CHAPTER SEVEN
SEDIBA: TBD (TO BE DETERMINED)
Dad, I found a fossil!”
On August 15, 2008, nine-year-old Matthew Berger tagged along with his father, paleoanthropologist Dr. Lee Berger, on a field project in Malapa Nature Reserve in northern South Africa. The project was part of efforts to explore and map out known fossil sites and caves in the reserve, about forty kilometers north of Johannesburg. While puttering around the reserve with his dog, Tau, Matthew discovered what he knew to be some kind of fossil sticking out of a dark brown chunk of breccia rock. At first glance, the senior Berger thought that the fossil was simply a piece of a very, very old antelope—a common fossil in the area.
He picked up the block of rock containing the fossil and looked more closely, and realized that what he was looking at was a clavicle—a collarbone—of a hominin. He flipped the block over and saw a lower jaw encased in the same piece of breccia. “I couldn’t believe it,” Dr. Berger giddily recalled in a New York Times interview. “I took the rock, and I turned it [and] sticking out of the back of the rock was a mandible with a tooth, a canine, sticking out. And I almost died. What are the odds?”1
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In April 2010, the fossils Matthew and his dad’s team discovered in excavations from Malapa were published in Science as a new fossil hominin species called Australopithecus sediba. Although the paleoanthropological community was basically in agreement that the fossils were truly spectacular specimens, the scientific name proved to be a somewhat controversial taxonomic assignment because the fossils showed primitive apelike traits as well as derived, or Homo-like, characteristics. (Many researchers argued that the anatomy of Sediba would be better ascribed to the genus Homo, not to Australopithecus.) The publication of the fossils was accompanied by numerous opinion pieces arguing about the best taxonomic status for the fossil—from Science to Nature to National Geographic to the New York Times.
Regardless of its taxonomy, to date, the Malapa site was undeniably a significant fossil locale, having yielded over 220 bone fragments that, when put together, can boast a total of six skeletons: a juvenile male, an adult female, an adult male, and three infants that all lived around 1.9 million to 2 million years ago. When the fossil species was described in 2010, it was—and still is—tremendously exciting not only because Sediba lived during a time when both australopith species and early Homo roamed the greater African landscapes together, but also because the fossils were from multiple individuals with incredible archaeological provenience. These fossils represented an interesting time in our evolutionary history and constituted a sample of the species that was greater than just one individual—which, in turn, helps paleoanthropologists understand variation within fossil species.
Over the twentieth century, little did more to shape paleoanthropology’s emerging identity as its own scientific discipline than the fossil hominin discoveries from Europe, Africa, and Asia. Every new discovery inherently carried a certain prestige because the fossil discoveries offered the basis for creating hypotheses and explanations about what could be observed in the fossil record—new fossils could make or break definitions of species, and every new discovery had the potential to rewrite the family tree. New fossils were imbued with social prestige in their original contexts—either accepted as ancestrally significant, like Peking Man, or dismissed, like the Taung Child.
As more and more fossil discoveries have entered the scientific record over the course of the last century, fossil collections are simply not as sparse as they were in earlier decades. (There are, for example, over four hundred Neanderthal individuals represented in the fossil record so far, compared with the very few specimens of the nineteenth century.) So, where does this leave twenty-first-century fossil discoveries? What would a famous fossil look like today? Flo and Homo floresiensis gave us one type of modern celebrity—contentious little hobbit that she is. The discovery of Sediba raised other questions: What historical patterns could or would other fossil discoveries follow? What historical patterns would they follow? What cultural expectations—and what scientific questions—would twenty-first-century fossils now need be required to answer to?
“The dolomitic cave deposits of South Africa have yielded arguably the richest record of both hominin and mammalian evolution in Africa. Fossils were first recognized in these deposits in the early 20th century, but it was the discovery of the Taung child skull from the Buxton Limeworks in 1924 that led to the recognition of the importance of these cave sites,” Berger explained in a guide to the fossils and history of the Malapa region.2 Part of the reason that the Malapa specimens could catapult so quickly into the paleo limelight was due to the incredible paleoanthropological history associated with the Malapa—Sediba’s success is contingent, in no small part, upon the fossils’ South African legacy.
But Sediba’s renown is also a product of the fossil being in the right place at the right time and with a person to champion it, all the while pushing for a change in the paradigm of how paleoanthropology collects data and generates hypotheses. If the historical parallels are any indication, the life and afterlife of a fossil are made and remade by its contexts; its lasting celebrity is created over decades. While Sediba’s initial life history certainly sets it up to be The Next Big Thing, it’s not a foregone conclusion that a century from now it will still carry the same distinction it has today.
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The year 2010 was a great one for studies in human evolution: two major new hominin discoveries entered the scientific record. These new fossils were both members of the genus Australopithecus, around two million years old. Although both were significant in terms of broadening our understanding of hominin evolutionary history, the two fossils have had very different lives after their discoveries. As similar as the fossils appear at first glance, they actually couldn’t be more different. One was from South Africa, the other from Ethiopia; one was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the other in Science. One was an Australopithecus afarensis—like Lucy—and the other was the new species, Australopithecus sediba. One was a discovery of a partially complete single skeleton, and the other featured multiple individuals. One was discovered during a routine field season by a veteran member of an international research team, and the other by a nine-year-old boy and his dog. The one, Kadanuumuu, has languished in scientific journals as a rather unknown hominin specimen to the public, while the other, Sediba, has gone on to wide international acclaim. Both are unquestionably significant to the field of paleoanthropology, but the cultural lives of these fossils are as separate as their evolutionary trajectories.
But why? What makes one fossil famous and not another? Why did one capture public and scientific attention and the other not?
The short answer is easy: context. Not only did the fossils come from different geological contexts—Kadanuumuu from East Africa’s Rift Valley and Sediba from northern South Africa’s limestone caves—but, more important for our purposes, the two sets of fossils inherited their own context for the history of their science, their own research traditions, and their own regional histories of how fossil discoveries are written into the story of human evolution. These differences came to speak volumes in how the fossils are studied and how they are immortalized.
The longer answer is, of course, more complicated. As with many famous fossils—Piltdown, Peking Man, Lucy—scientific significance is certainly one reason for fame and celebrity, but it is not the only reason. Paleoanthropology is a science punctuated by discovery and built by the fossils that it finds. Fossils capture scientific and public imaginations as new discoveries fill media headlines and Twitter feeds. These two fossil discoveries play out as brilliant cultural foils for each other—they are such recent discoveries that their initial conditions are easily compared and contrasted. From the same starting point—the same year of publication—they tell two different stories, giving audiences what-if scenarios for how twenty-first-century fossils enter scientific and social circles.
On his most basic level, Kadanuumuu—or “Big Man,” as he is affectionately called by the research team—is a partially complete skeleton assigned to the species Australopithecus afarensis and designated by field catalog number KSD-VP-1/1, dating to 3.5 million years ago. The first element of the partial fossil skeleton discovered was the proximal part of an ulna—the part of the forearm that makes the elbow joint—on February 10, 2005, by Ato Alemayehu Asfaw, an established member of the international team of paleoanthropologists. In addition to the ulna, the rest of the Kadanuumuu skeletal materials were published five years after its initial discovery in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a respected top-tier scientific publication. The article’s authors represented an international team, with members from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Kent State University, Case Western Reserve University, Addis Ababa University, and Berkeley Geochronology Center.
In their publication, the authors noted that the fossil was “extraordinary” because the discovery expanded the knowledge base of Australopithecus afarensis. Most significant was the information it provided on how the species walked. In the decades since her discovery, there have been extensive debates about the exact nature of Lucy’s bipedality; sure, she could walk upright on two legs, but just how much of her time was she bipedal, and how efficiently did she walk? How much was she like us? With the skeletal elements recovered, Kadanuumuu was able to refine and answer questions that focused on how the afarensis species would have moved.
Kadanuumuu also sported a complete scapula—part of the shoulder—which meant that scientists could examine if and how Australopithecus afarensis moved in trees and how it could have moved its shoulders. In an interview with Nature, scientists offered their take on why this new information was significant. “This new skeleton shows a fully running and walking biped, with most of the adaptations we have,” said team member Dr. Owen Lovejoy, a paleoanthropologist at Kent State University. “What we see in the new skeleton’s pelvis is what we see in modern humans,” added the article’s lead author, Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Science writer Rex Dalton described the discovery this way: “A hominid species made famous by the ‘Lucy’ fossil from Ethiopia could walk down a runway just like a fashion model today, a newly reported partial skeleton shows.”3
Even in Kadanuumuu’s original publication, he lived in Lucy’s shadow. The team referred directly to Lucy in the second sentence of the article’s abstract, and the article’s photograph of Kadanuumuu is the classic allusion of Lucy’s iconic portrait—bones laid out in anatomical position against a black background. Where Kadanuumuu’s “official portrait” suggests Lucy, it also subtly highlights the differences between the skeletons. Lucy has some skull fragments and a jaw in addition to her long bones—so it’s easy to mentally fill in the parts that are missing, or at least grasp how she could have been a living entity. Headless Horseman–like, Kadanuumuu has no crania and only one leg. In other words, with certain skeletal elements, like a skull, it’s easier to anthropomorphize certain fossil specimens; the easier to anthropomorphize, the easier to create a character that people will identify with.4
Portrait of Kadanuumuu, Australopithecus afarensis, published in 2010. (Yohannes Haile-Selassie and Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Used with permission)
Even at his press release, the official description of Kadanuumuu relied heavily on the audience’s familiarity with Lucy. “The new skeleton comes from the Rift Valley in the central Afar of Ethiopia, about 330 kilometres northeast of Addis Ababa,” Dalton noted. “Found in 2005 . . . a long day’s walk north of Hadar where Lucy was discovered . . . the skeleton is estimated to be nearly 2 metres tall. Lucy was just over 1 metre tall.”5 A short 2010 piece in National Geographic titled “‘Lucy’ Kin Pushes Back Evolution of Upright Walking” supplies similar information about Kadanuumuu’s morphology and skeleton, but once again defines the fossil against Lucy. A 2015 study that examined the question of sexual dimorphism—the physical differences between males and females of the same Australopithecus afarensis species—again juxtaposed Kadanuumuu with Lucy. This would be expected given how significant Lucy is—but what really undercut Kadanuumuu was the study’s emphasis on Lucy. Her name was first in the study’s title, weighting the better-known fossil over the newer, less-studied one.6 The Kadanuumuu fossils expanded the details of how we think about a fossil species—especially how we think about interspecies variation and the nuances of locomotion for Australopithecus afarensis hominins. But for all the emphasis on the fossil’s bipedality, culturally speaking, Kadanuumuu has trouble standing on his own two feet.
Why? Because Kadanuumuu is a semicomplete Australopithecus afarensis whose origin story is fairly de rigueur for paleoanthropology. There isn’t anything about the fossil, its discovery, its science, or its museum life that really jumps out and grabs audiences—nothing that revises the hominin phylogenetic tree or that inspires an entirely new canon of scientific inquiry. Kadanuumuu does not represent a new species or a new archetype. He doesn’t represent a new set of questions to paleoanthropology and he doesn’t highlight really new methodologies.
Kadanuumuu is a fossil—much like Turkana Boy or Mrs. Ples—that, perhaps, will jingle some note of recognition in audiences, but will quickly fade. (Mrs. Ples is the adult Australopithecus africanus discovered in Sterkfontein, near Taung, by Robert Broom in 1947 that substantiated the Taung Child. Turkana Boy is a Homo ergaster specimen found by Richard Leakey near Lake Turkana in Kenya. Both are important discoveries in the history of paleoanthropology, but simply haven’t risen to the celebrity strata of other fossils.) Kadanuumuu, like Mrs. Ples, props up other fossils. On the off chance that Lucy’s luminous essence might diminish, Kadanuumuu is right there, ready to lend the little cachet that it has to offer; Kadanuumuu exists as a secondary character to Lucy—a member of the Australopithecus afarensis supporting cast, her understudy. It’s as if Kadanuumuu is a bit player that you sort of recognize on TV, but it takes three clicks on Wikipedia to remind yourself why you recognize the actor. It’s difficult to become a celebrity fossil living in Lucy’s shadow. It’s important to note that not all researchers necessarily want fossils to become famous; decent, respectable, significant science can and certainly does come from fossils that never quite crack into popular imagination by either chance or choice.
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Sediba is a fossil of a different sort, and the story of his social celebrity is completely different from Kadanuumuu’s. First off, one of the huge differences between Sediba and Kadanuumuu is in the fossils’ names—both culturally and scientifically. Australopithecus sediba bucks the trend of famous fossils colloquially known through popular nicknames. While most famous discoveries rely heavily on the cultural staying power of a nickname—Lucy, the Taung Child, the hobbit—having a strong nickname is by no means a necessary step to celebrity. (Other fossils—Piltdown Man, Peking Man—are certainly simply informal shorthands for the fossil. Davidson Black even suggested calling the first hominin from Zhoukoudian “Nelly” to combat what he saw as explicit sexism by referring to particular hominin discoveries as “man.”) This isn’t for lack of trying for a cute name, though, as a nickname helps a fossil better connect to its public.
A press release issued by the University of the Witwatersrand in 2010, just after the formal publication of the discovery, raised the issue of a nickname and suggested that the fossil ought to have one. “The site continues to be explored and without a doubt there are more groundbreaking discoveries to come forth,” the article reads. “In celebration of this find, the children of South Africa have been invited to develop a common name for the juvenile skeleton.”7 The skeleton, which is type specimen MH1, was eventually named “Karabo” (“The Answer”) by Omphemetse Keepile, a seventeen-year-old student from Johannesburg. In The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins—a National Geographic children’s book by Lee Berger and Marc Aronson—the Sediba skeleton is named Karabo, but that name is never used as a persona or shorthand for the fossil, indicative, perhaps, of how the nickname doesn’t seem to have struck a chord. The fossils are known colloquially as Sediba instead.
Sediba is, of course, a shortened form of the fossils’ taxonomic assignment Australopithecus sediba. The specimens are also referred to by their catalog numbers—MH1 and MH2—or, collectively, as the Malapa hominins. In keeping with paleoanthropology’s emerging twenty-first-century tradition of tying fossil names to local languages, the word sediba comes from South Africa’s Sotho language. “Sediba, which means natural spring, fountain or wellspring in Sotho, one of the 11 official languages of South Africa, was deemed an appropriate name for a species that might be the point from which the genus Homo arises,” remarked Berger. “I believe that this is a good candidate for being the transitional species between the southern African ape-man Australopithecus africanus (like the Taung Child and Mrs. Ples) and either Homo habilis or even a direct ancestor of Homo erectus (like Turkana Boy, Java man or Peking man).”8 Tying its name to its region of discovery, Sediba triangulates the geography, taxonomy, and evolutionary narrative that are implied through its scientific name, Australopithecus sediba.
The fossils were undeniably something new for paleoanthropology, but their discovery was, perhaps, not completely unexpected given their geological provenience. The Malapa cave site is part of an area of northern South Africa called the Cradle of Humankind, designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in December 1999. The Cradle is part of a large geologic complex of limestone caves, approximately 7,000 hectares or about 180 square miles in size. For close to one hundred years, the Cradle has continually yielded new fossils and new species that pique paleoanthropology’s curiosity and offer unique possibilities for teasing apart and putting together an evolutionary narrative.
“Hominins are represented in the South African cave sites by over 1,000 catalogued specimens from more than 11 different cave deposits. . . . At least four and possibly more species of early hominin are found in the South African cave sites,” Lee Berger offers in his Working and Guiding in the Cradle of Humankind. Again, since the geological contexts between East and South Africa are so different, they offer different patterns for fossil discovery and offer evidence for different time periods and geographic places in humanity’s evolutionary story. “While the hominin fossils from South Africa are not nearly as old as the oldest hominin sites in East Africa (East African fossil hominins [like Lucy] may date back over six million years while those in South Africa are probably all less than three million years in age), the South African examples are important because they are almost always more complete and are found in the presence of a much greater range of vertebrates. They are therefore able to tell us a lot about the period in which they lived.”9
One thing that sets the Malapa specimens apart from other fossils was the quick turnaround time between discovery and publication. While Kadanuumuu’s publication was a very respectable five years after its discovery, Australopithecus sediba was published just two years after the discovery of the fossils. The initial 2010 Science publication, titled “Australopithecus sediba: A New Species of Homo-like Australopith from South Africa,” was simply a warm-up exercise for the marathon of articles that Berger and his team would publish in the next half decade. In 2011 alone the Sediba team published five in-depth articles about the fossil in a special issue of Science, each article tackling a different anatomical element (pelvis, ankle joint, etc.) and one on the process to assign a geological date to the fossil.
People were charmed by the species—even its detractors and naysayers. As a fossil species, Sediba represents an interesting suite of anatomical characteristics. It has long arms, short powerful hands, a very advanced pelvis, and long legs. This mix of anatomical characteristics made it capable of striding, possibly even running, like a human. It is also likely that Sediba could have climbed. “It is estimated that they were both about 1.27 metres, although the child would certainly have grown taller. The female probably weighed about 33 kilograms and the child about 27 kilograms at the time of his death,” added Berger. “The brain size of the juvenile was between 420 and 450 cubic centimetres, which is small (when compared to the human brain of about 1,200 to 1,600 cubic centimetres) but the shape of the brain seems to be more advanced than that of australopithecines.”10
“These fossils and many others are landmark discoveries in paleoanthropology, finds that have filled crucial gaps in scientists’ understanding of human origins. They are all vitally important. And yet the A. sediba fossils manage to stand out from even this elite crowd, because of the sheer volume and quality of information they contain,” argued science writer Kate Wong in Scientific American. “The finds from Malapa tick pretty much all the boxes on a paleoanthropologist’s wish list. Specimens that preserve multiple skeletal elements? Check. Remains of multiple, coeval individuals (important for understanding variation within a species)? Check. Fossils in near-pristine condition, thus eliminating uncertainties about how pieces fit together? Geological context that allows for precision dating of the fossils? Associated plant and animals remains? Check, check, check.”11
Wong’s informal checklist offers several key points to begin to understand why Sediba has been culturally fast-tracked along its way to famous fossil status. However, simply marking off anatomic features and a successful archaeological context cannot, by themselves, generate a famous fossil. A famous fossil is more than simply the sum of its skeletal elements and more than the significance of its context; a successful celebrity fossil manages to gain traction outside of scientific circles and maintain a cultural persona. Lucy was the first mostly complete skeleton to enter the paleoanthropological record, but it was how her skeleton was used, viewed, studied, and written about that helped push her into a cultural context and give her a public persona. Sediba benefits from being the right fossil in the right time with the right discovery story and a scientist to champion it. Certain elements of its story have historical allusions to the Taung Child’s discovery, and it benefits from a team savvy enough to leverage that history.
In many ways, the open, public access that is associated with the Malapa assemblage makes Sediba a very accessible fossil—both inside the scientific community and outside it. It’s easy to talk about the Malapa specimens because it’s easy to access them through publications, images, scans, and casts. “Many reviews of palaeontological research end with the statement that it would be highly desirable to recover more fossils. In this case, however, the Malapa team has already done that,” argues paleoanthropologist Fred Spoor. “The interpretation of their findings may be a matter of debate, but they have undoubtedly added a spectacular and thought-provoking sample to the hominin fossil record. This achievement represents a major contribution to the study of human evolution in all its complexity.”12
The question of fossil access is raised over and over in paleoanthropology. “The fossils are owned by the people of South Africa, and curated by the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,” the original Sediba press release read. “They will be on public display at Maropeng in the Cradle of Humankind until the 18th of April 2010, will move to Cape Town for the launch of Palaeo-Sciences Week from the 19th of April and will again be on public display at the Wits Origins Centre during May, on dates to be announced shortly.”13 Not only were the fossils on display immediately following their publication, but casts of the fossils have been working their way through museum, popular, and scientific circles.
Berger’s commitment to transparency and access goes beyond simply displaying the fossils or casts. When the Malapa fossils were being excavated from their breccia, Berger was quick to point out that he wanted to make the entire excavation available online and have nonexperts be able to interact with the scientists. In a 2012 interview with National Geographic, Berger’s enthusiasm for the social life of the fossils was practically contagious: “The world is going to be able to watch and interact live as we expose this discovery. There’s also the possibility that we have two bodies that are intertwined [in the rock]. Part of the fun of this project is that as soon as we find out, the world will find out with us.”14
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Ever since the fossil was published, it’s been very approachable, thanks to the outreach efforts of Berger and his team. Images of Sediba have flooded the Internet, and the fossil shows up everywhere, from scientific publications to museum exhibits to Wikipedia pages—the photographs, formal headshots, and snapped candid field shots help to tell a very visual story of Sediba, particularly the photo of the Malapa discovery itself, which is a candid shot of young Matthew Berger showing off the fossil while it’s still in its breccia matrix. The photo has popped up everywhere from the Malapa site’s Wikipedia page to articles in Nature to museum exhibits in Cape Town’s Iziko Museum.
Matthew Berger and the Sediba fossil, still in matrix, at the Malapa Nature Reserve. (Lee Berger; CC-BY-SA-3.0)
Sediba’s images, through photographs, casts, or reconstructions, are incorporated into a variety of public settings. Since the Malapa specimens are inexorably tied to the Cradle of Humankind, they feature prominently in the Cradle’s visitors’ centers.
As a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Cradle is heavily marketed in South Africa as a paleotourist destination. Its main visitor center is Maropeng, opened December 7, 2005, by then president Thabo Mbeki. Anthropologically, Maropeng offers visitors an opportunity to explore the region’s fossils and human evolution as a whole. Architecturally, the building is covered in grass, rising like a gigantic gnome house out of the stark South African landscape. For the paleoadventurous, the Maropeng center offers a boat trip through the “Tunnel of Time,” where visitors comfortably float from the Cretaceous to the Pleistocene, passing through landscapes full of recorded pterodactyl screams and eventually tooling around Pleistocene volcanoes and ice floes; the Disney-esque boat ride ends at the Hall of Human Origins, which showcases hominins from around the world. All of the “rock star” fossils, from Lucy to Taung to Neanderthals to the Malapa fossils, are featured. At Maropeng and other Cradle museums, Sediba manages to move from a strictly scientific object to tourist ephemera—small 3-D-printed Sediba skulls are sold in gift stores as necklaces and key rings. It’s easy to know about Sediba because Sediba is right there, ready to be known through casts, photos, tourist trinkets, and museum exhibits.
Even in more formal scientific settings, the images of Sediba have dominated over those of other fossils. Take the cover of Science. With its full-page picture and specialized typography, the journal’s cover conveys intellectual gravitas and scientific legitimacy, and has for decades. Ever since Science introduced a picture as part of its cover in 1959, the publication has featured a plethora of images, from thin-section slides and meteorological phenomena to pollen spores and technical instruments. Sediba has graced the cover of Science three times since 2010, a feat unmatched by any scientific discovery in such a short amount of time—and unmatched, in fact, by any other fossil in the history of the journal’s publication.
Only nine covers in over fifty years have featured hominin fossils. The first cover was fairly recent: a June 1998 cover showcased a color illustration of the two- and three-dimensional computer imaging of the endocranial capacity of Stw 505, an adult Australopithecus africanus. An August 1999 cover showed the forelimb bones and jaw of a partial skeleton (Equatorius), a very old specimen from a site at Kipsaraman, Kenya. The March 2, 2001, cover gave faces to the 1.7-million-year-old male and female hominins from Dmanisi, Georgia. The rather recently discovered fossil Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed Ardi, graced the cover twice in rather quick succession, in October and December 2009.
Unprecedented in Science’s history, Australopithecus sediba was on the cover, on April 9, 2010, September 9, 2011, and April 12, 2013, each cover showing Sediba in different poses: one with the skull, one with Sediba’s hand, and the final one a fully reconstructed skeleton with the left hand slightly extended, almost inviting the reader to join him. (The most recent paleo-related cover to date, October 18, 2013, was a photo of a 1.77-million-year-old complete adult skull from Dmanisi, designated as early Homo.) Each of these covers conveys the importance of the fossil discovery. Framed enlargements of Sediba’s Science covers hang in the hall of the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand—like an agency proudly showcasing headshots of its successful models.
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I had the opportunity to meet the Sediba fossils in person one summer at the University of the Witwatersrand. From the university’s archives building, I hiked across campus to the Evolutionary Studies Institute located in the Palaeosciences Centre. Dr. Lee Berger cheerfully spent a morning chatting about the Malapa project, the history of paleoanthropology research in the Cradle of Humankind, and the nature of celebrity fossils. The laboratory space itself is arranged to study all sorts of fossils—not just Sediba. Long benches offer space for researchers to examine fossils, both casts and the real ones; screen savers jogged across monitors attached to computers crunching data; students and postdocs chatted about their various research projects. That June morning, the hum of conversation and activity filled the sunny lab room. It was impossible to see the Malapa fossils and not conclude that they were enjoying their well-won status in the paleoanthropological world.
A giant vault for fossils stood at one end of the lab. As Berger deftly entered the combination, he talked about what he saw as the amazing, still unexplored potential for South Africa to contribute to big questions in paleoanthropology. (His insistence on this point was justified. In October 2013, he and a team of researchers began excavating the Rising Star Cave, which produced over 1,200 hominin bone fragments; subsequent excavations in April 2014 yielded 1,724 hominin fragments. The initial publication, in September 2015, described the hominins as a new species, Homo naledi.)15 During my visit to the Witwatersrand lab, Berger pulled out the cases that held the Malapa fossils and set them on one of the laboratory tables. A colleague of his, Dr. Steven Churchill, wandered over to join us. Berger opened the crates and we peered down at the famous Sediba specimens. Big bones, smaller bones, even some miniscule bone fragments. Each fossil was carefully nestled into its own foam insert, and every insert was labeled with the specimen’s catalog number.
A large scanner stood off in the corner, and Berger pointed out how the team had used the machine to scan parts of the roughly excavated fossil matrix from Malapa. Since large chunks of calcite breccia rock, infused with fossils, had been excavated from Malapa, the finer grain extraction of the fossils from the rocks happens at the lab. With the help of the scanner, scientists are able to get an idea about what is inside the breccia chunk before cutting into it, helping to better preserve the fossils.
Berger talked through each of the skeletal elements, highlighting different anatomical features and comparing them to other hominins, with Churchill occasionally interjecting or offering an observation. (Jokingly, Berger asked whether I, as a historian, was able to predict whether fossils could or would become famous.) From his discussion, it was beyond clear that he was completely committed to making the fossils available for study, whether through the originals or through casts. The passion for the new fossils—especially since they represented the discovery of a new species—was palpable. But even more profound was the sense that the project was different because the science going on around them was somehow different. Or at least, the science around the fossils was being done differently.
For a good chunk of its history, paleoanthropology has been a field dominated by precious few fossils and an implied hierarchy of knowledge based on access to those few fossils. Controlling who can look at what fossils and when has been a means of controlling what scientific and social narratives dominate the field. On a very broad scale, knowledge about human evolution is created by studies about the fossils—measurements, comparisons, statistical analyses; ipso facto, whoever controls fossils controls the production of the field’s knowledge. This can mean either gatekeeping (keeping out the cranks) or guarding (preventing dissenting voices). Access cuts both ways.
Berger and his team, tired and even disgusted by the problem of access to fossils, have vowed to not let that happen with the Sediba specimens. “The way Berger and his collaborators are studying the finds and disseminating what they learn represents a real departure from the cloak-and-dagger manner in which paleoanthropological investigations often proceed,” Kate Wong argued. “Berger has assembled a huge team of specialists to work on the remains and has made the project open access, with a policy of granting permission to any paleoanthropologist who asks to see the original fossils. He has also sent out scores of replicas to institutions around the world, and routinely brings casts of the bones—even ones that his team has yet to formally describe—to professional meetings to share with other researchers. This can only improve the quality of the science that comes out of the project and may well inspire other teams to be more forthcoming with their own data.”16
There is palpable excitement over this “change” and what it means for the field. But this eagerness about the Sediba fossils raises the question of what change in a scientific field like paleoanthropology looks like, how to make sense of it, and what kind of results are reasonable to expect from changes to the way scientific knowledge is produced. Because that’s what’s really at stake here with fossils like Sediba—a challenge to the paradigm that knowledge must be produced from the top down, once access to fossils has been granted.
The question of change in science is certainly well explored and well studied in the history and philosophy of science. When looking at change in science on a grand scale, we see that the big idea-based changes happen as part of what historian of science Thomas Kuhn called scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts. Other philosophers and historians of science, particularly in the decades after Kuhn, argue that changes happen additively, slowly and over time—where new ideas and methods propagate almost evolutionarily, where research can be understood as a series of research problems, and where each problem is solved in order of its significance or importance to the field.
Here, in the first part of the twenty-first century, paleoanthropology has all the markers for huge changes within its discipline, and these changes are reflected in how newly discovered hominins are studied. Just as Taung illustrated historical shifts in paleoanthropological theory, fossils recovered from the Malapa site—and the subsequent Rising Star Expedition—can help us to consider new intellectual trends in methodology of the discipline, like publishing the fossils in a way that is accessible to a broader audience or even posting 3-D scans of the fossils themselves, inviting others, including nonexperts, to participate in the science-making process.
The Sediba fossils, in fact, represent a very clear change in how paleoanthropology opts to create knowledge but not necessarily engage with new research questions. They represent change in science thanks to tools for studying fossils, rather than big ideas. Where some, like Kuhn, assumed that new big ideas were the primary drivers of scientific change, others suggest that new tools and new methodologies are more apt drivers for change at the turn of the twenty-first century. This is definitely the kind of scientific change that Sediba represents: namely, paleoknowledge being generated from new methodologies (like new casting technologies or 3-D scanning and printing), and new approaches to fossil access, such as publishing in a timely manner and with easy, open access to fossils. These differences underscore the differences between Sediba and Kadanuumuu.
Excavation projects at Malapa and elsewhere in the Cradle seem to be modeling the process of creating knowledge after other “big sciences.” In other sciences, such as biochemistry and physics, discoveries cannot be undertaken by a single person or research institute, as data sets are too large and experiments too complex. In paleoanthropology, recent changes include: increased access to fossils, accessibility of data, a transparency of methods, technology of casting and 3-D printing and dissemination, timely publications, and a public engagement. These new characteristics would seem to be a broad call for the discipline to reconsider how it “does science.” The Rising Star Expedition, for example, was a direct outgrowth of the paleo fame and fortune imbued by the successes of Malapa and Sediba; we see people looking to create knowledge from a broader cohort of scientists, providing access to fossils, drawing on a variety of expertise, and offering transparency and accessibility to nonexperts (via blogs and Twitter) in how the processes of science work. The hope is to involve more people in the process of scientific knowledge making and to have that process be more transparent.
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Sediba is a curious celebrity fossil, in part because its story is so recent and is thus still unfolding. If we build the Sediba fossil through comparison and contrast—particularly compared with Kadanuumuu—it’s easy to see the impact that the initial conditions of the fossil’s public and scientific life play a significant role. But one of the most interesting aspects of the fossil—perhaps part of the draw of it—is that almost every element of what makes a fossil famous can be found in Sediba, even with its relatively short postdiscovery life.
In an interesting twist, both lead authors—Yohannes Haile-Selassie and Lee Berger—have leveraged their fossil discoveries published in 2010 into additional discoveries. Haile-Selassie was the lead author on an article that described a completely new australopith species, Australopithecus deyiremeda, in May 2015, while Berger was the lead on the 2013 Rising Star Expedition, which began excavations at another cave not far from Malapa.17 It’s as if 2010 repeated itself in 2015: one discovery was famous—Homo naledi’s press releases and the tour of its fossils have saturated science media—and the other not so much. The contrasts sharpen the question of how much different types of discoveries are made famous by their stories and surrounding contexts. Are Berger and his team simply successfully using social media—live-Tweeting excavations and carefully maintaining comprehensive Wikipedia pages—where other discoveries are not? Or is one more famous through happy accidents of its context?
Within scientific circles, Sediba has been interpreted as a potential ancestor for the Homo genus; the species’ morphology represents some apelike and some humanlike characteristics, which harkens back to many historical phylogenetic debates—Taung, Lucy, even the Old Man of La Chapelle. Sediba is also able to invoke these other narratives and other aspects of celebrity fossils. It’s as if one were to take the best parts of the lives of Taung Child, the Old Man of La Chapelle, Peking Man, and Lucy and distill them into a single set of specimens. (The only famous fossil story that Sediba doesn’t tie into is Piltdown and, it goes without saying, that’s just as well.) With so many types of famous fossil discoveries in paleoanthropology’s history, it becomes very easy to talk about new discovery in terms of how it compares with older ones. “What [Berger] has shown in South Africa is that when you work with the government to open access to things, that has huge benefits for the country,” paleoanthropologist Dr. John Hawks suggests. “The amount of attention South Africa has gotten for Sediba is more than any other country got since Lucy. Such positive attention is hard to come by.”18
A fossil like Sediba has all the “right” elements to continue on its trajectory to paleocelebrity. On one hand, Sediba’s contribution to paleoanthropology is obvious—as a new fossil species in a complex evolutionary time in the hominin family tree, the fossils are well positioned to be studied for decades by countless researchers. On the other hand—on a more subtle level—Sediba is also well positioned to challenge the social worldview, the mechanical “doing” of science that serves as the basis of paleoanthropology as a scientific discipline. Kate Wong notes, “The strategy has paid off. Researchers have flocked to South Africa in droves to check out the remains, Berger’s research team has grown to include more than 80 members, and within just a few years of getting the bones out of the ground the team has already published a raft of high-profile scientific papers, with more in the pipeline.”19
Sediba’s story continues to unfold, much like Flo’s and other very recent discoveries. But Sediba’s story also asks a lot of questions about the process of creating scientific knowledge that other fossils do not. It’s apparent that Sediba has cultural cachet in spades. The next hundred years will determine just what kind of celebrity Sediba has to offer—it’s still To Be Determined—but for the Malapa fossils, their celebrity feels imminent.