EFR 751: Cave of Bones - A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins with Dr. Lee Berger

0:00:03 - Speaker 1 There we go. Dr Berger, welcome to Ever Forward Radio. I'm so excited to have you here. This is going to be adventure time, to say the least.

0:00:15 - Speaker 2 I think so.

0:00:17 - Speaker 1 I mean, where do I even start? One of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of the year. You have gone through an incredible personal journey of dropping over 50 pounds in pursuit of an amazing discovery that we're going to get into. You have brought your health into the forefront of your profession. You have made a discovery that I didn't even know. This was something yet to be discovered. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but what you and your team have done, you have discovered a completely new species in human evolution.

0:00:54 - Speaker 2 That's right. I think that what's in beside the journey and we can talk about that, and certainly I came out of this adventure transformed it's in an extreme environment that this non-human species was burying its dead and this is the first time we've seen a non-human species that actually conducts this level of mortuary practice and making meaning-making engravings on the wall above those burials. That is, we've been toying with the loss of human exceptionalism, as we've ever since. Jane Goodall recognized that there were chimpanzees using tools and, more recently, studies of cetaceans showing they have culture. Of course chimps and gorillas have culture, corvus, crows and parrots have culture, elephants have culture, but we've had these few things that have been ours, and humans have spent thousands and thousands of years trying to tell a story of why we are different, because we want ourselves to be different.

Every religious book begins with a story of why we're separate and often goes to the kind of negative place of then, why we have dominion and have done some of the terrible things that we've done. The discovery of homonoleti in the rising star cave of South Africa, says, is that we've discovered a culture of a non-human species. That's not our grade. They have a brain that's a third the size of ours, that's in the range of chimpanzees. They walk on two legs, but almost everything else about their anatomy is very, very different from us. We're not a large brain adaptation to this world like we are, and they did it maybe 100 to 150,000 years before we even thought of such things. Please say that again. They did it 100 to 150,000 years before we thought of the idea of mortuary practices and meaning making symbols.

0:03:05 - Speaker 1 Now is this the most important aspect of this discovery, besides finding this cave, and besides finding this new species and all these incredible collection of bones and not to mention the cave drawings and just such a discovery, literally everything involved is the burial aspect of what you all believe happened in seeing these gravesites in this cave, the species bringing in their dead. Is that the most important takeaway here in this overall discovery?

0:03:40 - Speaker 2 I think it's the combination of all of that. I think it's that we are recognizing a cultural level of complexity in a non-human form that is equal to ours. It shouldn't have probably been as surprising as it was, but even scientists like to. We have a whole field called the origins of modernity, or origins of modern human behavior. The arrogance of that title is actually quite something to say. What I think it does in combination is really does begin to say that we have missed a lot in the past, that we had tended to animalize our distant origins by trying to find reasoning as to why we perceive ourselves as so different from the animal world. What this really does is, I think right now, of course, you're in the midst of you get controversy around it because everyone didn't expect it. They didn't expect this level of evidence to ever come forward. I think in 10 or 15 years, we'll see this sort of period as a moment where we lost human exceptionalism, if I have to be blunt. Good riddance.

0:05:04 - Speaker 1 Science needs bluntness sometimes. I'm sure you would agree with that.

0:05:07 - Speaker 2 I agree with that wholeheartedly.

0:05:10 - Speaker 1 In earthing these remains of the Homo Naledi species. My understanding from watching the documentary and you've got an amazing book out now, cable Bones, that I know you unpack in greater detail but I understand that this species coexisted with Homo sapiens hundreds of thousands of years ago. How is this possible that there is such a similarity in species that coexisted during the same time period that we didn't know about? Was this cave, was this burial site in the cave, the only group of them that existed? How did this go miss for so long in science and discovery?

0:05:47 - Speaker 2 There's a whole lot in all of that. Firstly, there was a narrative that we had developed around the African origins of Homo sapiens and we did arise dominantly in Africa sometime, probably after about 500,000 years or so. The whole package was beginning to get there, at least anatomically. We see evidence of both the anatomical and behavioral emergence of Homo sapiens, and the contemporary behaviors begin to emerge about 350,000 years ago and really kicks off after about 100,000 years, where we see the barrel of the dead, we see art, meaning making symbols, we see self-adornment, all these things that we just say that's us, we're there. We had a narrative up until this discovery that said that we were because of that big brain, because of the supercharged combination of anatomy and behavior, we were alone in Africa and that we erased everything else. I think a couple of things happened over the past 50, 75 years or so of this sort of research. One, I think we stopped looking. I think we stopped looking at the evidence that might have indicated there were other things going on out there, because we knew the story.

0:07:11 - Speaker 1 How many times in science Due to assumptions. We just assumed that, oh, we've got it all covered. We discovered everything. We have all the pieces of the timeline.

0:07:18 - Speaker 2 That's it and that we have the basic things. And so every archeologist looking at an archeological site assumed that they're looking at a human archeological site, and it became so deeply entrenched in the field that, if there was evidence out there that other things were happening, we ignored it and we literally set it as an anomaly in the side. Also, homo naledi is behaving so differently than humans. It's utilizing, for at least part of its cultural practices, these very deep cave systems, these very dangerous cave systems, which humans don't do. By the way, even though we use the term caveman, we don't use deep caves. All of that's occurring in the rock shelters and twilight zone of the edge of caves.

0:08:08 - Speaker 1 Homo naledi. I want to highlight that point as well, especially after watching the documentary. This is not just a little archway under some rocks. This isn't for anyone thinking cave like oh, let me just seek some shelter in the wild. Here's like a little dome I can get under. No, no, no, no, we're going to get into this in a minute. This is a rock formation with tunnels, very elaborate, very small tunnels, with then openings to which the species didn't just walk down, crawled, slid you as well. This is a very elaborate underground work.

0:08:44 - Speaker 2 It's elaborate and it's a labyrinth, with both lateral, horizontal space and vertical space, and some of these spaces for humans, big, bulky humans who aren't meant to be there, are incredibly challenging. I mean to give you an idea. The last point, before you enter the first chamber that we discovered, the first chambers that we discovered, these burials and meaning making symbols is it's a 200-yard journey back into a cave where you both descend down to about 50 meters, then ascend up to about 30 meters and then descend 12 meters through a chute labyrinth that narrows it probably averages about 10 or 11 inches in diameter.

narrows to 7 and 1 half inches in places and you do. In that 15 or 16-yard journey down you actually traverse another five to seven yards laterally. So it's not a tube. It is impossibly difficult, so difficult that, up until I went in, only 46 scientists and explorers had ever made it into that space.

0:10:01 - Speaker 1 Wow, wow. So let's go ahead and get into the journey aspect, because this is something that I was just blown away at when I was watching this. You have a team that was growing as you all kind of made discovery after discovery, and not everyone had the ability, yourself included, to pursue these discoveries in real time. Please open up the door force here on the timeline from initial discovery to benchmark after benchmark after benchmark, and what was required physically of the team and yourself to keep pushing through and finding these discoveries.

0:10:41 - Speaker 2 So the discovery was made in 2013, in late 2013, by two recreational cavers that I had enlisted to utilize a map. I had to search new spaces, new places, in the search for this type of thing. Well, we never dreamed of something this extraordinary. I put together when I saw the discovery and I saw the difficulty of the spaces. I put together a team of extraordinary explorers, which just happened to be all women, six scientists I found via a Facebook ad. I put a Facebook ad out and we ran what was called the Rising Star Expedition.

You can actually go back and watch it. There's a great PBS Nova National Geographic documentary. It's on YouTube. You can see it now, called Dawn of Humanity. We went live to the world with this. That began this experience where we discovered the richest ancient human relative site in all of history, in a situation that no one had ever worked in before nor expected to find things this deep, dark chamber that is difficult, as I've described, to get into it. That created a sort of both adaptive experience as we continued move. We thought it was a natural deposit at first, because paleoanthropology has had a bad habit of sort of creating the null hypothesis that every time we look at and discover an ancient human relative that we've got to refute that it got there. Naturally, that's actually a pretty dumb thing in hindsight.

0:12:16 - Speaker 1 What does that mean exactly?

0:12:18 - Speaker 2 to arrive there, naturally, so when we for some reason are field, over the last 50 years particularly had developed the idea that if you found the bones of an ancient human relative small, brain-danged human relative that it was most likely there because some natural death of it had occurred, an animal had killed it, Saber-duncan.

0:12:40 - Speaker 1 It's outliving its life in the wild. All of a sudden it gets attacked or succumbs to injury and just dies there.

0:12:45 - Speaker 2 Or it dies in a collapse or whatever, something natural had occurred to it. I'm still not sure why that evolved really within our field, but it was actually, if you think about it, kind of dumb, because it's a pretty strong assumption. Yeah, because it's pretty clear that our ancestors are going to be cultural beings. Even our distant ancestors, I mean chimps and gorillas, are cultural, and these are logarithmically closer to us than the five or seven million years that separates us from chimpanzees and gorillas of evolution.

And they share a lot of adaptive things that say they're cultural. I mean, stone tools go back three million years, for goodness sake, but it was a character of our field that emerged so that when we made that discovery back in 2013 and began studying it, we were looking initially largely for natural explanations for why they're there. We didn't have any and we couldn't find any evidence for them, and we put out in 2015 the very controversial scene at that time controversial hypothesis that they were deliberately disposing of their dead, because that's about the only way we could explain that only homo naledi was in this remote space. Humans separate themselves in death all the time from the natural world, but in our field, we'd almost never found an occurrence in all of history of a ancient human relative, a small brain, one that wasn't also found with other animals and things that maybe could be used to explain why they're there. From some natural process, they were scavenged, they were collected or whatever. We said that it went down like a lead balloon, the field was not ready for it, and yet we continue to find them throughout this 4 and 1 half kilometer space of this labyrinth of underground spaces.

In other chambers In 2018, I was sitting next to one of my mentees, dr Canelwe Moliopane, looking at a video screen of two excavators working. The camera flashed to infrared, so it went from color to infrared because one of them had moved in front of it, and it allowed me to see that this feature that they were excavating of bones was in fact a hole dug into the ground with a body in it.

0:15:07 - Speaker 1 So take us to that moment, right there. When you saw that, did you immediately think that? Did you think there was something there? I mean, where did your mind go, being such an expert in unearthing history? What crossed your mind when you saw that technical snafu, really?

0:15:22 - Speaker 2 It really was a moment. It was as close, probably, to an epiphany as happens in science. I bet we had had all these problems. We couldn't explain why they're there alone, why we had found some. We found one little head on a shelf, a limestone shelf. We'd found a skeleton stuck into an alcove and everything was adding up that this was not just some bed of bones lying on the ground. And as we were excavating, we'd excavated this bed of bones to see its extent and we'd hit sterile soil. Then we hit this oval feature and as I realized what that was, I lent back and I turned to Kenny and I said I think that's a grave.

0:16:07 - Speaker 1 And she looked what prompted that. Was it just the old soil, new soil, shape?

0:16:13 - Speaker 2 I saw the oval edge of a disruption of the sediment and I knew we had been digging down for about 15 to 20 cemeteries, which means the body had depth, it was covered by dirt and it's in an edged feature that has disrupted the floor. If you want it in lay terms, it's a hole dug into the ground with a body in it that had been whole when it was put in and dirt from that hole was put around it. And I talked it through with her. I said I'm going to stop them Because I want this evidence to remain here. We need to actually preserve this evidence. And she looked at me and she said yes, and I got on the intercom and I said I want you to stop and I tried to explain this feature. But you've got to remember they're in this extreme environment. It's taken two and a half hours to get down in there. Their noses are this far from this. You know they're inches from this, so they can't see this feature. And it was that flash to black and white that allowed me to see the clear outline of that edge and I said you know I'm going to have to overrule you. You know that's this moment. And then we began to find others in other places. We realized that they were widespread. We realized the original work we'd done of the 15 individuals had been overlapping graves, like a medieval cemetery where they'd put a body in, then dug a hole through and disrupted the bones. That put a new body in. Wow, and and All of that. And so here's where it really gets crazy and here's that journey you were talking about. We started getting preparing to publish these things in 2019, 2020.

And we all know what happened that we got locked in Africa. We were stuck there. You know we were in a very heavy lockdown but we were proceeding with this paper and by the time COVID lifted and we were getting back to work slowly in 2022. And there were these anomalies, things that people outside of science would be little tiny things. One of the three geologists that ever managed to get in there Remember, I said, only 46 humans that ever got in there One said, I think, that there's fluvial movement of the thing, but he couldn't show us any sedimentology.

He was seeing bones moving downward in one space, which we would later find out was the collapse of bodies in the graves. And there were a few other things. And you know, I trained as a geologist, a paleoanthropologist and a forensic scientist and an archaeologist, and I was one of the few that had the kind of whole picture. I was turning 57 that year and I realized that, you know, I had known until then I would never get in that space. I was way too big. Most of these explorers, as you might imagine, are not only lightweight and skinny, but they're short, and I decided that I was going to make an attempt to get to a physical state where I could and over a period of the first half of 2022, I lost 55 pounds.

0:19:20 - Speaker 1 Oh, that's amazing. I mean no small feat, I mean that's a whole other discovery of the self besides what you're discovering in these caves.

0:19:27 - Speaker 2 Well, a lot of motivation to get the you know when you know that you know it is a dangerous space and you know. I've told the world how dangerous it is for a decade. And on July 28th of last year I made the attempt and got in. And that journey in itself, which I go into great detail in the book it's not really covered so much in the movie Cave of Bones, but that journey in itself was an incredibly difficult, terrible, awful, wonderful thing in of itself. I had to make decisions on the way down to pass through gaps that I did not know I could get out of going upwards.

0:20:08 - Speaker 1 I have to imagine that was terrifying. I mean, you're able to weasel your way through, but the question immediately pops up you know I'm in, but can I get out?

0:20:18 - Speaker 2 That weighs on your head a great deal. I can tell you the entire four and a half hours.

0:20:21 - Speaker 1 What was the contingency plan for that? Did you have like a? There is no contingency plan If you cannot get yourself out of there.

0:20:26 - Speaker 2 You die. That there is no.

0:20:29 - Speaker 1 There's no extraction team.

0:20:31 - Speaker 2 There's no extraction team. And once I was in there, I landed and I decided and here's a cool thing about these kind of journeys On the spur of the moment, the night before, I decided I'm not going to video this, I'm not going to take images. I've been watching this through a lens for a decade. I'm going to narrate it, I'm going to storytelling, record this and because sometimes, when you're forcing yourself to do that, you see things that others don't. And everyone who'd been there before was mission focused, right In there to get a job done, bring the data back out alive. And I knew that. You know, I was probably never going to be in this space twice.

And when I got in there, I began narrating and began to see things very quickly that our teams had missed, that the space had been altered by Naledi, that rocks had been moved, that you know it had been touched, if you will, okay. And then I saw this doorway. There's a passage between the chamber you land in and the main chamber, the Dinaledi chamber. At the distance, it's about, oh, it's about 25 feet long. And I looked at this and you hear me on the narration I go, wow, that really looks like a doorway. It's smaller than I? Yeah, and then you hear me pause. And the reason I paused was I'm an archeologist. I looked at thousands of ancient doorways. And what do you always do when you look at a doorway? You look for a sign for what is for. Yeah, what is this door? You know?

it's the room number exit bathroom you know, whatever it said, sacred art, chamber, whatever, it is Abandon all hope you enter here, right? Exactly right. And I looked to the left and I saw these engravings that everyone had walked by, and the first one I saw was a triangle and a square and then these X's and upside down crosses that had been drawn.

0:22:31 - Speaker 1 Were these paintings or carvings? No, they were engraved in a very hard rock Deep hard engravings. So that means they had tools.

0:22:40 - Speaker 2 They had tools absolutely. And some of them had a substance applied which may be ochre, in order to make them highlight. And here was a thing that I think your audience would be fascinated with. I had a transcendent moment at that moment, which was really strange, and you know, I'm a scientist. I don't know that until that moment I actually believe that those kind of events can happen. You hear about them, but you know, I've never experienced that.

0:23:07 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I've heard you talk about this. You were kind of saying you had like a cave hallucination.

0:23:11 - Speaker 2 Yeah, because I had my head lamp on. You can imagine this. I turned that light off and I always carry a UV light with me, a black light, because many minerals and bones fluoresce under black light, and I turned it on and, as I did, these images, those geometric shapes in the cross that floated off of the surface and shimmered in the air You've seen, like Queen's Gambit or a beautiful light when equations come up or a chest moves.

It's exactly what happened to me, wow, and it was so much so that I actually had to shut the light off. I was actually embarrassed.

0:23:51 - Speaker 1 Like it was too much, it was overwhelming.

0:23:52 - Speaker 2 Yeah, it was too much and I didn't want to say anything to anyone because I thought they'd think I'm crazy.

0:24:00 - Speaker 1 Yeah, so. Is anyone else seeing this? What's going on?

0:24:03 - Speaker 2 I know I now understand why it happened. I had an optical light shift occur, which is actually a factor of how light enters your optical nerve and is processed by your brain. If you want to experience it, just go driving tonight, particularly on a wet night. Look in your rear view mirror at headlights of a car behind you. You'll see the headlights of the car still and then you'll see the light they transmit actually shifting and moving away from them, oh wow.

Interesting. That's actually what happened to me, but that is likely many of the origins of trance and that sort of thing as we attempt to alter our mind.

0:24:42 - Speaker 1 I was also intrigued. You didn't find any special cave mushrooms down there or anything before this. No, Well, you know, we are investigating that.

0:24:50 - Speaker 2 You know because, well, I tell you, amongst the things that we think of as some of the last remaining vestiges of what separate humans, are complex mortuary practices which seem to be going away with this discovery and universal use, are of mind, altering events or substances.

0:25:09 - Speaker 1 Absolutely yeah.

0:25:11 - Speaker 2 Other animals don't do that. Some groups of animals or individuals will seek out mind altering substances. No other species universally does it in the way that contemporary humans do, and all previous societies, and so we are actually investigating whether some of the wood and burnt material in there may have those substances, because it's not out of the question and the beauty is, in this age of science we can actually test those. That's not just woohoo stuff.

Yeah, you know it's kind of fringe thing, we can actually look for that, and so those are kind of exciting pursuits. But I then went on to find a hashtag. You know the problem? We have.

0:25:50 - Speaker 1 Is humans A hashtag? A hashtag? Yeah, no way.

0:25:54 - Speaker 2 Not the hashtag of the company previously known as Twitter.

0:26:00 - Speaker 1 Was this the original social media tag? This was like hashtag Nelletti, is that the one up on the cave?

0:26:05 - Speaker 2 Well, actually in the book, you'll actually see the images that are very beautiful and I think we actually understand the use of some of them. But the difficulty we have and this is what's so fascinating about this journey you have to step back when we almost all these shapes are familiar to us Right triangles, boxes, x's crosses, both upside down.

0:26:27 - Speaker 1 Use across civilizations, across time, across the world.

0:26:30 - Speaker 2 Equal signs, these five lateral lines like finger marks, fingernail marks, but you've got to remember that humans, of course, understand those. We use them commonly in mathematics, we use them in music, we use them in the formation of language and to symbol, as symbols that we know meaning. These weren't done by a human, they weren't done by a mind like ours, and so, while they are shared by with us, we do have to be careful Now. They may, in fact, be shared symbols that are deeply held within us, that go back deep in time and may be related to how we process math or language or music in our heads. They're also shared, by the way, by Neanderthals, so three different species, one with a tiny brain, two with large brains, while sharing the commonality of these symbols. Now, that's fascinating. We are beginning to explore how we might understand that or interpret that.

However, that's early days in that, but I do think it may be testable. You know some of this. You know the visual neural imaging that's occurring now, where we can actually look at how thought, what the brain is seeing and how it's processing. That may give us things. These are also, by the way, since you brought it up, they're also the same images that people under controlled psychedelic experiences draw when they're asked what they're seeing. And so the problem was we never had an outgroup. We never had an outgroup. We were always reliant upon the assumption that it is nature and not nurture, and one of the big important things of this is we may have just discovered an outgroup, wow.

0:28:29 - Speaker 1 I really got to ran in in here. My brain is going a million different directions, but I want to paint the picture for the audience as to what Homo Noletti looked like. Who are these people? What is this species? Do we have really any idea about their day to day lives? Because if you watch the Netflix documentary, there's some pretty impressive animations that I'm sure are as closely connected to the findings in terms of bone and, based on what we see here as skeleton, we can maybe assume it looked like this, but I'm sure liberties were taken. So walk us through what this species looked like, how they moved and also, more specifically, how did they navigate? Getting into these caves, to your best understanding, because with all our advancements in technology and science today, it was a miracle that any of you all actually made it in and out.

0:29:22 - Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely so. Firstly, it's interesting because for nine years Homo Noletti was probably the very best known hominid species ever discovered. We had more of them. We now have something like 36, 37 individuals, ranging from neonates right up to the elderly Wow, everything in between and almost every bone in the body multiple times. So we knew a ton about them and I can describe them very easily. They stood about four foot eight, five foot two. They had shoulders that were very ape, like narrow, conical chest instead of a barrel chest, so that whole part of the upper body would look different from us. The spine is tiny and thin but shaped like an antitone. Their pelvis is more flared and wide than ours, is the bowl shaped pelvis, but then as you move down the arms and down the legs they become more and more human like, until you reach these incredibly human like feet and hands, except the toes and fingers are more curved than ours, and the thumb is five fingers, five toes five fingers, five toes, just like ours.

And then the weirdest part is sitting atop this very tall, thin, lean, powerful body was a pinhead, a head, a third the size of ours.

0:30:37 - Speaker 1 So imagine the size of the current human.

0:30:39 - Speaker 2 So imagine you. You're looking at a five foot person walking towards you at a distance, a skinny five foot person walking towards you, and you realize that their head is a third the size of ours. As they get closer, so in the distance they would probably look very familiar, look like a. Yeah, as they get closer, you suddenly realize they are not us and all those differences I just described. Now we were stuck for nine years with the best understood anatomy of any hominin species ever discovered and knew nothing about them other than that, because they were only in these chambers in this remote, hard to get to cave throughout the system, and we just had their anatomy.

Then of course, over a period of a remarkable 72 hours, we understood, we, we, we had we. Well, we'd started discovering the graves, which added great to their complexity. Then, over a remarkable 72 hours, in July of last year, we discovered meaning making symbols. We discovered evidence for fire Simultaneously. I discovered soot on the roof of that chamber and Canell way and her team in the adjacent chamber, where there are no body discovered burnt animal remains which led to that mean they were maybe living in these caves, not just bringing in their dead to bury them.

We do not see any signs yet typical of Intense occupation of this.

0:32:13 - Speaker 1 Nothing leads you to believe currently there was long term occupancy in there, other than people that are there forever.

0:32:19 - Speaker 2 That's right. Right now, it appears that they're using it for and I'm very and please take this as just an inadequate language term ceremonial purposes related to death, and they're separating use of the space. However, again I'd have to emphasize, they're not humans, so they may not be leaving human signatures of occupation Right In the way that we are expecting.

0:32:45 - Speaker 1 Right.

0:32:45 - Speaker 2 How, however, we have found thousands of remains of animals now Extraordinarily well preserved remains of fireplaces and horse, and we have found one tool, shaped rock, in the hand of a dead child, buried in the chamber, literally in its hand, being grasped.

0:33:07 - Speaker 1 I remember coming across this part in the docu series and my immediate thought was was this a tool or was it a toy? Because you noted that it was a small child or small 13 year old give or take. Ok. So I mean, why else would they be buried with something? Of course it had meaning to them, but purpose, I think, for a small child. We bury with something which opens up a whole another train of thought of OK, they have all this going on, they're not humans, but their child had a play thing.

0:33:37 - Speaker 2 Well, it is shaped remarkably like what you would expect a carving tool to be shaped by.

0:33:44 - Speaker 1 I will say that.

0:33:46 - Speaker 2 However, I think toy cannot be put out of place. I think my colleague, Augustine Fuentes, I think, puts it best in the says that you know why would you leave an artifact in the hands of a dead loved one unless you intended them to use it?

0:34:03 - Speaker 1 Wow, wow. That really makes you think. That really makes you think. Powerful. It's powerful, yeah. Do we have any evidence? Is your team or any other scientists now around the world, now that we know more about this species than the Naleti, do we have any evidence that there are more out there? Is it, are they out in the wild, or are they in any other caves? I mean, this can't be the only occasion, right?

0:34:26 - Speaker 2 No, it is and it certainly won't be. Discoveries like this typically happen in a sort of typical way. You have this kind of breakthrough, you realize that this new discovery has been made and everyone goes oh, it's impossible, oh no, there can't be, oh, I don't like the evidence. And then all of a sudden you start finding it everywhere. Then it's irrefutable. And you start finding, because it would be very hard to recognize Naledi from just some fragments, and we probably assign Naledi to other species based on little tiny fragments You'll also find with the meaning-making symbols and the behavior like the burials, everyone goes oh, it's impossible, impossible.

I've got symbols like that in my cave and I know they'd and then we go. Oh well, congratulations. It takes a while. Science doesn't immediately change, particularly Science so entrenched in human exceptionalism, like archaeology and the study of modern human origins that didn't expect the species to exist, much less to allow levels of complexity that challenge the idea that all of our complex behaviors are driven by this.

0:35:48 - Speaker 1 There's no doubt what you just described and what we've been talking about thus far on the show challenges a lot of what we know to be true about Earth, about life, about other species. Take the world out of the equation here, lee. I'm curious. What did this do to your world? Did this have any kind of profound personal impact? Take out the archaeologists, take out the scientists Lee Berger, the man understanding his place on Earth what did this do for you?

0:36:22 - Speaker 2 So I've gone through several journeys with the discovery.

One being involved in a really important discovery of a historical level obviously changed me. You know it would change anyone, it changed all the people who participated in that in various ways. But I did come out of that journey into the cave and that profound discoveries happening and the realization of why we had missed them in that. And then the physical journey out of the cave where I almost died in the process of that. It's just close to death. I've almost died many times I think, for this was as close to death as I've ever been and I had to make some decisions. I had to try to injure myself, to actually get free of a space, and that's detailed in the book.

0:37:12 - Speaker 1 Well, you had to break a limb or pop something out of socket.

0:37:14 - Speaker 2 I tried to dislocate my patella, which was keeping my leg from passing through a space. I failed and but I came out of that, having seen the symbols, having been in this space. That was clearly important to this other species in a place where very few people will ever go. It's a moon level journey. Almost in those senses, I have come out changed and please, I apologize for this, but I can't exactly describe how. It's still too new for me.

0:37:51 - Speaker 1 I imagine it's a very ineffable experience.

0:37:53 - Speaker 2 Yes, I'm still processing. I know I am a different person. I know I am a deeper person. I'm also a more accepting person of things, but I am, and sometimes I'm, a more critical person in an interesting way. But I know I'm changed. I cannot as yet clearly describe to you how.

0:38:17 - Speaker 1 Well, change is what we're all about here on the show and as we wrap up, I just want to again acknowledge your work, your entire team's work. I cannot wait to dive deeper into the book. Like I said, I saw the docu-series on Netflix actually on a flight and I think my jaw was open the entire flight. It was just amazing. I was like how are we not talking about this? How is everyone not floored right now?

0:38:41 - Speaker 2 Well, it did do very well on Netflix, I think it did. It was number two movie in the world for two weeks or something for it Well deserved the documentary. That's something I'm very proud of. That science communication is really important to me.

0:38:55 - Speaker 1 Oh, well deserved, Well deserved. But discoveries of the world and discoveries of our world is what the show is all about, so that we can learn how to move forward. A lot of times when we set goals or we want to advance our lives, our communities, we're just looking forward, right, but I love how this is reminding us to look back and to learn lessons of past civilizations and just to have our world kind of flipped on its head, as we all need to have it done sometimes, to let go of assumptions and bias and appreciate hard work like yourself and your team. But I say all that to ask my final question, lee moving forward in life, to move ever forward. When you hear that, what does that mean to you? And particularly through what you do in discovering this cave of bones, how does this discovery help us live a life ever forward?

0:39:46 - Speaker 2 I've got two examples of that One. If you know about me, I'm a big believer in open access and I was a fan of science fiction. When I was young, reading science fiction, I played Dungeons and Dragons.

I was a rabid Lord of the Rings fan, and I remember a seminal moment in my past where I had read Lord of the Rings and my friends had all too and we were talking about and they took all this fellowship stuff and journey stuff out of it and I'd taken something deeply and profoundly different, even as a teenager, because I heard Dolken saying if you discover something that, like a golden ring, that begins to feel like it possesses you, it has ownership of you, then you must find the nearest volcano and throw it in it, because there are plenty of golden rings to be discovered. And I have lived my scientific life like that making discoveries, nurturing them and then giving them away because there are more discoveries to be made. And that's the final bit. The big lesson is that we must, as a species and as individuals, no matter what you do, never stop exploring.

0:40:58 - Speaker 1 Coming from the mouth of a man that has made one of the greatest discoveries of our generation. Like I said, time Magazine has noted you as one of the 100 most influential people. I mean, probably one of the most amazing discoveries of all time. And how, here he is just saying you know, let's throw it in the volcano. There's more out there. I love it. I love it. Well, lee, again, I want to thank you for your work and your time. Where can people go to learn more about you and Cava Bones and everything that you're up to these days?

0:41:26 - Speaker 2 So obviously watch the Netflix show Cava Bones, read the book. It really gives a deep dive into that. And you can follow me on all social media at Lear Burger Face Twitter. I'm sorry X.

0:41:39 - Speaker 1 OK, yeah, right yeah.

0:41:42 - Speaker 2 And Facebook and others, but National Geographic go to their pages. They cover me I'm an explorer in residence there and they cover this and you can keep updated there.

0:41:52 - Speaker 1 Amazing Lee, thank you. Thank you so much.

0:41:54 - Speaker 2 My pleasure.