Lee R. Berger, Ph.D. | Academy of Achievement

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No one's ever made a great discovery by surging behind a wave. I was always pushing boundaries.

Lee R. Berger, known as “Rod,” ran cross-country, played varsity tennis, was captain of his high school debating team, an Eagle Scout, and the President of Georgia 4H.

Lee Rogers Berger was born in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, but grew up on a farm outside the rural community of Sylvania, Georgia. His mother was a schoolteacher; his father sold insurance and worked as a real estate broker. Young Lee Berger enjoyed an active, outdoor childhood, and especially delighted in hunting for Indian arrowheads and collecting plant and animal specimens in the woods and fields around Sylvania. He was active in the Boy Scouts and the 4H Club, raising pigs and cattle. When he discovered the region’s native gopher tortoise was endangered, he initiated a campaign to conserve the species, starting the first gopher tortoise preserve in Georgia. The successful campaign resulted in the gopher tortoise being named the State Reptile, and Lee Berger was named Georgia Youth Conservationist of the year. An Eagle Scout, and statewide president of 4H, Lee Berger entered Vanderbilt University on a U.S. Navy ROTC scholarship with the intention of going to law school and becoming an attorney. In his freshman year at Vanderbilt, he was bored by economics and other pre-law classes, and did much better in his elective courses, geology and videography. By his sophomore year, he was failing in his official course of study. Remarkably, the Navy officer who was his ROTC advisor agreed to release him from his commitment to the Navy, and Berger withdrew from the university to find himself.

As a boy, Lee Berger hunted for Indian arrowheads and other artifacts of the past. As a paleoanthropologist, he found his calling hunting for the fossil remains of humankind’s remote ancestors in South Africa. (Lee Berger)

Back in Savannah, Berger talked his way into a job as a studio cameraman at a local TV station. Fired with enthusiasm for his new line of work, he quickly advanced to the more challenging news division. In 1987, he was on assignment when he spotted a drowning woman being carried downstream by the Savannah River. Rather than stopping to record the dramatic scene, the young cameraman dropped his expensive camera and dove into the torrent to save the woman’s life. Berger received national recognition for his heroic act, including the Boy Scouts of America Honor Medal and the Humanitarian Award of the National Press Photographers Association. The publicity, for which the 23-year-old felt unprepared, caused a second re-evaluation of his career choices. He returned to college, this time to Georgia Southern University. Inspired by the book Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, he undertook studies in anthropology, archeology and geology.

Paleoanthropologist Dr. Donald C. Johanson of the University of California, Berkeley with “Lucy.” Lucy was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia and is dated to about 3.2 million years ago. Johanson was a mentor of Lee Berger.

During the course of his undergraduate studies, Berger met Professor Johanson, and on graduation in 1989, hoped to join Johanson’s crew at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. When Johanson’s permit was revoked by the Tanzanian government at the last minute, the older man arranged for Berger to join an expedition led by the legendary Richard Leakey at Koobi Fora in Kenya. On his first morning in Africa, Berger found the fossilized femur of an early hominid, the kind of discovery many researchers spend their entire careers hunting in vain. If Berger had required any further encouragement in pursuing paleoanthropology as a career, he was now irrevocably set on his course. On the advice of Leakey and Johanson, he headed for Johannesburg, South Africa and enrolled in the graduate program in paleoanthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. In the years since, Berger has made his home in South Africa with his wife Jacqueline and their two children, Megan and Matthew.

Lee Berger is joined by his family, including his stepmother Vernita, his grandfather Arthur B. Berger, father Arthur L. Berger, and his wife Jacqueline, as he receives the first National Geographic Prize for Research and Exploration. (Courtesy of Lee Berger) — Lee Berger is joined by his family, including his stepmother Vernita, his grandfather Arthur B. Berger, father Arthur L. Berger, and his wife Jacqueline, as he receives the first National Geographic Prize for Research and Exploration.

In 1991, he began his excavations at Gladysvale, near Krugersdorp, South Africa. Along with the long-established sites of Swartkrans and Sterkfontein, Gladysvale lies in an area known as the Cradle of Humankind. At Gladysvale, Berger discovered two early hominid teeth, making it the first new hominid fossil site to be discovered in Southern Africa in 48 years. Berger’s career was off to an auspicious start, but 17 years would elapse before he made another major discovery in Southern Africa.

Lee Berger received his doctorate in 1994, writing his dissertation on the development of the clavicle (collarbone) and shoulder girdle in early hominids. In 1995 he was named Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Research Officer at Witwatersrand. In his early 30s, Berger became director of Witwatersrand’s paleoanthropology research unit, a position once held by Raymond Dart, the discoverer of Australopithecus. The youngest person to lead any such facility, Berger took the novel step of opening the group’s priceless collection of early hominid fossil specimens to all qualified researchers, rather than restricting access to faculty and institute associates. The new policy was controversial and put the new director at odds with many of his colleagues in the paleoanthropological community.

A search of Google Earth led Lee Berger to discover the richest known sites of hominid fossils. (Andrew Howley)

Among the treasures of Witwatersrand was the skull of the Taung Child, which Raymond Dart had first identified as a specimen of the previously unknown species Australopithecus africanus in 1925. By comparing the Taung skull with the skulls of infant chimpanzees known to have been killed by eagles or other birds of prey, Berger confirmed the hypothesis that the Taung Child, two or three years old at the time of death, had also been the victim of a bird of prey. Berger also made an exhaustive study of the limb lengths of Australopithecus, based on the comparisons of all known specimens.

In 1997, Lee Berger received the first National Geographic Society Prize for Research and Exploration for his studies of the Taung Child and Australopithecus anatomy. The Society awarded Berger a research grant to use as he wished. Berger applied the grant to purchase then-rare GPS (global positioning satellite) coordinates from the U.S. government for the existing archeological sites in Southern Africa, and to acquire precious satellite maps of the region from NASA. He concentrated his mapping research of the area around Gladysvale, where he made his previous discoveries, but Berger found the information less valuable than he had hoped. The Cradle of Humankind was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999, but with no new discoveries to report, further paleoanthropological exploration in Southern Africa ground to a halt. Lee Berger began to devote more energy to bringing his work, and that of his colleagues, to a wider public. He shared his thinking on the current state of early hominid research in his 2000 book In the Footsteps of Eve: The Mystery of Human Origins.

Lee Berger didsplays the hand of MH2 (Australopithecus sediba, adult female), with the skull of MH1, the juvenile male specimen of the species. (Photo by Brett Eloff, courtesy of Lee Berger and the University of the Witwatersrand) — Lee Berger displays the hand of *Australopithecus sediba (*adult female), with the skull of a juvenile male specimen.

Meanwhile, Berger’s research continued in other directions, some far from Africa. In 2006, he made a startling discovery while vacationing in Palau, an island nation of the Western Pacific. In Palau, Berger uncovered fossilized remains of diminutive adults, human-like in some proportions, but unlike modern humans in facial structure. Berger returned to make further excavations, and comparison of these remains with earlier discoveries in Flores, Indonesia have generated a continuing controversy over the development of man in the Western Pacific. One interpretation of these findings suggests the existence of a now-extinct strain of genus Homo at a later date than previously supposed.

In 2007, Lee Berger’s career in Southern Africa was at a low ebb. Many of his colleagues believed the region’s fossil fields were played out, and institutional support for further excavation had virtually dried up. Even in his own department at Witwatersrand, there was widespread sentiment that the future lay in more sophisticated technological analysis of existing specimens rather than field work searching for new ones. The institute Berger had headed at Witwatersrand was reorganized under new leadership. Berger was appointed Reader in Human Evolution and the Public Understanding of Science at Witwatersrand, but he longed to resume field exploration.

Professor Lee Berger with the reconstructed skeleton of Australopithecus sediba. (Photo by Brett Eloff, courtesy of Lee Berger) — Professor Lee Berger with the reconstructed skeleton of *Australopithecus sediba (adult female)*. (Brett Eloff)

In his spare time, Berger began toying with Google Earth, a popular application for viewing aerial photography. When he entered the GPS coordinates he had purchased at such great expense in the late ’90s, he was shocked to find that they did not correspond accurately with the sites he knew so well by sight. He eventually realized that the U.S. government had deliberately included inaccuracies in the GPS data for security reasons. With the new tools available in the 21st century, he examined aerial photographs of the Cradle of Humankind and began to see patterns among the known fossil sites. These in turn led him to surmise the existence of other, unexplored fossil deposits. When he explored the area in person, armed with this new data, he noted dozens of previously unknown caves, hundreds of potential excavation sites, a rich and untouched source of fossils throughout an area that had been explored continuously since 1935.

National Geographic Society’s Explorer-in-Residence and Awards Council member Dr. Sylvia Earle with Dr. Lee Berger after presenting him with the Academy’s Gold Medal during the 2012 Achievement Summit in Washington.

On August 15, 2008, Berger returned to one of these sites with a doctoral student and his young son, Matthew. Within hours of their arrival, nine-year-old Matthew found a rock containing the fossilized clavicle of an unknown hominid. When Berger examined the rock, he found a jaw and canine tooth as well. Nearby were more teeth and a shoulder blade. What they had found were the remains of a previously unknown species of hominid that lived nearly two million years ago. In subsequent visits, they recovered the skull of the original specimen, a juvenile male, as well as partial remains of two adults of the species, male and female, and three infants.

Dr. Lee Berger and his wife, Jacqueline, at the 2012 Banquet of the Golden Plate reception in Washington, D.C.

This site, which Berger named Malapa (“home” in the language of the indigenous Sotho people) has produced the most complete sets of early hominid skeletons ever assembled. The location of the fossils, formerly a natural well, also yielded numerous animal remains, including those of an extinct saber-toothed cat. Berger named the previously unknown species Australopithecus sediba (“Australopithecus of the well”). These creatures had long ape-like arms, with articulate hands capable of using tools, and long legs, with feet and hip bones suitable for walking upright. They may represent a transitional stage between the ape-like Australopithecus africanus and the more human Homo habilis or Homo erectus, the tool-making predecessors of modern man. Regardless of their exact position in the family tree, Berger’s discovery has greatly expanded our understanding of the variation among early hominids and stimulated a new wave of productive exploration in Southern Africa.

Wits Vice Chancellor, Adam Habib, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Professor Lee Berger reveal the discovery of a new species of human relative, Homo Naledia at The Cradle of Human Kind on September 10, 2015 at Maropeng in Johannesburg, South Africa. Naledi was discovered in a hard to reach chamber in the Rising Star Cave which has led scientists to believe that the Hominids had a understanding of the finality of death. Naledi stood about 1,5m high, had a unique mix of primitive and modern features with a tiny brain about the size of an orange, a slender body and unusually curved fingers. (Photo by Alon Skuy/The Times/Gallo Images/ Getty Images) — Witwatersrand Vice Chancellor Adam Habib, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Professor Lee Berger reveal the discovery of a new species of human relative, *Homo naledi,* at the Cradle of Humankind on September 10, 2015 at Maropeng in Johannesburg, South Africa. *Naledi* was discovered in a hard-to-reach chamber in the Rising Star Cave, which has led scientists to believe that the hominids had an understanding of the finality of death. *Naledi* stood about 1.5 meters high, had a unique mix of primitive and modern features with a tiny brain about the size of an orange, a slender body and unusually curved fingers. (Credit: Alon Skuy/The Times/Gallo Images/Getty Images)

Continuing his interest in communicating these discoveries to the general public, Berger has written numerous books, including The Official Field Guide to the Cradle of Humankind, and a book for younger readers, The Skull in the Rock, which he hopes will inspire another generation of adventurers to seek the origins of humankind.

In Autumn 2013, Lee Berger led an excavation at the Rising Star cave complex in the Cradle of Humankind, and recovered more than 1500 hominid fossils, representing 15 or more individuals. The species of these remains could not be immediately identified, but the condition and completeness of the skeletons was unprecedented. After two years of study and analysis, Berger concluded that all were specimens of the same unfamiliar species. Berger named the species Homo naledi (star man) for the site where they were found, Dinaledi (many stars), in the Sesotho (Southern Sotho) language.

*National Geographic’s* featured the cover story “Almost Human,” about the discoveries of Berger in South Africa.

Many more fossils remain to be excavated from the site, but Berger’s analysis so far has led him to conclude that these specimens are well over 2.5 million years old, and represent a very early stage of the genus Homo. These hominids possessed long legs and feet suitable for walking long distances, as well as long fingers adapted to climbing and swinging from tree branches. The brain of H. naledi was no larger than a baseball, but the development of the hands and wrists would have enabled these hominids to use tools. Most interestingly, the orderly arrangement of the Naledi skeletons suggests ritual burial, a practice long thought to be the property of a much later stage of human evolution.

2021: In the hand of Professor Lee Berger, a reconstruction of the skull of Leti, the first *Homo naledi* child whose remains were found in the Rising Star cave in Johannesburg.The child’s skull was found alone, and no remains of its body have been recovered. The team have named the child “Leti” (pronounced Let-e) after the Setswana word “letimela” meaning “the lost one.” Leti’s skull consists of 28 skull fragments and six teeth. (Credit: Wits University)

In November 2021, an international team of researchers, led by Berger, revealed the first partial skull of a Homo naledi child that was found in the remote depths of the Rising Star cave in Johannesburg, South Africa. The discovery of a hominin child skull is an extremely rare find in the fossil record as juvenile remains tend to be thin and extremely fragile. The child was found in an extremely remote passage of the Rising Star Cave System, some 12 meters beyond the Dinaledi Chamber, the original site of discovery of the first Homo naledi remains that were revealed to the world in 2015. Discoveries from the subterranean cave system prompted paleoanthropologists to rethink what made us human. New findings revealed that a small-brained human relative known as Homo naledi buried its dead and carved symbols on walls inside the system. Both these behaviors had been previously associated with our species or the big-brained Neanderthals with which we interbred. The significance, and intended meaning of the symbols inside Rising Star, has yet to be determined, but the act of engraving intentional designs is widely considered a major cognitive step in human evolution.

2023: *Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins* by National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence Lee Berger and John Hawks. Join Berger on the adventure of a lifetime as he explores the Rising Star cave system and begins the complicated process of explaining these extraordinary finds—finds that force a rethinking of human evolution, and discoveries that Berger calls “the Rosetta stone of the human mind.”

In March 2023, Berger was appointed National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence and staff member. He was also promoted to Director of The Centre for Exploration of the Deep Human Journey at University of the Witwatersrand — the first head of the Centre. In August 2023, Berger’s latest literary work, Cave of Bones, will hit the shelves. This captivating book documents Berger’s exhilarating journey as he pushes the boundaries of his physical and spiritual capacities to explore the spaces once inhabited by Homo naledi, a hominin species that likely lived alongside our own.

Inducted in 2012

In his first years in South Africa, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger made the first major finds in the region in almost half a century. He became one of the youngest men in his field to lead a major research institute. In 1997, he received the first National Geographic Society Prize for Research and Exploration for his studies of human evolution.

But ten years later, exploration in Southern Africa had come to a halt. Berger’s colleagues believed the fossil fields were exhausted, that everything worth finding had already been found. When Lee Berger reviewed aerial photography of the region made newly available on the Internet, he saw things his peers had missed. The existing fossil sites fell into a pattern that suggested the existence of unexplored caves and potential sites for further exploration.

Berger’s subsequent visits to the area proved his surmise correct. The terrain was riddled with unexplored caves and other possible excavation sites. In 2008, Lee Berger uncovered multiple specimens of a previously unknown species of hominid, a possible link between the apelike Australopithecus and our own remote ancestors. Today, he leads his profession, and his discoveries continue to cast new light on the origins of humankind.

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You made one of your greatest discoveries, the remains of Australopithecus sediba, right after what you might call the lowest point in your career, at the end of 2007. There wasn’t a lot of support for new exploration at that time. Can you tell us how that turned around?

In that holiday period of 2007 I was sitting at home, and I’m not sure whether it was the lowest point, but it was a point where I was truly trying to find where — what was I going to manifest as next? It was going to be very hard to continue to get the kind of resources to fund risk-taking exploration. People were clearly not believing that there were other sites out there. There were talks of not even allowing digging at new sites because they clearly had failed. And I had almost been a demonstration of that over 17 years. It was at that moment that I became the last human being on earth to discover Google Earth. There I was, surfing and looking at these satellite images that were free. And I have to explain why that was such an epiphany for me. In the late 1990s, I had been awarded a prize for research and exploration by the National Geographic Society. It had been done by some of these other research and discoveries that I had made in the middle 1990s and early 1990s in South Africa. Bill Grosvenor, who was then the CEO, and Bill Allen the editor, took me into a grand office and said, “You can have anything you want, within reason, to do anything you want as part of this prize,” a research grant. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to apply technology, because right then there was this incredible new technology that was available. One was handheld GPSs that said that you could place your position with coordinates within like 15 meters on Planet Earth. That was amazing to me. We used to have to measure by triangulation our position on a map until that point.

A view of the valley where Lee Berger found the fossil site he named Malapa, Sotho for home. Part of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa, Lee Berger explored this valley from one end to the other before he discovered the remains of a previously unknown hominid species, Australopithecus sediba. (Photo by Lee Berger) — A view of the valley where Lee Berger found the fossil site he named Malapa, Sotho for “home.” Part of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa, Lee Berger explored this valley from one end to the other before he discovered the remains of a previously unknown hominid species, *Australopithecus sediba*. (Lee Berger)

Also, satellite maps were being made available by NASA, 30-meter pixels each one. They were hugely expensive — thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. That’s what I did. I bought these things. I started out exploring Southern Africa for three years, and I found quite a few new sites outside of the region. I mapped through all the existing sites with this incredible new technology, and I ended up concentrating specifically on an area just outside of Johannesburg, Gladysvale, where I had discovered these first hominids years before, and where all these big discoveries were. I discovered four new cave sites that had fossils in them. Now that’s pretty good, because there had only been about 14 or 15 known. So I had added a percentage, and this is probably the most explored place on the continent of Africa for these things. I started working, and, of course, you know the end of that story, because I didn’t find much in those sites as we moved into the 21st century. So it was that context that I suddenly was looking at free satellite images — not with 15-meter resolution, but 5-meter resolution of this area.

The Malapa site, where Lee Berger and company discovered the remains of Australopithecus sediba. (Photo by Lee Berger) — The Malapa site, where Lee Berger and company discovered the remains of Australopithecus sediba. (Lee Berger)

After looking at my house, like everyone does the first time they do it, and then after looking at some of the places you know, I saw that little window over to the left that you could put GPS coordinates in. And I had some of the most expensively obtained GPS coordinates on the planet to put in that window. I typed them in, and I saw what everyone sees, an amazing Google Earth phenomenon: flying from the sky and popping right down onto the point that that coordinate is. And my coordinate, the first one — which I put in as Gladysvale, because I knew it better than any place on earth — landed on nothing. It landed hundreds and hundreds of meters away from Gladysvale. The second point I put in, the same thing. The third? They were all useless. They were all wrong. I had wasted three years of my life. I had wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of research grant. It did not take me long to Google why the U.S. government had put deliberate error into those GPSs in the late 1990s: for military purposes. And the errors that were inherent in those handheld GPSs had created a compounding error. Well that was like adding “low to low” on my life at that moment. So I spent the rest of December and January moving those points physically on Google, from where they landed to where I knew they should be, because I could see these sites. I could see what they looked like. I knew where they were. I could locate them.

That must have been extremely meticulous and difficult work.

Lee Berger: It was one of the most important moments in the entire story of my scientific career, because it was in correcting that error that I began to see patterns, that I began to see that they fell in linear structures. I began to see the fossil sites clustered together. Caves might be in more random situations. I also began to see and learn what a site would look like — all the different varieties. They didn’t all look the same. And I began to think that if that’s a site, that looks like a site, and this looks like a site. I knew it could not be true. I knew it could not be true because I had walked that area myself. So had everyone else though, in the field, for the last 80 years. But it was driving me insane. So much so, that in March of that year, I printed out a little A4 sheet of targets. And I did what every human does: I started as far away from a place I knew best — the site of Gladysvale — because I knew there was nothing there. All the way in the city limits of Krugersdorp, 20 kilometers away from that point, where these rocks sort of faded out into the urban sprawl. And on the first day out, I found 21 new sites. By July of that year I had found 600 new sites, including well more than 40 fossil-bearing sites. Imagine this in the magnitude — if we went from 20 known sites to 60 — and I was blown away. If that error had not occurred, if those GPS points had been right, I would have never gone through that process. I would have accepted that the terrain was as we see it, and I would have never — so if I had not failed in that earlier expedition, what I’m about to tell you happened to me would never have happened. On the first of August — I had moved back in by then to the area around Gladysvale — and of course, by then the entire area was covered with sites: caves, fossil-bearing sites. They were all over the place. We just missed them, all of us.

The Malapa site in South Africa on September 4, 2008, at the moment of discovery of the female skeleton MH2. In the pit are Job Kibii, Lee Berger and his dog Tau. (Courtesy of Lee Berger) — The Malapa site in South Africa on September 4, 2008, at the moment of their discovery of the female skeleton.

Were people following your work at this point? Did you have their attention?

Lee Berger: The community of scientists — particularly the geologists — I began to rope into this. And I really thought that was where my career was going to go. This is a big deal. I’m suddenly offering decades — hundreds of years — of resources to the science. So I corralled together a couple of geologists, but no paleoanthropologists. You know, it is surprising how many people are risk-averse in that sort of thing. And I really thought the contribution was going to be this mass of new potential to our database. And on the first of August of 2008, I was almost on the last sweep of the entire region. I was as close to Gladysvale as you get. I was one kilometer away. One-and-a-half hills. And I saw some targets on Google Earth. I used to sit on Google Earth the night before deciding where I was going to go. I’d find my targets, and then my dog Tau and I would get in the car and there we’d go to that area. Out we’d go, and I’d walk it, target to target, looking at the terrain, finding things, marking one’s map, taking pictures. And that’s what I did on that morning. But I knew I wasn’t going to find anything that morning, even though I had these targets, because I had been in this valley. I’d been in this valley in the late 1990s as part of that National Geographic expedition, and I’d found one of those fossil sites in this valley. I had been there. But you know, I was following this system by then, and it was almost like a zen-like exercise to go out. I was disappointed if I didn’t find 20 caves a day when I was out there. And I drove in this valley, and drove near these targets, which were only 50 yards off the road.

I knew the moment I stopped the car I was going to make a discovery, because I could see an old lime trackway that somehow I had missed in the two or 300 times I had driven down that road before. Tau and I got out, followed this trackway up around this really rough terrain. Dolomite’s hard to walk on. The animals had carved a path along this old lime miner trackway, because it was where they could walk too. I came to an old game fence. It’s in a wilderness area. And there I crawled through this hole in the fence, and in front of me was the site of Malapa. It was just a little hole in the ground with some trees. And the first rock I turned over had an antelope arm in it. That’s rare. Big mammal fossils one kilometer from where I’d spent the last 17 years working and I hadn’t seen a fossil site right here! But I was on a mapping expedition, took photographs and notes, looked around, saw there were fossils, went up the hill, and found 46 new caves. Right in the middle of the most explored area on Planet Earth. I was shocked.

I went back to the lab, and this incredible tragedy occurred to us.

A little more than a week before this all occurred, the young man who was going to take over this position as director was killed in a motorcycle accident in London. And so here we were sitting with a lab that had already shifted direction, new post-docs hired that were going to be trained in lab things, and no leader. I was in my office, and I don’t remember exactly what I was doing that morning, but a young man named Job Kibii came into my office, sat down across from me, and said, “Would you be my postdoctoral supervisor?” And I looked up at him — it was a tragic moment — and I said, “No. You’re our lab guy. You want to be a lab guy. I’m not a lab guy. I’m a field guy.” But I’d just found this site and it was really bothering me. “If you want to learn to be a field guy, let’s go look and see what this site has to offer, and if it’s what I think it is, I’ll teach you to be a field guy.”

Lee Berger and his postdoctoral student Job Kibii, moments after Berger discovered Malapa Hominin 2, the adult female Paratype of Australopithecus sediba. (Photo courtesy of Lee Berger and the University of the Witwatersrand) — Lee Berger and his postdoctoral student Job Kibii, moments after Berger discovered Malapa hominin 2, the adult female paratype of *Australopithecus sediba*. (Photo courtesy of Lee Berger and University of the Witwatersrand)

Lee Berger: So on the 15th of August we go back to the site. My dog Tau, Job, my then-nine-year-old son, Matthew. We arrive there and I’m telling them the story of how I discovered it. We walk up the hill, walk to the site. There’s a little hole there where miners had found this site a hundred years ago or so, and they put in two, three dynamite blasts. And then they’d done something that I’ve never seen before — they left it. They knocked a few rocks loose. One of the ones is the one that I’d found earlier. And I said, “Okay, guys, go find fossils. And when you find one, call me. I’ll identify it and let’s see what the site has to offer.” And with that Matthew and Tau are gone — phfft! — off into the bush. And Job and I were standing at the hole, and I said, “You know, Job, I think that the miners left this because they probably did just what I did. They probably found it first, they start drilling holes and stuff, the foreman or someone walks up the hill, he finds all these other caves. And by the time he gets back, they drill the holes, he blasts, he doesn’t see anything worthwhile, and he says, ‘Okay, move it up here.’ They destroyed almost every one of those other 46 caves — destroyed.” And as I finished saying that, Matthew shouts, “Dad, I found a fossil!” He was 15 meters off the site in high grass. I could see he was holding a small rock. And just for a moment I almost didn’t go look, because I knew what he would have found. He would have found an antelope fossil, because at that time the statistical numbers were, for every one of these early hominids we find — these human ancestor pieces — we find about 250,000 pieces of antelopes. We just don’t find these things. My nine-year-old son, encouraging fossil hunting. And I started walking towards him, and five meters away I knew that his and my life were going to change forever, because he was holding a small rock. You have to visualize and crouch down. And there, on the outside of it, was an S-shaped bone.

So the bone in the rock your son found, what was it?

On August 15, 2008, Lee Berger’s son Matthew, age nine, found this rock containing the fossilized clavicle and jawbone of Australopithecus sediba, the first specimens of this species ever found. (Photo by Lee Berger)

That S-shaped bone was a hominid clavicle. The reason I knew that is very few mammals, first, in Africa have hominid clavicles. Bats have them because they fly. Moles have them because they dig. And primates have them. We’re primates. And only amongst primates do humans and our ancestors have this very characteristic S-shape. At that time I was probably one of the world’s only experts on hominid clavicles. I did my Ph.D. on them. All six or seven pieces — never a complete one — had been found. I did my thesis on the clavicle, the proximal humerus, and the scapula. And one of the reasons I did is there were no complete bones in the entire record of those, and it was about the only thing left to study and it was all scraps. And I was looking at one. Matthew says I cursed. I don’t believe that. I took the rock and I was examining it and it was one of those amazing moments where everything went black and white — and it really does happen to you. And everything — and I don’t have any auditory memory of this, but I have a visual memory — as I turned the rock over, there sticking out of the back was a jaw and canine of an early human. Maybe one of the most characteristic teeth that you could be looking at. And I could see there were other bones in this block. And I realized immediately that we probably had the rarest of the rare — partial skeleton — and we just don’t find this.

By 2009, Lee Berger had assembled the partial skeleton of Australopithecus sediba. (Photo by Brett Eloff, courtesy of Lee Berger and the University of the Witwatersrand)

I called the South African Heritage Resource Agency to get permission to take it off, because the rules changed, and there’s cell phone coverage there of course. We took it back to the lab, and within days we realized that indeed there was a partial skeleton there — a child in fact. And we could see its molars weren’t erupted. Its epiphyses — its growth centers — weren’t fused. It was probably 11, 12, 13 years of age. And we were extremely excited. The first — effectively — rock we look at has a skeleton in it. But I had to wait for the permit before I could go back. And on September third, I was informed that I would receive the permit on September fourth. Every single person in our institute that had a Masters or Ph.D. — in paleoanthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology — like dogs, went back out there, because we don’t find these things ever. You know, 99.9 percent of people who call themselves paleoanthropologists — the few thousand of us that there are — will never find one of these in the wild. And I think everyone had, in the back of their mind, that if a nine-year-old could do it in a minute-and-a-half, this was our moment. We got back out there three hours later. We had found nothing you could definitively call a hominid and we were devastated. I couldn’t even put this little block back into this tiny little hole in the ground. It just — they weren’t there.

We broke for tea, and we were thinking of leaving, and I walked back over this hole where I situated — so the hole was between me and where that rock was, 15 meters away. And I was trying to imagine how could the rock get from here? And I was literally trying to visualize these miners. A blast goes off, rock flows out. How does that rock get from here to there? And I began to have that ugly feeling that, “What if it came from one of those other caves, falling off a wagon?” That’s how it was so far away. We’d never know where it came from. It would be this treasure with no context. And the sun came just up enough that it showed on the back side of this wall that we’d all been in dozens of times. And I saw, sticking out of the wall, the proximal humerus of a hominid. Remember, I did my Ph.D. on them. I knew what they were. I didn’t say anything. I climbed down into the pit, I got closer, and I realized that the shoulder blade, the scapular, was in articulation. I still didn’t say anything. I put my hand on the wall, and two hominid teeth fell out of my hand. They were hanging loose in the loose dirt. Then I said something. It never occurred to me for a moment that that was not the child — Matt’s child. Clavicle, proximal humerus. And we find out later, maybe a month later, that this was another skeleton because never in history had two skeletons been found. And that started this adventure I’ve been in.

The site of Malapa, which I would eventually call it, which means “my home,” has turned into perhaps the richest early hominid site ever discovered in the history of this planet. There are many, many individuals we haven’t even excavated yet there. There are organic remains. It’s resulted in one of the most prolific research publication outputs that any team has produced, in very short periods of time, because we operate on complete open access to all scientists. My scientific team grew from one — me — to over a hundred scientists as you talk to me right now. Probably one of the largest science programs in the world directed at these very specific questions. It would turn out to be a new species, one we never imagined existed. It’s so different in its shape and morphology from things like Lucy, or things that come after it, like Turkana Boy, that I don’t think any paleoanthropologist imagined this combination, this mosaicism in morphology. It’s almost the opposite of what we had predicted, and that’s why it’s so exciting. It looks like a combination between later hominids and earlier hominids. We genuinely found something new, right on the surface of a site in the most explored area on Planet Earth. So easy to see that a nine-year-old could pick it up, not just another fragment of one of these things, but maybe the best ones that have ever been found, and people say we’ve discovered everything!

The cranium of Malapa hominid 1 (MH1) from South Africa, named Karabo. The remains of this juvenile male were the first of the species Australopithecus sediba to be discovered. (Courtesy of Lee Berger)

Your nine-year-old must have been a little bit more qualified than most nine-year-olds. But this was something to show Dad!

Lee Berger: Both my son Matthew and my daughter Megan go with me lots in the field. And so they obviously picked up the skill of seeing fossils. However, some people say, “Oh, well, he just showed you a fossil and he didn’t know it was a hominid.” And he’ll tell you that. But I’ll add a little different to that story. The clavicle is a very unusual bone, and it’s one of the few bones that is curved in human bodies, other than some ribs and some other parts of bone. But it’s the only one with a double curvature like that. It doesn’t look like any bone in the body of antelopes or carnivores. There were other bones around. There were other rocks he could have showed me. I think he saw it was different. I think with nine-year-old eyes, I think he saw it was different. Because I can tell you that when 14 professionals who know what they’re looking for got out there, three-and-a-bit hours later, we hadn’t seen a one of what would turn out to be very many of these things lying around there. We missed it, because we weren’t prepared to realize that much of what we were looking at were exactly what we were looking for. Because that had never occurred in the history of this science. So I give a lot of credit to Matthew’s discovery, a tremendous amount.

You were prepared for this discovery. Very few other people on earth would have known what they were looking at.

Lee Berger: You know, another story has occurred almost exactly like that, by the mentor of my mentor, in the same academic chair I took. Raymond Dart, when he opened the box in 1924 that contained the Taung Child, he was one of the only people on the planet that could have recognized the little endocast that he pulled out of there. He was a comparative neuroanatomist in 1924, in the University of the Witwatersrand, in the very situation that I occupied, and the same thing happened to me.

What was the impact of the discovery of Australopithecus sediba?

Lee Berger: Australopithecus sediba was a transformational moment when I first saw it, even though I didn’t know it by name then, because we would later name it. I had had a fantastic scientific career, but one full of huge ups and downs, which are typical of many people. I had rocketed to a position as chair of a very prestigious research unit at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, at a very young age, in my early 30s. I had taken over from a very powerful and famous paleoanthropologist named Philip Valentine Tobias. I had made some discoveries. When I first got to South Africa to do my Ph.D., I discovered two little hominid teeth. Those two teeth were the first new early hominids from the site of Gladysvale discovered in Southern Africa in 48 years. They appeared in National Geographic. Two teeth! That’s how rare this stuff was at the time. I had done other work, looking at what killed the Taung Child. I had looked at body proportions. But I had not made major hominid discoveries, because they are just that rare. I had got into the type of ups and downs and wars I’d had. Units closed, units reopened. I’d had the most ferocious fights with colleagues, and one of the odd things about paleoanthropology is what would normally be just an internal academic spat that might appear in a conference review ends up on the front pages of The New York Times in paleoanthropology. Those kinds of things were happening to me.

Why is that?

Lee Berger: A lot of my ideas were always pushing edges, pushing boundaries. No one’s ever made a great discovery by surging behind a wave, and I was always pushing boundaries. I also took a stance in the late 1990s about open access to fossils. You’ve got to remember, it’s very important to remember, that I’m almost the first generation of scientists — people my age and just maybe a year older — that were never without a computer. We are the first computer generation. I had one as a child. I’ve always had one. It makes us think differently. We’re almost the Facebook generation of scientists. And in the late 1990s, there were some behavioral abnormalities within paleoanthropology that bothered me a lot, and I was in a very powerful position. A young man, made director and saving one of the most powerful chairs in the science of paleoanthropology, and I had fossils that had been found by other people — albeit in the very distant past— under my control. And in this science, those are resources. I decided to open them up, let everyone look at them. It now is called “open access.” We didn’t have a name for it at that time really. But took a relatively public stance on that, that I was going to let people see these fossils. It was not the way it was done.

When you say let people see these fossils, do you mean online?

Lee Berger: No. There was no online in the late 1990s. That was yet to be. No, I meant physically look at them. It may sound strange, but to let scientific colleagues see material — published or unpublished — that was not the norm. The norm at that time was — and I’m not criticizing it, I’m just explaining how the science worked — you would gather a small team of people around you when you had important fossils, and you would study them over years and years and years and years. And then, at times, you would pronounce on the analyses that you had carefully conducted. While that’s not wrong in any way, shape or form, it was different than the way my generation thinks about the value. We grew up in the age of where you have a Google or a Facebook or the Internet, where we didn’t know what anything was worth until you put it out there and began to establish its worth as a community, as you tested the robusticity of it as you went along. So I was looking at the fossils the same way, and I said, “I’m going to open the safe door.” Well, it was probably a decade too early to say that, and it caused wars. It coincided with, also, the discovery of a very major fossil by a person older than me that worked for me. That caused tension and conflicts, particularly as I was publicly taking a stance which of course would be threatening if someone didn’t buy into it. Where some of the lowest periods, literally, the fights that broke out eventually made me decide to split the unit and actually dissolve this thing that I had worked so hard to build over the previous six or seven years. I then rebuilt. And as we moved into periods around 2003, 2004, some dramatic things changed in the world. And I ended up losing the second one again even after I had rebuilt it.

So after these years of trying to build up this research unit, you were about to lose it again over this issue of open access?

Lee Berger: Many people don’t realize how much things had changed by 2003, 2004, 2005. At that point, for the first time, we began to have readily accessible computers that could handle large databases. We had begun to work with 3D imaging of all kinds, from scans to surface scans, to all these kinds of things that were large datasets we just couldn’t handle before then. And because my exploration efforts — looking for fossils in various sites and stuff — had not produced any really big hits, the push by things like the universities and colleagues was to move away from exploration. There was very much a real feel that we probably pretty much discovered every major fossil field in Africa. And in fact, some scientists even wrote that down at the turn of the millennia. It wasn’t a great time to be proposing to explore and push new, because we hadn’t succeeded, theoretically, being given the chance. All the big discoveries were in old sites. And so, a whole re-look at this field of science at my university was going on. There was going to be an institute created. It was clear I was not going to be the director of that. They were moving towards technology-based study. “Let’s study the sure thing — the fossils that we’ve already discovered, the fossils that were discovered decades and decades and decades ago — because that’s what’s getting on the cover of Nature and Science,” and all that sort of thing.

Your concept of opening fossils up for everyone to see, you said was maybe ten years too soon. Was that because people just weren’t ready to be that open?

Lee Berger: I think that my generation of scientists — what would eventually be an Internet generation — we’d not reached sufficient power within organizations to activate. I was far and away the youngest person who had reached some position as director at that point. The community has to be ready for certain messages, and timing is often everything.

You must have been disappointed by how things were going.

Lee Berger: Sure I was. In the sense that I was still an extraordinary believer in that there was more out there to be discovered. I just wasn’t demonstrating. Of course, I’m in a field where you never find what you’re looking for. So it was one of those Catch 22 moments. The university began the search for a new director to lead us into the technological era. I began casting about for my next phase in life. I dabbled in looking at presenting some science education shows as a sort of field explorer type thing, because I’d always loved and passionately believed in the public communication of science. I was continuing to rise in my career. I was given a promotion. I became the “Reader in Human Evolution and the Public Understanding of Science,” which is interesting. It’s clear in this period where my mind was in that. We eventually found a new director, which was, ironically, a person who’d been a postdoctoral student in my very unit. As these things go, the youth become closer and closer to you in age, as technology advances, and he was destined to come take over. They began hiring people — lots of young people — to fill these postdoctoral positions, looking at the equipment and such. And it was all towards the end of 2007.

You made this discovery after you had reached a low point and everything looked like it was over. That’s a tremendous irony, isn’t it?

Lee Berger: Let me couch the “low point” thing. I had never been a believer that there is any such thing as failure. Failure is about an education. It’s just up to you to see what you learned there. There is no situation where you can discover something — an antelope fossil, anything — that is not immensely valuable to us, as humans, to understand. We’re just not smart enough at any one given moment to recognize what the question is. The pressure of colleagues, and your society you exist in, whether it’s academic in my case, or society, business, whatever it is, it’s that pressure. It’s that enormous pressure of what they perceive as success that causes the lows. I never thought I was failing. I never for a moment thought I was failing. I am one of those scientists that has been fortunate enough to have something truly extraordinary happen to me. I thought I had made big discoveries before. I thought I had made contributions to science, incremental or major. I only realized after this when truly a discovery of magnitude occurs. It’s so much bigger than you are that it doesn’t need justification. You don’t have to tell anyone how big it is. And that was the moment I had to make the decision, “Do I keep this for myself, or do I stick to what I had gone through hell for in those wars of ’99, 2000, 2001?” And I would like to think that there wasn’t a moment where I said, “My precious.” And if there was, it didn’t last very long. I fortunately stuck to that belief that there was a better way to do this, and I opened it, and brought in a great team which grew osmotically, in a way that people could — I mean, to over 100 scientists. That’s in no time at all. And publishing magnificent papers in the highest quality journals, and really, I think, contributing to our understanding of something about where we come from.

What has Australopithecus sediba taught us about who we are? How has it changed the way we see our origins?

Lee Berger: These fossils have taught us two sort of big streams. One is that that idea that there’s not more out there to be discovered is wrong. Whatever they are, that idea is wrong. We need to build a generation of explorers and field scientists and go out and find more of these. Because sitting — in the most explored area on this planet for those very things — is sitting these things, on the surface. That’s one thing it taught us. It’s not a lesson about human evolution. It’s a lesson about human behavior. A lesson about human evolution is that we don’t know what’s going on. We thought we had this figured out. We thought it was a relatively neat package. Okay, we might have said, “It’s bushy here, it’s bushy there.” This is saying something — there were other experiments that were so different from what our ideas were that there must be other stories going on. This is not a bush, it’s not a tree, it’s like a braided stream of complexity that we also — it has taught us, regardless of what Australopithecus turns out to be in that braided stream of evolution, that we cannot use small bits and pieces to build a whole. If I had found any one area of anatomy of sediba, I would have probably named three or four different species from the different pieces. The ankle would be an ape. The rest of the foot would be a human. The pelvis would be a human. The spine would be an ape. The arms would be an ape. The hand would be a homo erectus. The skull, the teeth would be the genus homo — homo habilis. The brain and its back would be an Australopithecine, and front something advanced. I mean, you can’t use parts to interpret the whole unless you have the whole. We need more skeletons.

Where does it fit? We don’t know. I think it teaches us that we shouldn’t maybe ask that question yet about any of these things. We can speculate. It looks like a perfect transition between some early Australopithecine and Homo erectus. But maybe not the ones we found. And that’s exciting, because we are at an explosively transitional moment. It must be like when scientists realized they had a part of the periodic table. They knew the rest was there. They just hadn’t found it yet. That’s where we are.

So there’s a lot for future scientists to do.

Lee Berger: There is a lot for future scientists not only to do but to find.

(On November 19, 2015, the Academy of Achievement interviewed Dr. Lee Berger for a second time, this time in New York City, to discuss his historic discovery of Homo naledi at the Rising Star Cave Complex.)

Take us back to autumn of 2013. You were excavating the Rising Star Complex in the Cradle of Humankind when you made a remarkable discovery. Can you describe the events leading up to that discovery?

Lee Berger: I had sent a group of explorers out to look for fossils, but instead of doing the traditional going over the surface of the area in this Cradle of Humankind where I found things like sediba and other great discoveries that have been made in the past, I just thought I’d send them underground. The first part of the team was not physiologically appropriate to actually get into some of the very tight spaces, and so we enlisted some amateurs, two of them, in fact, Rick Hunter and Steve Tucker, who are quite slim, very fit —and a little bit insane — explorers. And on September 13th, they went into one of the best-known cave systems in the entire region, if not all of South Africa, the Rising Star system. They went off-map though, and they found a place at the top of a collapse we call Dragon’s Back, and there they looked down a seven-and-a-half inch slot. Now imagine, they’re already 100 feet underground. They’re looking into this slot, and of course what do they do? They go into it, and they go down it about 50 feet and drop into a chamber. And in that chamber are bones scattered across the floor. They’re bones that they thought were the kind that I was looking for, and their camera didn’t function, so they had to come back out. It was about a four-and-a-half hour trip at that time. They told me that they thought they’d found something, but I said, “Bring me pictures,” and “I’m not going to believe you unless I see pictures of this,” because I get that kind of thing all the time. People call you up and say they found a skull, and it’s a plastic baby doll head or something that they got out of their backyard. And I forgot about it, and October 1st, about 9:00 in the evening, my door buzzer went. I answered the intercom, and Pedro, who was a student that I had enlisted as sort of the team leader, was on the other end. He said, “You’re gonna want to let us in.” And I almost didn’t ’cause it was a kind of a creepy voice like that. In they came, lifted up a laptop, and there I saw a picture that I thought I’d never see. There, sitting on this photograph, was a jawbone that I could see was a primitive hominid that was just lying there on the floor. Next picture was a skull. Next picture, a series of bones of a body, it looked like. I’d never seen anything like that in all of my career, just lying there on the floor. And so we celebrated a little. I couldn’t sleep that night. Picked up the phone at 2:00 a.m., called National Geographic. And they funded an expedition that would start one month later with six volunteer scientists, who just happened to be women from all over the world, who came without knowing what they were gonna do. Literally risking their lives, a 60-person expedition in the field. Within a week, we had the richest hominid site ever discovered in the history of South Africa, and by the end of the 21-day expedition, we had found more fossils of primitive hominids that had been discovered in the entire history of the search for human origins in all of southern Africa for the last 90 years. And we left thousands in the chamber. It’s probably the richest site ever discovered in the world. It’s like our version of Tutankhamen’s tomb.

What sort of expectations did you have prior to the excavation of this site?

Lee Berger: Oh, I thought there was a skeleton. I couldn’t believe it, and I thought there was one skeleton. This is a field of fragments. We don’t find these things, and I’d already had my lottery ticket punched with sediba. I had my skeletons from that discovery. I went after this second one with all the expectation of a fragmented skeleton that we would get out of some species. I never in the world expected that chamber to have that richness, and I really didn’t expect to find another new species.

When did you realize that these were the remains of an unknown species?

Lee Berger: Literally, as the first pieces came up, the results were completely unexpected. It didn’t look anything like the fossils I thought I saw on the photographic images. And almost from that moment, my colleagues and I, sitting there in the science tent, were pretty sure we’d never seen anything like this before.

How does your discovery of Homo naledi change what we know about the story of humankind?

Lee Berger: Homo naledi tells us a few things. One, that we should have an expectation of strangeness. That there are things out there we haven’t found. There are lineages that are certainly out there that we haven’t seen, maybe “ghost lineage” is the word. Something coming from deep time that was invisible until we see the species, and perhaps we should expect more of those. Second thing it teaches us is that there’s mosaicism in human origins. That the simple expectation that when you look at one part of the body, you can tell what another part of the body’s gonna look like, that’s wrong. Sediba started that story. Homo naledi says that absolutely. And the third thing I think it teaches us is that we should be very careful about proclaiming everything we find as a human ancestor. Human relative is probably a better term because it’s clear now that to get to us, there were lots of different experiments.

Could you paint us a verbal picture of what you believe this creature looked like in comparison to other pre-humans we know about?

Lee Berger: So the easiest way to sort of describe Homo naledi is it’s not a human, first. You’ve got to get that out of your mind, but it is standing on two legs. Imagine something standing on two legs. It’s probably about five feet tall, but ultra-thin. If you were looking at it across a room, you’d immediately know you’re not looking at a human, or if you are, there’s something wrong with them because perched atop that five-foot body is going to be a pinhead. A head literally with a brain the size of an orange. The shoulders would be high, almost a — brought up sort of — held like an ape would hold its shoulders. But then you’d notice that the arms would be more human proportion. The hands would look like a human hand, except they’d be held and curved out at the end so that they wouldn’t be flat. They would just be sort of more like an ape at the end but human-proportioned. When you got down to the hips, they’d be sort of flared, but again, a very slender body, and then long, skinny legs which — at the very end of that — a human-like foot.

What do these features tell us about these creatures and how they lived?

Lee Berger: We’ve just discovered Homo naledi, but because of the abundance of fossils that we have — 1,550 elements we’ve brought out, 15 individuals — we know probably more about it than almost any other species of ancient human relative ever discovered. And so we can say that Homo naledi was a climber, but we don’t know what it’s climbing. It has these very different hands than any kind of hominid we’ve ever seen before with those long, curved fingers. We know it’s a long-distance walker. It’s got these long legs, and it’s walking in much the way a human is. We can even see that in the way the foot and ankle are constructed, but it’s doing it somehow a little bit differently because the pelvis is constructed differently. So you’ve got a climbing, long-distance walker. But perhaps what’s most amazing about it is that we’ve also had a glimpse into its behavior. We’ve hypothesized, after eliminating pretty much everything else, that Homo naledi was deliberately disposing of its dead. Which means it’s got a mind that has the capacity that we previously thought was not only unique to humans, but perhaps identified humans. The concept, perhaps, of the recognition of self-mortality.

Where does Homo naledi fit in the course of human evolution? How does it relate to the Ardipithecus ramidus found by Tim White in 2012 and the Australopithecus afarensis known as Lucy found by Donald Johanson in 1974?

Lee Berger: Everyone wants to know where this animal, and this non-human species, fits in the human family tree. The answer is we don’t know. And we haven’t been grandstanding. We could probably say, “Hey, this is at the base of the genus Homo, and everything else that comes after it comes out of it.” But one of the messages that comes out of Homo naledi is you probably shouldn’t be drawing simplistic family trees anymore. We don’t know where it comes from. It’s clear from its mosaic morphology that it has some deep roots back in some very early primitive ancestor, but does it come out something like Lucy? Well, there are parts of the body that says it could, and then parts that say “Gee, it might even be primitive to that.” So there could be some even earlier ancestor we haven’t discovered yet that gives rise — it splits away, and then you have these different experiments going on down through time. Now that doesn’t mean, because of that, those are independent experiments that just go away, because with recent studies of genetics, we now know sometimes things can come back together. We carry Neanderthal DNA inside of us. So there’s a chance that there could be divergent, and then hybridization at different times, so you’re picking up the best of different things as evolution occurs. But the important part of that is Homo naledi says that our record isn’t complete enough, and we should probably just step back for a bit and find more fossils.

One of the most exciting things about this discovery is that it seems these creatures intentionally buried their dead. Do you know that as a fact?

Lee Berger: We were faced with a dilemma. About day four, we realized that there was nothing in this chamber but hominids, and all of us have degrees in archeology, forensic anthropology, and we kind of knew what it meant to see a truly mono-specific assemblage. It’s rare to the point of unique in the paleontological record. Well, except for one species: Homo sapiens. This wasn’t Homo sapiens. We knew that very early on. We knew it was primitive, and so we began trying to eliminate things. We could easily eliminate eventually that it wasn’t a predator. There were no marks of that. There was no scavenging. We knew that it wasn’t a mass death assemblage, because they had come in one after the other. We could tell that from studies of how the bones were laid out, and also how they were weathering. We knew that they hadn’t died in some collapse. We knew they weren’t washed in there. We could see that from the sediments. We went through everything, and we were eventually left with this one hypothesis, that this non-human species of animal was doing something that we previously thought only humans did, deliberately disposing of its dead. Lee Berger: Well, up until September 10th, when we announced that we have a species of non-human animal that deliberately disposes of its dead in a ritualized fashion — at least that’s the best hypothesis — it was thought that that was not only unique to humans, but perhaps identified us. Now we have to rethink what it means to be a human.

If you were to magically discover a videotape that showed this ritual happening two and a half million years ago, what do you imagine it would look like?

Lee Berger: So to put yourself at the moment that an event like this happens, you have this chamber that’s in the dark zone. It is deep in a cave. We know that because there’s nothing else in there, and we can see that there aren’t windblown sediments and such. So the entrance is difficult to get to, and in fact, there’s some evidence that the entrance is the same one we come down, that little narrow chute, because there are remains at the bottom. So if we’re at this moment, perhaps a group of them are carrying a body, and somehow they are working their way up in the dark, up this collapse that we call Dragon’s Back. Risking their lives, perhaps. Maybe they pass the body up bit by bit, climbing ahead of each other to lift what must have been a heavy weight. If it was an adult, it would weigh 40, 50 kilograms. So this is a big animal and a big event. They reach the top of the chute, and that’s where our story kind of stalls into speculation, because we don’t know what happens then. Do they drop the body down this little slot? Does it hang and begin to deteriorate and fall into here? Or do they descend that chute as well, somehow moving the body down and entering and placing the body in the dark zone of this deep cave? It’s hard to imagine them doing that in the pitch black, and so there is some implication that perhaps — again, this is pure speculation until we can discover some chemical evidence of this — but perhaps they were lighting fires too. But think about that. Here’s an animal with a brain the size of an orange that does that with its dead? But we’re kind of left with that inevitable hypothesis, at least on the evidence we have at hand.

Are there more remains to be excavated from the site?

Lee Berger: Down in that Dinaledi chamber, we left thousands of remains. The floor is quite literally comprised of the bones of Homo naledi. We have 15 individuals out. We recovered 1,550 specimens so far from just sweeping the top of the floor, what had actually just moved up and settled out of the dirt, and an excavation of about a yard by ten inches. Can you imagine the extent of the fossils that we left behind?

What else might the remaining skeletons tell us?

Lee Berger: Right now we already have this basically head-to-toe look at Homo naledi. We have it from near fetal-aged individuals. We have infants, toddlers, children. We have teens, young adults, adults, and the elderly. We have most areas repeated in multiple individuals, and many of those bones are very complete, but some areas are not as complete as others. So we would like to get a little bit more and reconstruct those areas that are missing, but we’re also gonna leave remains there. Because technology is changing at an incredible rate, and we have a chance to actually leave a gift for future generations of scientists. I mean, with what we can do today, it would seem like a miracle to a scientist 25, 30 years ago. What they’re going to be able to do in 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, who knows? And so we have an obligation to leave part of this at least — and probably a significant part of it — as a time capsule for those scientists that aren’t even born yet.

Have all of your colleagues accepted the classification of these remains as a new species?

Lee Berger: We published these in refereed journals. There are something like 60 authors on the two papers, one looking at taxonomy, the other looking at the context. There have been a couple of scientists who have jumped out and said, “No. This is Homo erectus,” and in fact they’ve said it’s “primitive Homo erectus,” and some of the media jumps up and says, “Ha! See? So there’s now a debate going on about the taxonomy. You guys got it wrong.” What most people who aren’t scientists don’t understand though, is that’s kind of exactly what we’re saying too. If you say that Homo naledi is a primitive Homo erectus, then by definition, you’re placing it at the base and root of our genus. The debate of whether it’s a new species or not, well, that’s a semantic debate about how we scientists talk about variation and differences. We say that there is too much variation to include naledi within Homo erectus, because if you do, you extend it beyond any known species that’s ever existed. Plus, it’s got unique characters never before seen in any hominid, like its thumb, like parts of its femur. Those are technical arguments. So what sounds like this big disagreement about taxonomy is actually a bunch of scientists agreeing with each other and just arguing over subtle words.

What do you think is most important for the colleagues who disagree with you to consider?

Lee Berger: I think what Homo naledi says is that we’ve got to stop using just one part of anatomy to proclaim species. Because of the scarcity of the ancient human relative fossil record — and it has been a field of scraps — most of the field has relied on just the head, and often just dentition to identify what a species is. Homo naledi says you can’t do that. Sediba said you can’t do that. We used an entire body to describe a new species, and I would say to colleagues who disagree, we’re gonna have to do that. You need to see the whole thing. That doesn’t sound very fair though, if you’ve got a 90-year record that’s comprised of isolated teeth or a bit of a mandible or a jaw, but these fossils are demanding that we start doing the things we do. That is taxonomic classification, not on bits and pieces, but from head to toe.

You’ve said your work is really about seeing, learning to look and take in your surroundings, and unlock what you think you already know about them. When you’re out hunting for bones or fossils, what are you hearing in your head? Is it silence? Is there a soundtrack?

Lee Berger: What these discoveries have taught me in a very real way is that people like me need to open our minds to possibilities. Clearly, the previous 17 years to discovering sediba, I had a case of backyard syndrome. That is that I wasn’t seeing what was right in front of me. When I discovered Malapa, that was less than a mile from where I’d spent the majority of the last 17 years looking. It was so easy to see, a nine-year old could see it, and that’s the trick. A nine-year old could see it, ’cause they don’t have an expectation of not discovering something. I then stopped exploring, concentrated my energy on the science of studying sediba, and it was only after five years that I went, “Wait a second. We need to be back out there.” And within a month and a half, naledi had been discovered, and it was right under our noses all the time. The Dinaledi chamber and the Rising Star system is less than a mile from the richest site for human origins on the planet, the site of Sterkfontein. I sat in my command center looking at this site, as bone after bone after bone came up that were lying there on the floor of a cave that none of us had looked at, because that’s not the way they’re supposed to be. So what goes on in my mind? Don’t have expectations of what you’re going to discover. Stop expecting it to look like what you know. Keep your mind open, and stop and look at everything.

Are there particular songs that you listen to while you’re on an expedition?

Lee Berger: You know, I don’t actually listen to music while we’re conducting these expeditions, and there’s a couple of reasons why. Because there’s almost no time, and I know that might sound funny to people, but these events — and I’ve got to go back in my mind to this Rising Star expedition. People’s lives were at stake at every moment. This was incredibly dangerous. I was personally taking a decision that I was risking people’s lives to send them in and out of these chambers constantly to discover fossils, to bring bones up. And so when I set up that expedition model, and we laid the three and a half kilometers of cable, and we had a command center and science tent and caving tent and all those sort of things, every moment of my mind was focused on those cameras and those audio systems, watching and thinking about those people. There wasn’t time for music in that. It was an extraordinary — and then, as we started making these huge discoveries — it wasn’t skeleton. It was multiple skeletons, and then we realized that what was happening to us was extraordinary. We knew we were in perhaps one of the most remarkable events any paleontologists or archeologists have ever faced. That was music to me.

What’s kept you motivated over the years? What enabled you to push past the failures and remain confident that you could make a major discovery?

Lee Berger: I have always lived my life thinking there’s more to be found, that we don’t know everything. Yeah, that’s tough. It’s tough in a field where 99.9 percent of the people never make a discovery of one of these things in the wild in their entire life. It’s hard to keep going. I went for 17 years finding bits and pieces. But there is always that thing in me that says there is something else out there. To be fair, I never visualized this happening to me. I never visualized sediba. You know, I would have been happy with a mandible, a jaw, a piece of an arm — anything — prior to 2008. Then there were skeletons. There is something in me that says that’s not enough, and so we keep looking. And then naledi came along. There’s more out there. I know that for a fact because I also learned a lesson from sediba. We didn’t stop exploring after naledi, and there are more things. Those are not miracles, and there’s more to be found.

What are you searching for next?

Lee Berger: I don’t know, and that’s the thrill of it. I have no idea what we’re going to discover. I kind of know the areas we’re working in. We plan and make logistics around certain types of environments. You learn from your discoveries, so you know what types of things there are, but the beauty of it is I have no idea. As we’re speaking right now, my phone, which is turned off, could be ringing, and one of my explorers could be saying “Hey! You’ve got to see this.” That’s the beauty of it. I have no idea.

Have your discoveries affected the way you live your everyday life?

Lee Berger: Sediba was an extraordinary discovery. It changed my life. Suddenly I was part of a club of explorers and paleoanthropologists who had been privileged to be involved with a major discovery that was gonna sit in textbooks forever. That changed my life. It changed my life in a science-y way. It changed my life in a public way. Suddenly you’re a public figure in a different way. Naledi was so much more extreme than that. When it went viral on Twitter, when it started trending, when it came out on the cover of National Geographic, when the scientific papers had 250,000 reads — for a science paper! — when I would go to schools or into auditoriums, lecture halls — and you’ve got to remember, this is just nine weeks ago. And you get standing ovations, and you get kids crying, and I watched them cluster around these underground astronauts and see them as the heroes that they are. It’s not a rock star that’s there. These are scientists. My life is entirely changed.

You now have a very unique understanding of humanity, of human evolution. Does that affect the way you approach life from day to day?

Lee Berger: Homo naledi has done something that I thought would never happen to me as a paleoanthropologist. I went into a field to study and interpret bones. Suddenly, not only are there bones, but you’ve got a discovery that’s giving you insight into behavior in a way that I never anticipated. The idea that we’re getting a window into another species’ mind from this chamber, that’s amazing, you know? That’s something that I think the whole world is going to have to think about. You know, you’ve got something here, a discovery that’s making us question our own humanity. I guess I don’t know how I feel about that. I haven’t had enough time to digest the effect of that in something that I wasn’t really prepared for. I’d spent my life as a biologist, a paleontologist. And now I have to also think like a philosopher. That’s kind of neat though.

What will people think when they excavate our civilization millions of years from now?

Lee Berger: I think about that a lot. What would it be like if we’re sitting here in New York City a million years from now, and an archeologist plunges an excavation in this. What would they find? They wouldn’t find us. They’d find the remains of our way of doing things. They’d find lots of other animals. They’d find, here in New York City, pigs and cows and sheep and goats and cats and dogs and birds. And we’d be absent. They’d find our buildings. They’d find the rooms we live in. They’d find the clothes we wear. They’d find the tools we use. Unless they got really lucky and bumped into that .000-whatever percent that’s a cemetery or a morgue, that’s kind of a strange way to think about the events that are transpiring now. Did we just get lucky in the Dinaledi chamber and find that minute percentage? What must else be out there? So when you look at the future looking back at the past, they’ll only see our things, our actions, what we do. They’ll almost never see us.

Perhaps you could tell us about your early life, growing up in rural Georgia.

Lee Berger: I grew up in a little town called Sylvania, Georgia. We would stay there during the winter and we’d move — migrate between that and Savannah, Georgia. It had about 800 people. We were 13 miles out, on a farm. And it was an extraordinary part of what molded me, that outdoors lifestyle, the idea to observe nature, the freedom that that gave. It also made me want to see a bigger world. I think it was a big part of what made me leave America, eventually, as I explored America, and then realized that there was this vast world out there that was waiting to be discovered.

So when you were a child, was there an element of exploration in your play?

Lee Berger: The idea of finding things and looking for things was always, clearly, a sort of inner part of me. I come from a long background of people who look for things. My grandfather was an oil wildcatter. My deep ancestry comes from pioneers who were sodbusters in the Kansas Territory. So risk takers, things like that. So I was always collecting something. It might have been wildlife, it might have been where I would collect turtles, or try to raise fish that I caught in a pond, or collecting arrowheads in plowed fields. That sort of looking for things, finding things, has always been, I think, something that’s been a very big part of me. The idea that there are things that other people don’t see all over the place, even in my own backyard, or as I walk through the woods, always intrigued me, and I think has been a big part of me.

So there was a feeling of exploration, even as a child?

Lee Berger: I was always collecting things. I would spend my time in the woods whenever I could. Some unfortunate animals ended up in terrariums or aquariums in my house. Or I would be looking for arrowheads, or Native American artifacts, or rocks. I came from a long line of these sort of explorers, if you will. People who were never happy to be where they were, but always looking for something. I found a real thrill seeing things other people missed.

What kind of work did your parents do?

Lee Berger: My father was a real estate broker and sold insurance, but in a small town way. So it’s a very different thing to what some people would think of, in a large office block. My mother was a math teacher. She taught first in schools, and then eventually in a small local college. They both were passionate about education, but also gave me a lot of freedom just to be. I wasn’t the easiest child. I went through quite a lot of academic ups and downs until I found what I loved.

Is it true that you were an Eagle Scout?

Lee Berger: I was an Eagle Scout, and that was a huge part of my life, scouting. It began to give a purpose to some of the things I was doing, whether it was collecting merit badges or things like that. I was also involved in 4H heavily. I became President of Georgia 4H, and that — that was the first thing that actually began to start helping me reach out into the bigger world, if you will.

What kinds of things were you involved in with 4H?

Lee Berger: Some things that might surprise people when they see me now. I was involved in pig farming. I used to do showmanship with cattle and pigs, and real country things. I was involved in dairy contests. But maybe more importantly to what actually happened is I was involved in the public speaking parts of it, where they began to engage in how to teach you to communicate. Then I started to meet scientists through the projects and the competitions. One of the things that happened to me through 4H was that I began to become interested in wildlife conservation and biology. I found out there was an endangered species in my region called the gopher tortoise. That took me to national competitions and it also introduced me to the first scientists I’d ever met. They were hugely formative and I ended up starting the first gopher tortoise preserve in the State of Georgia. It’s now the state reptile. It was a big part about teaching me not just about passion when you find something, but about the process of what you do to study something, or to actually make something happen. It also taught me a little bit about politics, getting some other people to become interested in something and assist you in accomplishing something.

Given this deeply scientific background, it’s surprising that you went on to study law.

Lee Berger as a young midshipman. He entered Vanderbilt University as a member of Naval ROTC, with the intention of preparing for law school, but soon found that the law was not for him and his future would not be in the Navy. (Courtesy of Lee Berger)

Lee Berger: Well, anyone who has parents wouldn’t be surprised when a young man or woman decides to do law or medicine or something! Because isn’t everyone supposed to be a lawyer? Because that’s what the world needs, another lawyer! I don’t mean that in any harmful way, but it’s true. The pressures of that are enormous, to please other people. And like, I think, many, many young people, the idea of being what other people want you to be is the easy way out. So I got into Vanderbilt University on a Naval ROTC scholarship. And I started to look and take all those pre-law courses, Economics 101. Anyone who’s ever done that will remember them. And after the first few, I was ready to die, because I didn’t understand it. I didn’t believe it, I didn’t like it. But here I was on a scholarship to do this. I was terrified, but one of the great things about a lot of the liberal arts colleges that people don’t appreciate as much are those electives. And I, of course, gravitated to geology, and even videography and a couple of other things, and I loved them. My transcript looks sort of like F, D, D, F in more core subjects of what I was supposed to be. And then A, A, A in everything I was taking as an elective. I reached a critical point, where it was literally one of those situations where I was going to fail out of college or I had to do something radical in my life.

I had one of those incredible moments when I met a person who didn’t realize how influential they would be in my life, in the young lieutenant who was my adviser in the Naval ROTC. Because I went in on the verge of failing out. Now I was lucky enough at that time that we had the two-year process. So I had gone a year-and-a-bit into it. So I wouldn’t have to go enlisted, but I was in trouble. And I went to him and I said, “Gosh, you know, it’s not working. I think I’m maybe going to drop out for a while, maybe enlist in the Navy and find myself, because this isn’t working.” And this young lieutenant who had my life in his hands, he could have told me — and it would have been in his interest because they were recruiting officers in some ways to say — “Absolutely.” He leaned across the table and he said, “What is this, when you look at it?” He had my transcript, and he shoved it across. And, you know, I was like, “Failure.” And he said, “No, look at it again. Don’t look at the Ds and Fs. Look at that again.” And I said, “I don’t see it.” And he said, “I see your passion there. I see what you love. You just don’t realize it.” He said, “You’re not enlisted material. You need to find your love.” And he said, “I will let you out of here right now, as long as you promise me to go do what you love.” And he signed my release papers. I put my stay at Vanderbilt in abeyance, and I walked out the door into a very interesting period, but where I then found that thing and never looked back.

So what was this period of your life like after you left Vanderbilt?

Lee Berger: A journey. It started with going back home to my family. The former President of 4H — Eagle Scout, Naval midshipman — has come home, maybe not having done as well as he should, back to Sylvania.

I ended up in Savannah, Georgia, and I walked into a local TV station and said, “May I see the manager?” And he said — well, the secretary for some reason said, “No.” And I was standing there devastated and he walked by and he said, “Who’s this?” And I said, “I’m Lee Berger and I’d like to work for you for free.” And he went, “What?” And I said, “Really, I’m just fascinated by this.” I’d had one video course, and I loved it, in college during that period. And he said, “I can’t let you work for free.” He said, “But you know, we’ve got the worst job in this place, which is the studio cameraman thing. I’m desperate to fill this. If you’re willing to work for minimum wage and learn that thing, I’ll do it.” Three months later I was the head cameraman in that division. Four months later I was in charge of — I was in the news camera division because I saw how exciting it was. I ended up in some wild things. I got hired by the leading station within a couple of months. Started the first night news program in Savannah, Georgia. Ended up saving a woman’s life because I was caught in a weird circumstance where the police had gone up river in the Savannah River when they heard that a woman had fallen in the river. And I ended up downstream — that’s part of my Eagle Scout — where I ended up downstream all alone, and there went a woman going by. And my job was to film and I had to make a decision instantly: film this woman — but the next stop is the Atlantic Ocean — or not. And I dropped my camera, which they were very fragile and very expensive back then, and jumped in and brought her in. And that was an amazing moment for me because it brought a lot of attention to me nationally. It occurred just after an event where some reporters had filmed a woman who’d set herself on fire. I ended up as this young guy amongst professional reporters in this national debate of right or wrong if the press intervenes. I wasn’t prepared for it. I realized how woefully unprepared I was to suddenly be launched into the profession of journalism.

I was just finding myself. So at the peak of that I said, “You know what? I need to go find myself.” So I ended up doing a couple of odd things, working for my father’s company for a little bit. And then I said, “I need to get back to university. My passion is in something,” and I knew it was science. I knew it was probably geology, but I didn’t have it then.

I went — to get my grades back up — to a tiny little place called East Georgia College. And there I met another group of those incredibly precious people, people who had chosen to go to one of these small colleges to teach. And there I met a geologist who just exploded the world of fossils that were all around me. I had no idea in the place that I lived, this low country, of what was around me. I met these passionate English professors and mathematicians. My grades, of course, rocked because it wasn’t “work” anymore. I stayed there for a brief period, got my grades back, went down to Georgia Southern University because it was the only place I could afford. You know, I was on my own on this one. I had had my scholarship chance. And I walked into another place that was just full of these rare, passionate academics and scientists. I had by that time read a book that fundamentally changed my life, and it was Lucy. I actually stole it from the library at this college. I couldn’t put it down.

Lucy was the famous early hominid fossil specimen discovered by Donald Johanson. How much time elapsed after the discovery of Lucy, before you discovered the book?

Lee Berger: Lucy was discovered middle 1970s. This book was written in the early ’80s. And my — this adventure was about ’87, ’88, ’89 that that was occurring. I actually took this book from the library. I did eventually pay the fine and put it back. I couldn’t let it down. I couldn’t. I had found the thing, and there was one line in there that struck me: when Don (Johanson), who would eventually become a great friend and mentor of mine, said that these early hominid fossils are effectively the rarest sought-after objects on earth. There’s something like a one-in-ten million chance of finding one. And I had just before then been thinking of becoming a dinosaur paleontologist or something. And that line so intrigued me, because the first thought that came in my mind was not, “Gee, who would want to go into a field of science where you had no chance of finding something?” But, “There’s a field that you can make a difference with even the smallest discovery.” I wanted to make a difference, so I began pursuing that.

I registered at Georgia Southern, I started doing a degree in archaeology. I did a degree in geology, because I realized that if you want to be a paleoanthropologist — and I just learned that term effectively — that you needed these skills, and particularly if you wanted to be in the field. And through a series of things that happened that were very both coincidental and I manufactured, I ended up meeting Don, and he liked me. We hit it off very well. He invited me to go work with him as a geological assistant at Olduvai Gorge. I was graduating, but I was graduating offline, so I was making my graduate school applications, but I was not going to be in the normal system because I had not entered on the same time as a normal student. So I was about to get my dream fulfilled to go to Africa. And two months before we were to depart for Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, he calls me and he says, “Lee, it’s not going to happen. I’ve lost my permit.” I was devastated. For some reason Don took pity on me, with all the problems he was having, and he contacted Richard Leakey, who was involved with the Harvard University Koobi Fora field school at his research station in Northern Kenya. And they accepted me into this program.

I ended up landing — last-minute entry into this program, went through all the orientation — ended up at Koobi Fora in Kenya. My first morning there I couldn’t sleep. Here I was. These are the fossil fields of Africa! I woke up early — all the rest of the students stay asleep — and I walked in. I saw a light on in the small encampment, in the middle — right on the edge of Lake Turkana — in the middle of Africa. And there I met a man, John Kimengich, one of Richard Leakey’s fossil hunters. And he had chatted to me for a moment. He was having tea. It was probably 4:30 in the morning. He said, “You want to go look for fossils with me? I’m going out now.” I said, “Of course.” The next several hours he taught me how to find these anomalies, how to see these things. And as we’re walking about to the Land Rover — 11:00 in the morning, it gets too hot to work — hundred meters from the Land Rover, I look down, and there was a piece of a femur, this leg bone of an early hominid. I found my first hominid — one-in-ten million chance — my first day! It was completely like — I was hooked!

Did you immediately know what it was?

Lee Berger: I did. I had worked very hard to give myself the skills of comparative anatomy and understanding human morphology. Once I’d found it, I had done nothing but dedicate myself to this sort of pursuit.

What were the chances?

Lee Berger: One in ten million, according to Don!

Donald Johanson is a member of the Academy of Achievement; his interview is part of our archive. It might be interesting to talk a little bit about his discovery of Lucy, and why his discovery was so important, and how that fired you up.

Lee Berger: Don Johanson’s discovery of Lucy is important in the history of this field of science in a great many ways. And something that has actually, with these recent discoveries, tied me intimately to him forever. Lucy was the first skeleton. People who aren’t in this sort of field do not understand that we are a science of scraps. We are a science of fragments. These are potentially the rarest sought-after objects on earth, and there are just little pieces of them that we have to build this record. Those skulls you see in National Geographic and on television, they are rare beyond belief. There are literally just a few dozen. None are complete. Most of the record is made up of isolated teeth, maybe 80-plus, 90 percent of the record. The post-cranial elements from the head down are made of fragments. For most of them we don’t have a complete one. And Lucy was the first time we had the remains of the head of an individual with its body, even part of it. It was a transformational moment. Suddenly we were building not as much guesswork. When you’ve just got a piece, you could be accused — and potentially rightfully so — of a lot of reconstruction. There she was. It was huge in our field. They are so rare as to almost be beyond belief. By the time I made this recent discovery, there had still been only perhaps seven partial skeletons ever discovered in the history of the early hominid: Lucy being one; the Turkana Boy discovered by Richard Leakey. There had been Little Foot in South Africa, still not excavated from the ground. The remainders are so fragmentary they don’t even have names or numbers. I mean, we’re talking little tiny things. One little baby called the Dikika Child. I mean, tiny fragments, but they are the most precious things we have. So it is interesting that the two people that have been very important to me — Don Johanson and then Richard Leakey — in my early career, who guided me, were both the finders of skeletons. And I’ve of course joined them with this. But with this incredibly privileged abundance that’s happened with discoveries in Malapa.

Going back to that first day in Kenya when you found the femur, was there any sense of disbelief among your fellow students about that?

Lee Berger: You know, I think that when you look at the idea of disbelief, with here we come back, the first bit, with a bit of a femur, everyone’s jealous of things and stuff like that. But there was — most people at that age are just thrilled when exciting things happen, no matter who does it or who gets it. We tend to only wear ourselves out of our sense of communal joy at success when we get a little bit older. But you know, it was — and not everyone on that field school was going to be a paleontologist. In fact, almost none of them were. They were there for the experience. I was there to be a field paleoanthropologist. So I don’t think there was that much of a hint of jealousy or anything. It was generally enormously exciting. Our field school had found a hominid. That a big deal, because not all of them did.

For somebody who has never studied this field, how would you describe, to a lay person, what makes it so exciting?

Lee Berger: It’s a very simple answer. Why are people interested in human evolution, and where we come from? Every single person is interested to know who their parents are, who your grandparents are, who your great-grandparents are. Genealogy websites — and that work — are hugely popular. Why? The reason is because every human being on this planet at some point realizes that the people who they descend from in the past carry traits and behaviors that are now part of them. And as we try to understand ourselves as humans — something only humans can do — we explore our inner selves. We’re looking for causality, reason. We want to know not only why we look physically like this, but — often the more important — why we behave like this. Well, people like me just do that in the deep depths of time. These bones that we’re finding are of individuals that lay somewhere in our deep family tree. They’re teaching us, when we look at their behavior, when we examine their physical being, when we learn about the environments they lived in, and how they interacted, and how certain aspects of them evolved, we’re learning about us. But not just me, selfishly, or you, but about every living human being on this planet. What’s not to be interested in?

How important is it for scientists or science students to know how to speak about their work to a lay audience?

Lee Berger: We do a funny thing in modern academia, as we train the future generation of scientists. We teach them to do research from day one. It’s the priority. They get a research lab. It’s all we do. We teach them the right papers. We teach them to do statistics. We teach them to analyze data, to think scientifically, which will form about ten percent of what they actually do in their daily lives. The other 90 percent will be communication, either with students, or other colleagues, or with the public out there. We’re educators in many ways. We are the communicators of science, and we never teach them to do it, and we should. Every single person who goes into science should be taught to communicate. To communicate with their colleagues in civilized and dignified manners, but to communicate with the public, because this is for the public that we do this. This is for the people of the world. And then the other thing which we don’t teach them is the principle of exploration. We don’t give them the tools to be adventurous. Whether they’re going to be adventurous in the lab, or whether they’re going to be out there looking for whatever it is they’re looking for in any field of science, we don’t actually teach them those skills. We don’t teach them how to fix a tire. The things I learned in scouting or 4H in rural Georgia. We don’t teach them how to not be killed by a large dangerous animal, or to cross a country border with a passport, or to understand the geology that sits around them, whether they’re studying chemistry, plants, or animals. It’s the Earth that these things live on. We don’t teach those things, and we need to do that too.

So they won’t be so narrow in their thinking?

Lee Berger: It’s not about narrow. It’s about the idea that we need to open our eyes. We need to remove “backyard syndrome.” Backyard syndrome is something a lot of people don’t think about, but it’s critically important that we get rid of it, no matter what you’re in — science or business.

If I ask you to draw your background — or substitute your living room or bedroom or kitchen — right now, or I asked you to draw this room — look around and then leave this room and draw — you draw this room more accurately than you would draw any of those things you’re most familiar with. And the reason is that you would amalgamate them into a kind of an idealized vision of what they looked like over however long you’ve encountered them. A year, ten years, whatever it is. You’re not seeing them. That’s the way our brains work. It protects us from the world by graying what we’re most familiar with. We only notice when major change takes place. That’s what happened with me with Malapa. My own backyard — all of paleoanthropology’s own backyard — the most explored area on Planet Earth — had this thing sitting right at — why? Because we knew it couldn’t be there. We had a predetermined idea of what sites were going to look like, and we knew this area had been explored. We have to erase backyard syndrome in everything we do as human beings.

That’s really about thinking creatively, isn’t it?

Lee Berger: It about thinking creatively. It’s also about constantly reminding you of the character flaws of the way we work as animals. Reminding yourself all the time, “What am I not seeing?” And then preparing you to see anomalies. That takes knowledge, because you must educate yourself to know what’s normal before you can identify what is abnormal.

Are you trying to do that with your students?

Lee Berger displays the cranium of Malapa hominin 1, the first specimen of Australopithecus sediba to be excavated at Malapa. (Photo by Brett Eloff, courtesy of Lee Berger and the University of the Witwatersrand)

Lee Berger: I absolutely am. I’ve just written a children’s book called The Skull in the Rock, about the process of this discovery. Because for me, no matter what the end result of this is, as we go through the next decades — hundreds of years — of scientific analysis of these incredible remains, and the ones that we’ve yet to find and the ones we’ll find in other sites, it’s the process that I went through that is almost more important. Because it’s the process of science, but it’s also the process of exploration. And I wrote a kid’s book before I wrote an adult book because it felt like the right thing to do. Sometimes adults won’t listen. Secondly, children’s writing is approaching adult writing very, very rapidly as we move into this incredible next phase of education, where kids read the most amazing things and think like adults. And thirdly, because I’d never done it before. I want to challenge myself to write to an audience that needs to understand this message maybe more so than grownups do. Maybe grownups already think they’ve got it figured out.

What do you see your son Matthew doing in 10-20 years?

Lee Berger: Matthew says he wants to be a paleoanthropologist. My daughter wants to maybe go in conservation, be the next Jane Goodall, Sylvia Earle, or work with animals in some way. But both of them want to go into some fields of science. But they’re both young. They have every opportunity to do anything they want. This is their generation, their moment. They’ve been involved in a discovery that proves there’s so much more out there.

What do you think is the next great frontier in this area of science?

Lee Berger: The application of technology to discover what’s all around us already that we’re not seeing.

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

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