of the original ones are individuals that range from near neonate all the way to extremely elderly that have worn their teeth down. In the Hill antechamber, that burial is a fascinating one. There's one main body of a child that would be, give or take,

13 years of age in human developmental terms. Then there are two faces, just the faces, just the fronts of the faces, no mandibles, no nothing, in that same one. We don't know whether they were placed in there or whether they were part of something that was dug through and they ended up in there. And then there's a fetus that we can see on Secretron in there. And we've yet to extract that, but it's fetal aged or it could

be just after birth, but it's that level of individual. And that's in there. We don't know right now whether they were all buried together or whether, you know, the one or two or three intrude into each other or the one main one was the last one that intruded into all of them. But it's a clearly delineated hole with a base of the hole, and it interrupts an edge, a sedimentary layer that has been dug, and it's been recovered with the dirt that came from the hole. And it occupies space. So we have basically every age represented, from birth or before birth to the elderly and death. And we right now conservatively are sitting between 27 and 35 individuals.

But that's really just because we don't want to take any more out right now. Once again, it's so exciting for what's going to happen in future excavation seasons down there, isn't it, Lee? Well, and wait till we throw this art team at these and the symbols team and, you know, because right above these graves in this passage, think of how difficult it is to get this space. Our carvings carved into the dolomitic wall. Now this dolomite is 4.5 to 4.7 on Mozart scale. For people who don't know what that is, sort of talk is one and diamonds are 10. And so you're approaching the middle of hardness of rocks. And they have scratched into those surfaces and possibly even applied something pigment-like over the surface of some of them. Triangles, geometric shapes like squares, horizontal and linear lines, equal signs, Xs, crosses right side up and upside down, cross hatches that look like hashtags. And they beat the surfaces as well, leaving, you know, sort of these percussive marks all over them.

And if you look in the pictures, some of those remarkable illustrations, you can even see how they are. You know, the power that it would take to engrave with presumably a rock into that is extraordinary. And they did it over and over. And it looks like they covered up old images and re-carved through them using dirt from the floor. I mean, and I know again, you know, you probably saw some of the responses. People, how do you know humans didn't do that? Well, there's no sign of humans. We know every modern human that's ever been in that space. We give their names in the back of the paper. It's a space humans don't go into.

Prehistoric humans don't go into spaces like this. It's a mythology that they enter these extremely deep, dark, dangerous, because who would? There's no tools that would indicate humans. There's no sign of humans, other than if you make what I think is a very human exceptional argument, well, the symbols themselves are signs humans were there. Well, we take the stance strongly that a scientific argument is that these symbols, which are right above the graves of a non-human species, are done by that species, which is there in abundance. And, you know, no, we have not dated them yet, but that's also kind of, as you would know, an archaeological false flag. So kind of, as you would know, an archaeological false flag. There probably haven't been more than a couple dozen engravings on the entire planet that have ever been dated.

Just saying, well, we have to have a date. Well, that's easy to say right now. But you know what's cool about this hypothesis? Is probably it's so profound and important that if we don't have a way to date them right now we will invent one that is absolutely amazing in itself as you say if these are marking a great the grave of these particular homo naledi i guess keeping on that point about you know the accessing so deep into the cave system if we go back to the whole structure of homo naledi and you know how they were smaller smaller brains but you know different anatomically to Homo sapiens. For them to be able to access this part of the cave, would it, dare I say, have been easier some 300 years ago?

A lot easier. A lot, absolutely. And when I was stuck in the labyrinth after discovering those things and climbing out of that chute labyrinth, and I literally had those visions of them moving through those spaces in a very different way than clumsy, large humans would move in, you know, where we can, our heads are so big, we can't even turn our heads in some spaces.

We have to, we have to lean sideways and move up blindly. You know, they wouldn't have done that. They, they were tall, you know, they were four and a half, five and a half foot tall. But they had powerful, thin, ape-like shoulders, very lightly built with incredibly muscular joints, curved fingers, curved toes, and a tiny head, which is very important in small spaces. And we know they had fire. There's fire everywhere down there. So you're dealing with a species that was, compared to humans, almost troglodytic, obviously, and its ability to use these spaces.

I'm not saying they lived there, but they certainly seemed to use these spaces for, I think it's fair to call them rituals, were related with the mortuary practices and whatever else they did. And that's extraordinary. And I mean, you know, humans struggled to get in there. I'm the largest person by far that's ever been in there, but even small humans, it's an extremely dangerous space for us. And there's no sign of us in there. So, you know, that's where the hypothesis sits right now.

And, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if we're able to also test it with molecular data and other things, you know, actually being able to see the maker. Well, there you go. Well, you mentioned fire use. So come on, Lee, we've got to talk about that then. So what is this evidence for hominidality also being able to use fire to make fire? A five-year-old could identify it and we just didn't for nine years. It's charcoal.

There's giant chunks of charcoal and ash throughout the system. I tell this story a lot because it's important as a science story about being very careful about the assumptions we carry and making things harder than they are. I spent eight years telling every member of the team, you go back and look at my old lectures and look at the Q&A sessions where people go, is there fire? And you go, well, fire's very difficult to identify at 250,000 years. It's hard to see because our fields made it hard. And in most places, it is very ephemeral, the evidence for it. And so what happened is we quit looking for it. And it turned out it was right in front of us. It was in every passage, every chamber. There was an excavation being

conducted in the Dragon's Back by Dr. Moliapane at the same time I was in the chamber. There was an excavation being conducted in the Dragon's Back by Dr. Moliapane at the same time I was in the chamber, and she discovered a beautiful hearth there, and a huge one and a small one. And I looked up, and the roof is covered in soot that's been grown over by stalactites and stalagmites. We then went into the Rising Star Chamber, and there are big chunks of burnt wood, you know, that it's, there's fire everywhere in there. Of course there is. Nothing could be working back in those spaces without that. It was just, I had talked my team out of seeing it. And it is everywhere. So you found the charcoal. Am I correct to say you've also discovered charred animal bones too?

Tons of them. The Rising Star Cave, which is adjacent, it's next to the Lisseti Burial Chamber, where Neo came from. Sorry, what is Neo? Neo is a skeleton that we named, which oddly, we called it the Lisseti Chamber, which means light, before we realized that it was there. But Neo is a skeleton that's in a slightly different situation. This individual is in a hole in the wall and then covered. So it's almost as if it were slid into a hole in the wall, an alcove, and then covered. And there's a child there too, adjacent to it in the same situation. The Rising Star Chamber is adjacent to that. And literally there are built-hard stone structures in there, burnt bone, thousands of animals,

that we're now developing a big team to approach that. I mean, we are looking at an altered space, a space that is cultural. And it is a, you know, hypothesis is right now, the only bodies in there are Naledi bodies. And the only evidence of anything in there is Naledi evidence. And so we believe we are investigating a massive subterranean cultural space of another species. That is absolutely insane, the words you just said, Ted Lee.

I mean, wow. You can never get such, does it? You know, I do. I have to invoke this sort of idea of when I talk about this, you do get the sense that we've kind of opened up the spaceship. You know, it's like being, it is like one of those things where you're walking into this spaceship where aliens died a million years ago, in this case hundreds of thousands of years ago and they just left it and that's what it feels like okay as long as we don't talk too much about aliens though okay

lee that's we won't talk about aliens but oh i'm waiting for i'm sure you are too i'm waiting for the ancient alien people to jump into this one well yeah indeed let's move away from that for now because there's another area we can talk about quickly before we start wrapping up because we focused a lot on the bones on the charcoal. Am I right? And I know, once again, it's, you know, they're still open for debate and lots of controversy around it because this is something new and extraordinary. A potential tool that has also been found in the excavations, too. There's actually a couple, by the way.

There are some hammerstones in the wall that we haven't excavated in adjacent chambers. There is a tool-shaped rock sitting quite literally in the hand of that child buried in the hill antechamber. Is it one or isn't it? It'll probably be debated as long as you and I are alive and after. It's very interesting when I show this lithic. This lithic, by the way, is inside of a plaster jacket. Now it's at the Synchrotron in Grenoble, France. We have a 3D print, though, that's a six micron print of the thing.

So you can hold it in your hand. If I showed archaeologists this prior to it being announced, they would wax on about, oh, yes, this is a middle stone aging. It's used for carving wood potentially. And this is a pointed edge. And this is probably. And then you go, and it's found in the hand of a dead 13-year-old Homo naledi child.

And they go, well, maybe it's not. So we have chosen the rather inglorious name of tool-shaped rock for the time being. And it is an artifact in the sense that it is out of context in place. There's nothing else like it in that system. And it is in this very unusual context. You know, we were actually some individuals criticized us for even reporting it. But we were of the thinking, well, if we didn't report it, we would receive enormous criticism. It is there. People have to understand this is science and it's a process. And we will, you know, we will test that and look at it and examine it and find ways. The beauty is we will invent ways to solve that problem.

Wonderful. It's a science. It's a process. And it's exciting because, as you've already highlighted, this is still the early stages of this whole story. No doubt there'll be more discovered in the years ahead, which Lee is just absolutely brilliant. I mean, if it is, though, all that we've talked about, a small-brained hominin was able to do all of this hundreds of thousands of years ago. Complex behavior that's always been associated with modern humans. And the evidence seems to suggest that so far.

This is absolutely game-changing. I think so. And I think that if you actually think, if our idea of what humans are at that time, they must have been big, lumbering, stupid thugs at the same time as these guys are developing their own culture. You know, funny, now, I guess in the armchair of 2020 hindsight, why does this surprise us? Should it really surprise us? Or have we simply spent decades and decades doing what we did to Neanderthals, and now we know that was wrong and dumb, and demeaning everything other than us just to keep ourselves on a pedestal? And, you know, didn't we know this was coming? I mean, we knew fire has existed, what, for two million years, right? There's good

evidence of it. Who do we think was making that? It wasn't us. And if they're doing that, is there even the remotest chance that we were missing large parts of complex behavior, and that we had tried to turn hominid paleontology into the study of animals. And now we're finding animals aren't animals. And guess what? And does it really surprise us that something that is likely more than halfway more evolutionary close to us than we are to chimpanzees would be super complex. No, I don't think you should surprise us at all. And I think you're going to see this as just the dam breaking. And you're going to see a deep understanding that this has been going on a long time. It's been right in front of us, just like fire was for our team, just like those

symbols were on the wall in front of us, just like those graves were. It's been in front of all of us all this time. Well, Lee, it must be such an experience to be involved in this team and making these discoveries and being able to visit this place. Hopefully one day I might be able to come down there and have a look for myself, be one of those rare individuals. You're welcome to. And I'd say it's not exceptional it's a privilege well absolutely i mean last but not least you've written a book all about this discovery and your research which is called cave of bones there it is right here there's also a netflix show right there was a netflix crew with me when the discovery of symbols were made that air airs July 17th by the same name, Cave of Bones.

So there was Dr Lee Berger highlighting the extraordinary story of Homo naledi and why these new findings are potentially game-changing in our understanding of human evolution. Naturally, these findings have been the talk of the town amongst esteemed anthropologists across the world over the past couple of months. So I caught up with one of these legends to get his thoughts on Homo Naledi. None other than our good friend of the podcast, Professor Chris Stringer, CBE, from the Natural History Museum. Professor Chris Stringer, CBE, from the Natural History Museum. Chris, always good having you on the podcast.

A pleasure to be with you once again. The Homo naledi story and what's been happening in South Africa, for you, this must be incredibly exciting and interesting times. Yes, absolutely. I mean, the discovery of these remains near Johannesburg in a cave that was supposedly well explored, in a region that was supposedly well explored, to have the surprise of an entirely new species being discovered deep in this cave system. And it's, you know, a small-brained human. It's something which we would guess should be more than a million years old, maybe more than two million years old with that small brain size. be more than a million years old, maybe more than two million years old with that small brain size and yet the dating suggests it was still around in the last 300,000 years. So this is an astonishing story of a late surviving species that still has many primitive

features and of course what gets more amazing is the evidence that it was getting deep into the cave which has the implication of the use of fire for lighting to get deep into the cave and of course further claims that it may have buried its dead that it may have made engravings on the walls that it may have built fires deep in the cave so these claims are ones that are coming out now and i think certainly i'd like to wait for the full publication of all this data because obviously establishing that burials you know really are burials is difficult. Establishing how those engravings were done and how old they are is also an important part of the story. Establishing with those fires who built those fires and how old are the fires so is it contemporary is all this contemporary

with Naledi which would show that Naledi was engaging in really complex behavior for something with a gorilla or chimpanzee sized brain to be making fire to be burying its dead to be putting engravings on cave walls these are all things we associate with large-brained, late humans like us and the Neanderthals. So it would be astonishing, and of course it raises more questions, because of course brains are energetically very expensive. Our brains, even as we rest and sleep, our brains are using at least 20% of our body energy. So they're very energy-thirsty. We have to have a high-quality diet to feed those demanding brains, if you like.

And it's assumed that evolution has, if you like, driven us to have these large brains, that our life demands it, our complexity demands to have these large brains. And yet here's something with a brain less than half that size that's apparently doing a lot of these complex things so it makes you wonder why have we got all these why have we got these big brains if we can do a lot of this with a brain less than half the size and with half the energy requirements so these are big questions that come out of the Naledi material and I think it's we've got to be cautious because of course indeed there could

have been other humans down in that site. And that's something that's not entirely clear yet. So maybe Homo sapiens did get to those chambers later on and do some of this activity down there. That is a possibility. And I think that has to be excluded. So we need better dating. We need to know when were these fires built. Are they really the same age as the Naledi material or could they be

younger? Can we tell when those engravings were made? Could they have been made at a later date? That's a possibility. But I think that regardless of all those questions, the Naledi material is so important. There's so many fossils there. They can tell us a lot about human evolution. And the whole question of how homo naledi relates to the to the rest of the fossil record is still a big question is it a separate line of illusion going back millions of years or is it something maybe related to homo erectus if it's something that goes back millions of years again with that complexity of behavior it would imply that a distantly related creature developed a lot of behaviour that we associate with Homo sapiens,

which is a huge story, of course. Is it interesting for you, you've been studying the story of modern human evolution for several decades now, it's 50 years, isn't it, Chris? It's absolutely incredible. A find like this, do you think that there is therefore now the possibility that in the future there will be evidence discovered, maybe a site that shows this coexistence further proof of this coexistence between the beginnings of modern humans and this small-brained homo naledi which the dating suggests was living at the same time as homo sapiens in Africa well that's right yes I mean even on the existing dating naledi overlaps with

what should be homomo sapiens individuals elsewhere in Africa and also with late versions of Homo heidobagensis or Homo rhodesiensis, the fossil from Zambia, Kabwe. That's about 300,000 years old. So there are these other species around. It's how did Naledi survive? What were its adaptations that allowed it to survive for so long? We assume it's got a very deep evolutionary history. So there must be ancestors for Homo Naledi somewhere in the fossil record. Maybe they're already known, or maybe they're still to be discovered. But there's a whole evolutionary history there still to be unraveled. And yes, how late did it go in time?

These remains so far may not be the youngest remains of Homo naledi. There could be younger evidence and of course the dating of the fire remains within the rising star system. If that turns out to be younger in age it might have two implications. One is that Homo naledi was around younger making those fires or it might imply that maybe a species like Homo sapiens was there making those fires. So that's why it's important to date this evidence more. And I think we need to see the fully peer-reviewed versions of the papers, what we've seen are pre-prints, if you like, before final peer review. And so there are many questions in them which may be answered

once we've got the final versions of the papers. It is such an extraordinary discovery regardless. And these claims, they're big claims. As mentioned, there's going to be a lot of scepticism around them at first. And as you say, that whole process seems overarchingly, maybe let's not run before we can walk. Yes, certainly. Yeah, let's not run before we can walk. But I think even if some of the evidence doesn't hold,

the fact that these creatures were seemingly intentionally getting deep in the cave whether they were burying their dead or whether they were stashing the bodies but even if they're getting down there in these very difficult to access deep chambers implies that they must have had artificial lighting so even to have the possession of fire for a creature like this would be an astonishing discovery if that can be proven. It's really, really exciting. So let's see what happens in the years ahead. Absolutely, yes. Exciting times to come. Well, Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Thank you. Well, there you go. There was Dr Lee Berger and Professor Chris Stringer highlighting the incredible story of Homo Naledi. It's a really exciting area of paleoanthropology, of human evolution. So much mystery still surrounding this small-brained human relative and who knows what incredible secrets will be revealed from this cave system, the Dinaledi chamber from all of these fossils in the years ahead I can't wait to see what happens next now of course you can watch the new Netflix documentary unknown cave of bones which follows Lee and his team as they excavated these Homo Naledi fossils in the rising star cave system Lee of course has also written a book and you can also view what

other professionals think of the homo naledi discovery online so definitely go and check all of that out now last things for me you know what i'm going to say but if you have enjoyed today's episode and you want to help us out on the ancients well you know what you can do you can leave us a lovely rating on apple podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It really helps us as we continue to grow the podcast and share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. But that's enough from me,

and I will see you in the next episode.