24

Four days later, the excavation team was still working on that skull. We had established a work pattern, with two or three excavators in the cave before seven o’clock each morning, a changeover during the late morning, and the last crew coming out of the cave sometime around three o’clock in the afternoon. Despite our high hopes, the work on the skull had stretched on much longer than we had expected. Day after day began with the same word on the briefing board: #Skull.

Friday, though, it looked as if it was really going to happen. The team underground had exposed enough area around the skull that we could begin to understand how the deposit was put together—and bring up the skull.

We were facing an unexpected problem. The fossils were building up quickly, and the Science Tent was running out of room. Most of the bones were extremely well preserved—among the best I had seen at any fossil site. But they were damp, and we needed to allow them to dry very slowly and naturally. If their outer and inner layers dried at different rates, the bones might crack. But this took a lot of space, and space was hard to come by. “There’s another safe,” I mentioned.

“We already filled it,” someone replied. My eyes goggled.

We had solved another problem already. We knew the skull was very fragile. It was the largest element we had yet attempted to bring out of the Chamber, and we worried about how we were going to get it through the Chute safely. Someone found a plastic lunch box: Would it fit through the Chute? Yes. But the skull was curved, and even packed in bubble wrap and foam, it might simply collapse under its own weight. Our solution? A blue plastic cereal bowl, nested inside the lunch box.

Around 2:30 that afternoon, John called down to the team members in the cave. “Look, guys, let’s think about wrapping it up for the day in around a half hour or so,” he said. “I don’t think you’re going to be in a position to get that skull. Let’s get it tomorrow.”

“You know, we’re feeling pretty good down here. Give us another hour or so,” came the reply.

An hour later, John called down to the cave came again. “It’s been an hour, and I need you to be ready to come up—you’ve got quite a climb ahead of you. You can have the first shift tomorrow, if you want, and get the skull then.”

“We’re not coming out of here without this skull,” said Becca.

“Hey, I hear you,” said John. “But it’s time to knock it off for the day.”

The intercom was silent, then Becca’s voice again: “Are you going to come down here and get us?”

That settled it. It really was Skull Day.

In the end, it took more than another hour.

We watched the video feed nervously as Becca and Marina maneuvered the all-important cereal bowl into place. Patience and persistence paid off: The skull was ready to come out of the cave. They lifted and supported the partial skull as if they were moving a sick patient onto the operating table.

Everyone had been waiting for this moment. All cavers and excavators on hand took up stations along the way: at the top of the Dragon’s Back, at the bottom of the ridge, at either end of Superman’s Crawl, down the Ladder, and out the entrance. The skull came up the Chute in its lunch box, and from there, the team operated like a bucket brigade, passing the precious fossil hand to hand through the climbs and squeezes. Aboveground, we watched the progress on the video feeds, seeing the incredible teamwork as the skull moved out the route our teams had taken into the Chamber. Near the entrance, everyone paused to wait for Becca and Marina to catch up, and they emerged together with the skull, triumphant.

It was a great moment, capping off an entire week of great moments. Our team had gradually become aware that something extraordinary was happening. By the end of that remarkable first week, we had recovered more than 200 individual hominin fossils. That was more hominin bones than we had yet recovered from Malapa over the five years of work there. And we were literally just scratching the surface. At that point, we had not yet dug more than three inches deep, and only in an area of the cave floor hardly larger than a couple of dinner plates.

By the end of the second week, the collection had grown to more than 700 remains. That was a special number, because it exceeded the volume of the richest hominin site in Africa, Sterkfontein—a site so close I could see the entrance to its visitors center, just up the valley, from where I sat in the Command Center. Here we were, surrounded by the famous fossil sites of South Africa, where people had explored for fossils more than 70 years, and we had uncovered a site richer than any of the others. It was beyond remarkable.

I had planned the entire expedition to last three weeks. After the recovery of the first skull that Friday, two weeks remained. Some of the scientists and volunteers had to go home, including Steve Churchill, who left reluctantly for an obligation in the States. Others joined us, including Darryl de Ruiter from Texas A&M University, who had been a key member of the sediba team describing the skull, and Scott Williams from New York University, a specialist on vertebrae who had described the sediba spine remains. New members of the caving society joined us, too, and many close friendships formed between scientists and cavers during the three-week expedition.

All in all, it was the best expedition of my life. All continued to run smoothly, with only a couple small incidents, none catastrophic. Alia was injured one day as she came up the Chute, but not too seriously, thank goodness. She needed a few stitches, and I think today she is rather proud of the small scar. Our efforts on social media from the site meant that thousands of people around the world were tracking our team’s progress underground. More and more, teachers were giving their classrooms daily updates, fellow anthropologists were sharing what we were doing, and curious members of the public were reading our expedition blog. People around the world were hearing the voices of our team members, and we all enjoyed sharing our news.

FROM THE FIRST DAYS of excavation, we all had a strong feeling that we were looking at an unusual creature. Those thighbones were like Lucy’s and sediba’s, with long, flat necks and small heads. The molars also looked primitive, getting larger toward the back of the jaw, but all in all the teeth were small, even smaller than sediba’s. And we had never seen anything like that metacarpal for the thumb.

Over the next two weeks, that feeling grew. The first skull was not as complete as we had hoped. As Peter carefully took it from its lunch box and reconstructed it, we could see that the brain was very small, maybe the size of an orange. And we were sad to see none of the face was there. We didn’t need to wait long for more evidence from the skull, though. As the painstaking excavation exposed more of the Puzzle Box area, the team uncovered two more partial jawbones. One of them—the jawbone of a very old individual with teeth worn completely down to their roots—was nested within another partial skull, this one preserving the top of the left eye socket, including a thin browridge sticking out from the forehead. Peter put the pieces of this skull back together, and now we could see the form of the face from the eye around to behind the ear.

I sat in the Science Tent, studying the skull carefully. In profile, the skull looked like a miniature Homo erectus. Its browridge was thin, but separated from the forehead by a groove, and the skull was pinched inward only slightly behind the orbits. I could trace the lines of the jaw muscles on the side of the skull, back from the browridge to an angled, thick area behind the ear. No australopith had features resembling these. Yet the brain that would have been protected within this skull was clearly tiny, even smaller than that of the first skull we had unearthed. No erectus skull had ever been found with a brain so small. Adding further to the mystery, the back of the skull was not long and angled like an erectus skull at all. Instead it curved sharply, almost like the skull of a modern human.

I shook my head in wonder as I held this tiny specimen. I had never seen anything like it.