16

I slid first one booted foot, then the next into the legs of the one-piece overalls. There was just enough room to get my shoes through each leg without making a complete fool of myself by falling over in an unbalanced heap. Pulling the jumpsuit up proved less difficult as I slipped my arms through the sleeves, all under the critical eye of John Dickie, an officer of the caving club. Pedro, Steven, Rick, and a few other members of the club looked on, having already kitted themselves up at what seemed like lightning speed.

It was late at night, four days after Rick, Steven, and Pedro had shown me the photos of the cave. This was the first time both Rick and Steven could be available for a return trip to the site, both having day jobs. Steven was an accountant by day, studying for his professional exams. Rick was a card-carrying member of Mensa who had almost been kicked out of high school due to an incident involving an explosion and a chemistry lab—you cannot make this stuff up—and now moved from one construction job to another. Both Steven and Rick had the sinewy frames that often characterize really great cavers: They were what I often refer to as being “physiologically appropriate” for such work.

Dave Ingold, a wiry septuagenarian and longtime caver, looked me over with a critical eye. I felt like I was being judged in a way I hadn’t experienced since my childhood days competing in livestock shows back in Sylvania, Georgia. “He’ll fit,” Dave said with a grin and then a chuckle.

I raised my eyebrows. I didn’t intend to try the 18-centimeter slot; my head alone was probably too big to fit. But could the route through the cave up to that point be so narrow that they were worried about me fitting? I glanced over at my son, Matthew, who had kitted up as fast as the others. Now 14, he was more than six feet tall and lean, a perfect shape for caving. He smiled back at me, eager to get to the task at hand.

I picked up the backpack containing the high-resolution scientific camera and a variety of photographic scales—standard tools for measuring archaeological finds—and tossed it over to him. Sure that Matt could handle the narrowest slot, I had spent the past four days teaching him how to take a properly scaled scientific picture. The entire point of this evening’s exercise was to get good, scaled photographs of the hominin fossils, and any other fossils that were in the chamber. The last thing I wanted was to push the button on a major expedition for something I wasn’t 100 percent sure about. I also had talked Matt through a strategy to photograph as much of the cave as possible, and to try to identify what fossils were actually there. Having grown up in the fossil business, so to speak, he could do the job I needed done.

As we approached the cave entrance Rick and Steven led us to, I glanced about in the dark, getting my bearings, and tried to remember if I had ever been here before. Only a few hundred meters away was the outline of a hill, with Swartkrans near the crest of the opposite side. I had been there hundreds of times in the past 23 years. A little farther away I could see the lights of the Sterkfontein visitors center. We were right in the heart of the Sterkfontein Valley, the most explored fossil-bearing area on the continent. Standing there, I realized that not only had I been in this area before but in these precise caves, the Rising Star and Empire systems. I had surveyed this farm during the Atlas Project, and not more than 200 meters away was one of the fossil-bearing sites from that expedition.

As we walked up the slight slope of the hill, our headlamps flickering across the uneven ground in front of us, I asked no one in particular questions about the site in advance of entering. “How far in is it?”

“Not too far” was Steven’s unhelpful answer.

“How bad are the squeezes?” Squeezes are the narrowest part of a cave passage, where you literally squeeze your way through narrow choke points of rock. They set the limits on who can enter deeper.

“A bit,” someone else I couldn’t see in the darkness answered.

“And the climbs?” I asked.

“Some,” laughed Rick.

“You’ll fit,” added Pedro, although he chuckled somewhat ominously, too.

I was quickly learning that this group of cavers didn’t speak much, or at least tonight they were going to let me find out for myself. Maybe, I thought, there was a reason for this?

We reached the cave entrance and I scanned the narrow opening with my headlamp. To the left was a black void, a drop-off of unknown depth. To the right, a tree obstructed the route in, forcing us to edge closer to the sheer drop-off. Nice.

Just beyond that danger point was a rock archway that was clearly man-made, perhaps by miners blasting an entrance back in the 19th century. The experienced cavers were already starting down ahead of me. Matt eagerly followed. Slipping on my caving gloves, I followed the group down into the darkness.

Thirty minutes later I was having second thoughts. I found myself pressed into a narrow space. A sharp knob of rock pushed painfully into my ribs. My right arm was stretched out in front of me, my left crammed tightly by my side. My whole vision was filled with cave floor, and tilting my neck up a little rewarded me with a clonk of my helmet on the low ceiling of the passage. I could just see a light ahead at the end of the tunnel and Dave peering back at me, grinning.

“Just a bit more!” he said, a little too cheerfully.

I kicked, my feet stretched behind me, trying to get traction on the slippery mud-coated rock. I was wedged tightly in place and could only move forward with little wriggles, exhaling to make my chest smaller, pushing forward, sticking like a cork with each inhale. This was “Superman’s Crawl,” so named because all but the skinniest cavers had to extend one arm over their head to squeeze through the seven-meter-long passage. With one hand forward, one back by my side, I pushed through, centimeter by centimeter.

A few minutes later, free of the squeeze, I could stand. I brushed some of the wet mud from the front of my overalls, a futile gesture considering the sheer amount of mud and dirt all around. My headlamp’s light played about the faces of those around me, and behind me, Rick slipped out of the crawl as if he had walked through standing up. Matthew followed right behind, grinning and clearly loving this.

“How much farther?” I asked.

“A bit,” came the helpful answer.

But now I could take a moment to look around on this side of Superman’s Crawl. “Fossils,” I said, fingering a glistening baboon tooth that protruded from the wall.

“The walls are covered in them,” Steven agreed, gesturing to another one on the opposite wall—and indeed they were. This chamber alone deserved further investigation, but we were here to see fossils farther on.

“Do we wait on Pedro and the others?” I asked.

Pedro and a few other cavers who were not “physiologically appropriate” to pass through Superman’s Crawl had taken another, longer route, through an area that had a well-known squeeze called “Postbox,” because you slipped through it as if you were a letter dropped into a slot.

“No, they’ll catch up,” answered John as he moved off down a narrow passage. “We have some climbing to do.”

Reaching the base of an old roof collapse, Steven leaped nimbly up onto a jagged edge of rock, leading the way. The whole line of rock pushed upward in a series of large scalelike flat rocks that ascended into the darkness above.

“Up there?” I pointed my headlamp upward into a space so vast, the light failed to reach the ceiling.

“Yup, it’s called the Dragon’s Back,” Steve replied, already meters above me and climbing the wet rock quickly.

I looked over at Dave Ingold and asked how deep we were.

“About 40 meters.”

Matt, Dave, John, and the others quickly followed Steven’s ascent route. Shrugging, I thought, “In for a penny, in for a pound,” as I pulled my body up onto the narrow edge of the Dragon’s Back and began the climb. Already I saw how difficult mounting an expedition in this cave system would be. The whole journey was dangerous. I guessed that we must already have come a hundred meters to get to this point, though it was hard to assess with all the twists and turns of the passages. Getting any sort of equipment in here would be a nightmare. Caves like this often have loose ceilings, as tree roots can penetrate deep and destabilize the rock as they seek water deeper down. Not to mention—I thought to myself as I glanced down the knife-edged Dragon’s Back—a single slip off these rocks, with a fall of what looked to be about a dozen meters or more, might result in serious injury or even death.

The experienced cavers took the Dragon’s Back in safe, measured movements, expertly navigating up the sheer, wet rocks. Matthew did the same, but with the fearlessness of youth. I am not ashamed to admit that I took a bit longer to traverse the 17 meters it took to reach the top of the climb.

At last we were at the top, with only one more obstacle to go. Here one had to step across a gap about a meter wide, the drop below going all the way back down to the floor of the cave 15 meters below. I took the leap over the vertical crevasse, joining the others on a small rock ledge.

“This is it,” Steven said. I pressed myself against the wall behind me and leaned over so that I could peer around him. I would have to crawl on my belly to go any farther. Getting down on my hands and knees, and then flat on my chest, I wriggled into the tight space that Steven had indicated. Rick slithered ahead of me, squeezing himself into what seemed an impossibly small niche at the end of the passage, making room for my approach.

Rick gestured forward with his toes. “That’s it,” he said, as I inched my way forward over the sharp rock.

“You’re kidding,” was my honest response.

Rick was sticking his foot into a vertical slot that looked to be just slightly wider than his boot.

“You’re kidding,” I repeated, looking at the slot in disbelief.

Wriggling forward a bit more, I pressed my face into the fissure and let the light on my helmet shine down into the darkness, illuminating the vertical shaft below. I didn’t think my head would even fit through the narrow opening. Sharp, jagged rocks jutted out into the slot. I looked up at Rick in disbelief, shaking my head in wonder that he and Steven had ever gone down this chute.

“Is this the only way in?” I asked.

A muffled answer, interrupted by grunts, came from somewhere below and behind me. “Looks like it, but we’re trying!” Dave and John were looking for a different way into the fossil chamber, but they weren’t having any success.

All I could say was “OK” as I squeezed my way backward out of the entrance to make way for the others to get through the slot.

I turned my headlamp off to conserve batteries and maneuvered myself onto the small ledge, trying to find a comfortable position. Matthew, Rick, and Steven had descended, and the other cavers had moved farther away in search of other access routes to the chamber below. Silence soon prevailed as I was left in total darkness to contemplate the way forward.

As I sat alone there in the dark, my mind was spinning. Could this really be the kind of paradigm-shifting find I think it might be?

The last four days had been a whirlwind. After Pedro, Rick, and Steven first showed me the pictures from this chamber, I had sat up late thinking about what the discovery might mean. If these were hominin fossils, as inaccessible as this chamber seemed, they were open and exposed to other cavers who might hear about them. We needed to assess the site quickly and work to establish how best to excavate. I had called Terry Garcia, executive vice president for mission programs at National Geographic, and he had agreed to support the work. But before spending so much effort and funding, I needed a second opinion.

The next day, I sent copies of the photos to colleagues I trusted: John Hawks, Darryl de Ruiter, Steve Churchill, and Peter Schmid. Although the four scientists’ opinions varied, all agreed that the fossils represented some kind of primitive hominin, particularly considering the jawbone with its teeth in place. Like me, none of them noted any duplicates among the bones they saw in the photographs. That suggested that the bones might represent a single skeleton—a remarkable find made only a handful of times before, as we all knew. Their observations supported my original impressions, but I needed more than Rick and Steven’s amateur photos before launching a major expedition.

So now, in the dark, facing the reality of this site, I started thinking through the logistical challenges that faced me. If the fossils were what we thought they were, this was going to require a large operation. Just the safety protocols that would have to be put in place to do this work would be immense. And who would carry out the work? I needed people with the expertise to excavate precious fossil hominin material, and the skills and mental attitude—and body size—to get down that narrow chute. I could well imagine that conditions in the chamber itself were even more dangerous than where I was sitting. There would be a danger of CO₂ buildup, collapse, and injury down there. Now that I was in the cave, I could see that there was potential danger along the whole route into the chamber.

I started thinking about the infrastructure I would need for such an expedition, envisioning something like my fellow National Geographic explorers Bob Ballard and James Cameron had used in their undersea expeditions. A series of hardwired cameras and telephones would keep the scientists underground in contact with the surface. That was going to take a lot of cable. Here we must be something like 200 meters into the cave, taking into account all of the twists and turns. The equipment would also need to be waterproof, or at least water-resistant, to survive for any length of time in this wet environment. Caves can be hostile to sensitive electronics, and so the equipment would have to be extremely durable. In my mind’s eye, sitting there alone in the dark, I imagined a command center, with screens and computers, intercoms and other backup communication systems, monitoring and communicating with scientists down below as they excavated the delicate fossils.

Getting fossils out of the chamber was one thing, but that was the final step that could come only after the long scientific process of recording the positions of the fossils in the context where we found them. At Malapa and most other sites, we used laser theodolites—sensitive surveyors’ instruments—to record the location of every artifact and bone with an accuracy of millimeters. Here, I doubted that such equipment would even fit down into the chamber, much less be usable within its narrow, twisted confines. But context of finds is everything in our world of paleoanthropology, and so we would have to solve this problem as well.

Finally, after mulling over these problems, my mind went back to what sort of people I could enlist to do this work, and more important, how I was going to find them. Bob Ballard and James Cameron had the luxury of using robots to descend into the deepest parts of the ocean and explore and retrieve artifacts. Paleoanthropology hadn’t advanced to that stage yet, so I was going to need skilled—and skinny—humans to work at the end of the communications tether I was designing in my head.

All of this was predicated on the notion that these fossils were those of a primitive human relative. I thought they were, but I had only seen Rick and Steven’s first pictures. Crouched there, uncomfortable in the darkness, I could only wait.

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES WENT BY with no sign of Rick, Steven, or Matthew. Occasionally one of the other cavers would come by and chat for a few minutes, before again slipping off to explore. There was still no sign of Pedro. Perhaps he had turned around or found some other part of the system to explore.

A flicker of light came from the narrow shaft. Turning on my own headlamp, I peered eagerly across a meter of space to see who was coming up. With a heave and a grunt, I was relieved to see Matthew haul his shoulders out of the slot. He looked at me, his face smeared with mud but his eyes sparkling brightly. He pushed the backpack that contained the camera toward me as he caught his breath from the climb.

“And?!” I asked impatiently.

“Daddy, it was beautiful!” he said excitedly, “It was so wonderful, my hands were shaking for three minutes before I could take a picture!” He pulled the camera out to show me, smiling as broadly as I have ever seen him smile.

“There’s a lot!” he said excitedly as I started scrolling through the pictures on the back of the camera.

The fossils were everything I had thought they might be. Matt had clear pictures of the mandible. He captured a skull embedded partially in the ground and postcranial remains scattered about on the cave floor. All hominin.

“Basically from the moment you drop down into the chamber, all the way to the end, there are pieces of bone lying about all over the floor,” he said.

I nodded, excited by what he was saying. Rick, then Steven popped out of the shaft and we all shuffled about, trying to make room to fit together on the ledge.

“What do you think?” asked Rick, looking expectantly at me.

“I think we have a lot of work to do” was my answer.