10

By early October 2008, I had begun to amass quite the collection of fossils as Matthew’s child skeleton—as I had come to think of it—continued to grow. My research group was now so small that I didn’t even have a lab anymore, so half of my office became a makeshift hominin laboratory. I covered a heavy circular oak table in velvet, to cushion the fragile fossils, and it became my workbench. I moved a small safe into the corner of the room to hold the fossils and protect them at night.

I named the U.W. 88 site Malapa—“my home” in the southern African language of Sesotho. A fitting name, I thought, not only because Sesotho is widely spoken in the region but also because it is the second language, after English, of Wits University. I made plans for the excavation, deciding where to put a survey beacon so that we could map the site and contextualize the finds. Soon we were ready to excavate the Malapa fossils.

First, there were the blocks on the ground that had been displaced by the miners. We had to map and transport them to the makeshift lab. We plotted the position of the large block with the humerus and scapula and then pried it loose from the wall, lifting it from the pit using sheer muscle and then transporting it back to the lab for preparation.

Each morning, I visited the fossil prep lab to see what had emerged the previous evening. I was now employing five of the Bernard Price Institute preparators after hours, and the growing hominin skeleton had the staff of both institutes abuzz. Day by day, it was exciting to see the fossils emerge. Bone by bone, the small skeleton took shape as each new piece was added.

First, the mandible was completely prepared out, followed by the small fragment of chin and canine. Then came parts of the upper limb, and some vertebrae were discovered. Eventually, the preparators found half the pelvis, its low, broad shape showing that, indeed, like other hominins, this was a biped. The femur, found on that day in September, began the building of the lower leg. Toe bones and rib fragments followed. After a while, the little skeleton was becoming as close to complete as the famous Lucy skeleton, although without any parts of the skull besides the jawbone. Despite this absence of a head, it was a beautiful thing to behold.

The first jawbone recovered from the Malapa site, after preparation

Next Charlton started on the large block containing the humerus and scapula. A day of preparation revealed my mistake in thinking that these parts belonged to Matthew’s skeleton: The bones of little children originally form as several parts, connected to each other by thin plates of cartilage. When the bone reaches adult size, the growth plates finally fuse. Hence, a bone that has completely fused, like the humerus that I was seeing in this block of breccia, must have come from an adult. I had already known another individual must be there—the two teeth that had fallen into my hand were from an adult. Now we were finding other adult bones here as well.

To be fair, expecting a second skeleton from this tiny site seemed preposterous. In the entire history of paleoanthropology in Africa, never before had two skeletons been found together in close proximity. There had been assemblages of bones from several individuals found together at a handful of Rift Valley sites and in southern Africa—the most famous probably AL 333, the “First Family” from Hadar, which had fragments of bone from many individuals of Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis. But nowhere had two nearly complete skeletons been found, right together, in such a small site.

Here, it was definitive: Malapa held two skeletons, both growing before our eyes. As Charlton continued to prepare the block, it became clear that this second skeleton was in fantastic condition. An entire articulated arm began to emerge from the rock. Could there be a hand at the end of the arm? We would have to wait and see.

As I sat in my office, looking at that skeleton laid out on my desk the very next day, I pondered the way forward. How was I going to do this work? I obviously couldn’t proceed alone. The science was too specialized, and there was so much to do. It would take a team of experts to understand these skeletons and the site where we had found them.

I thought about the history of discoveries of such skeletons. During the 1970s and 1980s, the teams who discovered fossils tended to publish their first research in a matter of months. The famous Lucy skeleton was discovered in November 1974, and 16 months later, Donald Johanson and Maurice Taieb had published a short description of it. Richard Leakey’s team had discovered their most complete find, the famous “Turkana Boy” skeleton, in 1984 and published a first description of the find the very next year. There had been much more research to do on these fossils, which continued for years afterward, but the early tradition had been to carry out the basic scientific description of such discoveries quickly. After all, back in the very beginning of African paleoanthropology, Raymond Dart had published his description of the Taung Child only months after he freed its face from the rock.

But now, in the early 2000s, a new model of how to do science had taken hold. Instead of publishing finds quickly, some of the biggest players in paleoanthropology had been keeping their discoveries close to the vest for many years. Everyone in the field knew that Tim White and his small research team had discovered a partial skeleton of the early fossil species Ardipithecus ramidus in the mid-1990s, but since then, White had shared nothing in public about the skeleton’s anatomy other than a few cryptic comments. (That team would eventually publish their research on the anatomy of the skeleton in 2009.) Little Foot research was following the same slow release schedule as “Ardi,” it seemed, as well. Little Foot had been discovered at Sterkfontein in 1997, and now, nearly a dozen years later, no one outside that group really knew what progress had been made. These discoveries had been extremely challenging for their teams to preserve and prepare. Each team had certainly wanted to do the best possible work on them. Maybe years of study in relative secrecy were really necessary for them to understand and carefully describe what they had found. That was impossible for me to know. What was obvious was that these more recent examples were not alone; other research teams had adopted similar practices.

Malapa, too, would be challenging to prepare, every piece requiring dozens of hours of work. It would surely take years to fully understand the site and recover all the hominin material that must be there. Would it be better to wait until I had a whole skeleton, or even both of them, before publishing? Almost every day, something new was coming out of the rock, and it didn’t look like it was going to stop.

Back in 2003, when I had written so strongly in defense of opening access to the South African fossil hominins, I had suffered for it. My strongest critics said that I was “giving away” the hard-won discoveries made by others. That certainly wasn’t true about the discoveries from Malapa. Looking at the fossils, thinking about the hours of work each one represented, I knew I had to go with my instincts. I could not keep them closed off from other scientists for years.

Nor could I do it alone. I needed a team.

PAUL DIRKS AND I had collaborated well during the years I had been exploring the Cradle, and I wanted him to lead the geological work. Steve Churchill had been working with me on projects since we had met while both of us were finishing our Ph.D. research. We had recently worked together on the Palau expedition, co-writing the descriptions of that skeletal material. One of the world’s leading experts on the postcranial skeleton—the bones of the body beneath the skull—Steve was the logical choice to lead that part of the work. I also knew I wanted Darryl de Ruiter to be involved. Darryl had come to South Africa from Canada in the mid-1990s, first as an undergraduate volunteer and then as a Ph.D. student of mine. In the past several years he had worked extensively on the skulls and teeth of South African hominins. I trusted Darryl and knew he would be up to the task of describing this mandible and the two adult teeth.

I sent Steve and Darryl an email on October 11, 2008, pictures attached, entitled simply “Hominids.”

Their excited replies came back within hours. Looking at the pictures of the mandible, both of them shared a first impression. It looked like an australopith, maybe even a robust one. I knew that first impressions, and pictures, could be misleading, and I hadn’t attached a scale. But their minds had gone to work right away, shaping their first thoughts on how to tackle the problem. It wasn’t so bad a guess—so far, in the Cradle, australopiths were exactly what we expected to find. Both of their opinions would change over the next weeks as they examined the pictures sent to them, and they became more and more convinced that the little mandible was something special.

At about this same time, Peter Schmid, another longtime colleague and friend, called from Zurich. Peter and I had run field schools together, and now he wanted to know if I would be interested in another. His students had loved working in South Africa and were interested in a return to Gladysvale.

I interrupted him, “There is something you need to see.”

Two weeks later, Peter was in my office, looking skeptically at the table where I had draped a cloth over the little lumps of fossil, hiding the skeleton from view.

Peter is what one would call an “old school” comparative anatomist. Although he is a jovial fellow who loves to joke, he is deadly serious about his science, and his expression told me that he expected little from what I was going to show him. He told me later that he had been expecting a scrappy little clavicle and a few teeth.

Mischievously enjoying the moment, I reached under the cloth—without lifting it—to pull out the original clavicle that Matthew had found. Peter raised his eyebrows as he handled the small fossil.

“It’s fantastic!” he exclaimed.

As I mentioned before, expectations in paleoanthropology run pretty low.

The second fossil I pulled out was the mandible. Peter’s face took on an owl-like expression.

“My God,” he uttered.

I just smiled as he carefully examined the specimen.

Turning it over in his hand, he said, “The teeth are so small.”

I nodded and remained silent. I was eager to hear if his impressions matched with those I had been formulating over the last weeks and months.

“It looks Homo-like.”

I nodded again, though I added, “Except for the dental proportions. They’re primitive.”

What I meant was that the teeth had a size pattern different from modern humans. In most people today, the first molar—closest to the front of the mouth—is the largest one. They get smaller as they go farther back in the mouth. The Malapa mandible was the opposite—its back teeth were larger.

“That is australopith-like,” Peter agreed.

“There’s more,” I said. I pulled out a fragment of the humerus, and then the ulna. Peter was dumbstruck as he held first one, then the other of these specimens. To put him out of his misery, I carefully removed the cloth covering the rest of the remains.

Cursing was becoming fairly common in the presence of these fossils in those days.

“Wait until you see the second one,” I said, after Peter had recovered.

“There’s another one?!” He looked at me as if I were mad.

WITH A SMALL CORE team identified, I plotted the way forward. I would need preparators, and that meant money. Malapa was unquestionably a full-time project.

In November, I received a visit from Albert van Jaarsveld, then vice president and managing director of the National Research Foundation of South Africa, the central government funding agency for science. After seeing the skeleton laid out on my desk, he immediately committed emergency funds that would keep the project going for about six months and allow me to hire and begin training my own preparators. His visit was followed by trustees from PAST. They, too, put forward significant emergency funds for the project.

I needed excellent preparators, and I knew I had to build my own team of experts. Celeste Yates, a boisterous South African and a preparator renowned for her patience and skills, was available. I immediately enlisted her to begin working on some of the material.

In those months of late 2008 and early 2009, while I had my whole attention on the fossils from Malapa, the university was merging divisions into a sort of “superinstitute” of paleosciences. In early January a large workshop took place at the university, with guest scientists working to describe the fossil postcranial bones recovered from Sterkfontein over more than 30 years. That work was to culminate in a book-length description of the bones. I thought it was a bad idea, and said so. The idea of producing a monograph seemed so out of date and the science seemed poorly timed. The Little Foot skeleton was obviously important to understanding the Sterkfontein bones, but it was not yet accessible for study. Human evolution is a comparative science, and it was becoming clear that the new fossils from Malapa would be important for understanding Sterkfontein, too. With participants who had little attachment to our university, the workshop seemed like a data-mining exercise with little benefit to South African science. My concerns fell on deaf ears.

So the workshop unfolded without my participation, but I had my hands full with a stream of new discoveries and all the work they required. I took a drive out to Malapa to clear my head. As I stood there above the pit, I put everything else aside. I had enough to do.