25

On the second-to-last day on-site, I pulled Rick and Steven aside. I hadn’t forgotten my promise to them about their second possible find, the thighbone they had seen in another part of the cave. Now that the expedition had successfully worked through the field season, it was time to investigate.

“OK,” I said, “take Marina and Becca and go get that bone. But I want a complete map and lots of photos before you collect it.”

They were off like a flash.

Two hours later, I sat on a rock at the edge of the entrance to the cave. In my hands was the proximal end of a hominin femur, very much the same in appearance as the top end of the thighbone we had recovered from the Chamber where we had worked the past three weeks. But this bone came from another location entirely—a new chamber in an entirely different direction through the underground labyrinth, as they described it. At a place near the entrance, where a hard left would go toward the Dragon’s Back chamber some 60 meters away, they had instead taken a right down a sloping passage. This new chamber seemed to have no relation to the chamber where we had originally found fossils. They were more than 100 meters apart underground, separated by long, twisting passages. The first chamber was site 101 within the Wits fossil-numbering system, and for three weeks as we cataloged fossils we had given each a number starting with 101. This new chamber would be site 102.

I couldn’t believe it. Another collection of fossil hominins in the same cave system? I looked up, taking in the wide grins on their four faces. I asked the inevitable question, “Was there anything else with this?”

“A skull,” was Marina’s answer. Our work had just begun.

TWENTY-ONE DAYS AFTER SETTING foot at Rising Star, this team of scientists, students, and volunteers had accomplished something remarkable. Together we had recovered more than 1,300 individually numbered fossil hominin remains, an unprecedented haul by any standard, far exceeding the number discovered at any single site in Africa.

We had accomplished all this in an effort put together in only four weeks, with a team of top scientists, avid cavers, and eager students. Working in one of the most inhospitable environments any paleoanth​ropological expedition had ever attempted, we ended the expedition without a single serious injury.

We had planned the expedition to recover a single hominin skeleton and document its context. What we found was more than anyone had dreamed possible. We had found at least one example of nearly every bone in the body. For most bones, we had multiple copies from different individuals. Among the most numerous parts were teeth, and our assessment of the teeth and jaws that had come out of the site made clear that we had at least a dozen individuals with some very young infants, at least one very old adult, and every age category in between. Yet with all these hominin bones, the only other animal remains we found were six bones from a bird and a handful of rodent teeth. No one had ever discovered a site like this.

And there were more. Everywhere in the Chamber, our team could see bones—there must be thousands still in the sediments. As much as we wanted to continue, though, we couldn’t excavate any longer. Funding was exhausted, but even more important, we needed to start the scientific study of the remains to see what we were dealing with. We needed to learn more about the fossils we had so that we could make smart decisions about how to learn more from those that still remained in the site. I had never been more proud of a team of individuals, but it was time to go home.

Furthermore, the word had gone out around the world on social media, and people were asking us the same questions we were asking ourselves. What species were we looking at? How did all those bones get into this dangerous, remote chamber? And how old were they? It would be our job over the coming months to answer these questions.

How does one set about studying such an enormous haul of fossil hominins? I sat in my office back at Wits, the fossils safely stored in a number of safes, and talked about this and other problems with John Hawks after the expedition. “I want to do something radical,” I said to him.

“What do you have in mind?” he asked.

“You remember what we talked about before the expedition?”

John nodded. “You mean getting young people here to study the fossils? The more I think about the idea, the more I like it. But when we were talking about that, we were only going to have one skeleton to deal with. Now we’re talking about an order of magnitude more fossils than you had with sediba. Nobody’s ever examined this many hominin fossils all at once.”

I smiled and nodded. “That makes it even more important. If we get the right young people, with the right data sets, we can do right by these new fossils and transform the field.”

“That’s for sure,” said John. “There are so many talented people out there who are never going to get a chance to work on new fossils like these. Many of them will go on to different kinds of work, the opportunities are so scarce.”

“I think it is the ultimate win-win,” I said. “People who have just finished their Ph.D. research have been using the newest techniques in their research. We can deliver research with the highest impact, and we’re in a position to do it in short order. We just have to get the people together.”

“Well, you know I’m in. Finding the right people and getting them together is the kind of challenge I like,” John said with a smile.

That afternoon, I called up Albert van Jaarsveld. He had approved emergency funding from the South African National Research Foundation back in 2008 to kick-start the Malapa program of research. Now I was back again, hat in hand, to find a way to fund the analysis of the Rising Star fossils.

“I want to run a symposium,” I explained. “I want to engage early career scientists, in combination with the existing sediba team, to study the Rising Star finds.”

Albert thought about this for a moment as I waited patiently on the other end of the line for his response. “Can you call it a workshop?” he asked.

“Sure!” I said, smiling into the telephone. “I can call it anything you want!”

In early January, I posted another message on Facebook.

The University of the Witwatersrand, through the Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences and the Evolutionary Studies Institute, will be holding a unique workshop to study and describe recently discovered fossil early hominin material for a series of high-impact publications. It is intended that the workshop will be held in South Africa from early May until the first week of June 2014.

We are seeking early career scientists with data and skill sets applicable to the study of any part of the anatomy of early hominins. Participants must be willing to share these data and skills in a collaborative workshop designed to study, describe, and publish these important hominin fossils.

The intent of the workshop is to give a unique opportunity to early career scientists to participate in the primary description of African early hominin material. Applicants must be able to attend the entirety of the workshop. Successful applicants will have all travel and accommodation costs covered; be given access to existing comparative fossils, modern material, and all data sets; and receive mentoring throughout the process from senior established scientists.

Output will include authorship on at least one high-impact paper as well as continued collaboration and authorship on future research to which he/she contributes. Interested applicants should submit their CVs, a brief summary of their skills or data sets that would be applicable to such a project (not to exceed 1,500 words), and three letters of support from established scientists in the field.

In short order we received applications from more than 150 scientists, each one bringing a different set of expertise to bear. Consulting with several of the sediba scientists and squeezing the funding as much as possible, we were able to select more than 30 young scientists to participate in the workshop. They would all come to Johannesburg in early May 2014 and spend five weeks together to work on the fossils firsthand.

IN THE MEANTIME, THERE was one more thing that I couldn’t take care of alone. When we ended the expedition in November, we knew that we were only touching the very surface of what was left within the 101 Chamber. That wasn’t just an expression. As we ended excavation work on the last day, the underground team had exposed the teeth of an upper jaw—a maxilla. We could see it there in the video feeds, slowly emerging from the sediment as they worked on it that last afternoon—at first just the teeth, then the lower part of the face. The thin bones of the face are so fragile that we didn’t dare rush, and this maxilla lay within the Puzzle Box, so that as team members worked slowly downward, they exposed yet other bones that overlay part of it. There was no helping the situation. We weren’t sure how complete this face might be, and the clock had run out. For its safety, we left it in place.

In March 2014, I invited Becca and Marina back to Rising Star to bring that maxilla out of the cave. If we wanted the best chance of understanding the anatomy of the face, we needed to retrieve it before our team began to analyze the fossils.

As they worked to remove it, they found just beneath it many more fragments of the skull and the complete jawbone. The upper and lower jaws fit together perfectly—the upper teeth had been worn down exactly where they had been in contact with the lower teeth in the living individual.

Matching upper and lower jaw from the Rising Star cave

Here, just inches below the surface, the bones were incredibly well preserved. In November, the team had uncovered an ankle and part of a foot in anatomical position, articulated with each other. That indicated that the leg had been deposited in the site with soft tissue holding the bones together. Up to that point, we had been working on a jumble of bones, missing many of the most fragile parts. But now, Marina and Becca were finding thin pieces of bone—the jawbone of a young child, for example. They uncovered some finger bones and slowly exposed what turned out to be a complete, articulated hand. It lay within the sediment in a death grip—fingers curled—and lacked only one tiny bone of the wrist. It was the most complete hand of a fossil hominin ever discovered. A nearly complete foot was there as well, and several partial feet, hands, and other articulated parts.

The two weeks of work in March recovered another 300 or so specimens, but they were among the most impressively complete remains that we had found so far. They would play a key role when the workshop assembled in May to study the fossils.