JOHN HAWKS
NEAR JOHANNESBURG, 2016
“You want to see something interesting?”
After working with Lee Berger for a couple of years, I was no longer easily surprised. When enough hominin fossil discoveries take you in unexpected directions, you learn to go with the flow.
This morning’s little field trip had started like many others, a predawn drive from Johannesburg out to the Cradle, the mid-July winter sunrise just hitting us as we left the northern outskirts of the city. We were heading out with Kevin Hand, a friend of Lee’s and a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Kevin had given a guest lecture the day before. Beating the traffic gave some time for breakfast, and we talked about the discoveries of the past few years before heading out to the field.
On most excursions like this, Malapa is the star of the program. The Nash trust had renamed the expansive property the Malapa Nature Reserve, and it was always an enjoyable excursion, driving out over the grassland with its stock of animals, Lee’s Jeep bouncing over the rocky trails and splashing through the stream at the bottom of the valley. Now that a protective structure had been completed, crouching impressively over the little site, archaeologists were resuming their work, clearing and surveying the ground surface around the breccia deposit. The team had already made new discoveries—fossils embedded in blocks of breccia that had been blasted clear of the site or used to fill the miners’ track. Soon they would be excavating new blocks to recover the rest of the first two sediba skeletons, and we expected to find additional pieces of hominin individuals that a few new fragments promised. Those discoveries would take time to prepare out of the breccia, and Lee had arranged a preparation lab at the Maropeng visitors center—20 miles away—to allow people to watch the process as preparators scribed these new fossils out of the blocks of breccia. From the CT scans of the blocks, we knew some of the fossils that the team would soon see, and we planned to let some of them remain in their rocky prisons, waiting for future technology that might uncover new secrets. Still, every time we walked around the site, we wondered what unexpected discoveries might remain in the rock.
From the outside, the Rising Star site is much less impressive than Malapa—an eaten-down horse pasture and an unimpressive cave opening. Without donning caving gear and descending, visitors cannot see anything but the entrance cut into the dolomite hillside. Lee’s foundation had started work to purchase the property and place it in a public interest trust, protecting the site forever, but the hard work of rehabilitating the property and establishing a proper field station remained in the future. The area around the cave wasn’t as pretty as Malapa, but it had a hold on me. I had as good an idea as anyone alive what waited here deep underground, and with all I knew, I still couldn’t answer the most interesting questions.
Lee pulled his Jeep off the road at a different spot, however—not Malapa and not the Rising Star opening I thought we were going to see. “I want to stop off and look at this new site the guys found,” he said. “Here, take a flashlight.”
A few minutes of walking brought us to the solid rock edge of a deep pit with steeply sloped walls and trees growing up from the bottom. In the far wall of the pit was a dark opening with the look of a miner’s old work.
“I can’t believe I didn’t see this before,” Lee said as he led us down the steep incline. I paused to find a footing, gripping a sapling as I skidded down the moss-covered rock. The pit was like an ancient amphitheater, its floor littered with fractured limestone and breccia, with an enormous boulder seemingly suspended in mid-slide. Tree roots snaked along the face of the rock as we moved farther down. Along one face, we moved next to a solid breccia wall flecked with cross sections of fossil bones. Kevin followed Lee closely, but I dawdled, my attention fixed on the wall. Any one of those fossils might be the next discovery, I thought. After all, how many expert anatomists had come down this same slope?
Well, I knew one, and he was striding ahead of me.
Lee stopped at the cave entrance, pulling a flashlight from a pouch at his hip and flicking it on. He led us into the darkness. Inside, the walls opened into an enormous cavern. We studied the walls carefully, breccia deposits covering some of them. We made our way around an enormous debris pile left behind after the mining activity—huge chunks of dolomite blasted from the ceiling. Lee’s path trended to the opposite side of the cavern, where a shaft of daylight came from the cave roof above. Kevin and I fanned out, studying the cave walls and beaming our flashlights into every corner.
As I scanned the darkness, my mind wandered over all that had happened during the past few years. Sediba had brought me to South Africa to work, and then I was caught up in the Rising Star expedition. I became involved because these discoveries were changing the science. The sediba fossils made us all realize that there was new evidence of our evolution out there, waiting for us to find it. Rising Star fulfilled that promise, the largest hominin discovery in Africa and a new species at that, hidden within one of the most explored regions in the world. Who knows what will come next?
So now here I was, shining a light into the dark vastness of this uncharted cave.
“You want to look at this?” Lee stood within the beam of sunlight, smiling and holding out a fist-size rock. As I came closer, I didn’t see anything all that obviously special about it. Had he found a stone core left behind by some ancient toolmakers?
I took the rock from his outstretched hands, carefully turning it over to inspect it. Two teeth caught my eye, each the size of a nickel. The bone of the jaw that contained them was light cream in color, strong and robustly built, perfectly in proportion for the large teeth. I glanced up at Lee, who simply stood watching me examine the ancient hominin jaw, an amused look on his face.
I said what we were all thinking: “Here we go again.”