6

By 1996, I was well established as a young academic. I was 31 years old. I had been teaching human anatomy to medical students for years. I had found fossil hominins in the field, and I had done some good science on those finds in the laboratory. I had a strong publication record and had found ways to fund and support my work. Promoted to senior research officer and director of paleoanthropology, I became responsible for the precious collection of fossil hominins held in Wits’s vault. I thus took over the role and responsibilities Phillip Tobias had held for decades.

A generational shift was happening. Younger scientists were introducing technology and new ways of thinking into our profession. My generation was more collaborative by nature, perhaps driven by our familiarity with computers and the Internet, and I was beginning to explore how to broaden the study of these fossils in our vault and encourage more open access.

Both my more senior colleagues and the university urged caution. On my appointment, the deputy vice chancellor of research called me into his office to give me these words of advice. “Lee,” I remember him saying, “you have a good publication record, but you have too many collaborators. What you need are more single-authored papers. Those are all you will ever be judged on.” For his generation, great science arose from years of lone research or at the most work in small collaborative teams.

I had other ideas. The fact is, my generation approached science differently. For us, new research depended on specialized technology, and no single person could learn all the methods now available to answer the most interesting questions. We could do better science by working together, sharing information and sharing credit. People could collaborate over vast distances, sometimes without ever meeting in person. The Internet was changing the nature of science, enabling publications to appear faster. At the same time, universities and administrators were expecting higher and higher production. We were on the edge of the “publish or perish” cliff, still judged by individual output, even though our productivity was higher when we collaborated.

Collaboration posed a special problem for young paleo​anthropo​logists. The older generation of fossil discoverers could sometimes feel like an exclusive club, and as the new director in charge of the fossil remains, it was as if I had been given a key to the clubhouse. But I represented a generation that didn’t just want the keys to the club; we wanted to open the doors to everyone. We were impatient for a faster pace of discovery and science, and sought collaborations with larger and larger groups of experts outside the traditional schools of thought. My instincts for such open collaboration would lead me into conflict with members of my mentor’s generation.

IN THE MEANTIME, I got busy. I worked to describe a series of footprints dated to just under 120,000 years ago, found at a place called Langebaan Lagoon, near Cape Town. I hypothesized that they were the oldest known footprints made by a modern human. I described some fossil hominin remains from Saldanha Bay, north up the coast from Cape Town, that I had uncovered back in 1993. I conducted studies to try to understand how the behavior of animals like leopards and hyenas affected the accumulation of bones in caves. And I kept on excavating and operating field schools at Gladysvale, working with Peter Schmid, from the University of Zurich in Switzerland, and later with my longtime friend, Steve Churchill, from Duke University.

In 1997, the National Geographic Society awarded me its first Research and Exploration Prize, recognizing me for “outstanding contributions to the increase of geographic knowledge through his accomplishments in the field of palaeoanthropology.” This award came with a cash prize, which I used as it was intended: for research and exploration. I put together a three-year-long expedition to search for new fossil sites in southern Africa. I called it the Atlas Project. From 1998 through 2000, my small teams scanned satellite images to spot potential fossil sites and then carried handheld GPS units out in our small fleet of Land Rovers to plot their locations on the ground. There was no Google Earth in those days. Eventually, high-quality satellite images would become available to all over the Internet, but in the 1990s they came at a huge cost, both in dollars and in computer processing power.

We had some pretty good successes. Before we started, we knew of only a few fossil-bearing sites across the dolomitic limestone stretching from Pretoria across the northern rim of the Johannesburg metropolitan area. These included the famous fossil sites of Sterkfontein and Swartkrans—14 sites in all, the result of some 60 years of exploration. During the course of the Atlas Project, we scoured what I thought was every inch of this region, walking hundreds of kilometers over the rugged terrain and inspecting outcrops and clusters of trees for fossil or cave sites. By the end of the project, we had found the entrances to nearly 30 previously unknown caves as well as four new fossil sites on the surface.

We also extended our search to other areas of South Africa and to Botswana, thanks to a letter from the president, Festus Mogae, giving us permission to survey his country. Over those three years, we found many dozens of fossil localities, most in deposits from ancient rivers. We published our results, describing the sites and the fauna we had discovered, and opened up excavations at one of those new sites, a place called Motsetse, on the property next to Gladysvale. Motsetse would turn out to be rich in saber-toothed cat fossils. But in these days, another hominin discovery still eluded me.

During these expeditions, I began experimenting with bringing the science live to the public. With National Geographic, I started an online column called “Outpost: Human Origins @ national​geographic.​com,” which followed my team as we hunted for fossils. We broke new ground as a real-time online chronicle of science for the general public—but we were hamstrung by the technology of the day. I transmitted reports over my satellite phone. Easy photo uploads and ubiquitous Internet access were years away. The Outpost experiment was short-lived, but it gave me the bug. I could see the potential of using the Internet to communicate the thrill of exploration. Later, I would come back to this idea of sharing fieldwork as it happened.

Those were some of the best years of my life. I had a wife and two young children, and a successful career in science. I was exploring, and I was responsible for one of the largest collections of hominin fossils in the world. But looming on the horizon was a nasty fight that would leave me scarred, and paleoanthropology in South Africa in tatters. The next few years would almost end my hope of ever building a strong exploration program or making a major discovery.