This Face TOTALLY Changes the Human Story

Immediately you descend into the mouth of a cave... We dress, put on harnesses and hook ourselves to some safety ropes and then we climb

this

rock edge. It goes up about 20 meters, so if you fell off Dragons Back, it would be very bad. If any of us were injured on the other side of the cave, paramedics would be sent to us and we would have to live underground until we could get back out. You go through that little tunnel and then you come out and there was a more open chamber. But we only had our headlights on at the time, so everywhere we looked you could see flashes of bones.

Hello smart people, Joe here. There may be almost 8 billion

human

s on Earth, but Homo sapiens is a solitary species. And not just because we look at our phones all day, or never go out, or just watch YouTube videos all the time. Because our species is a relic. The only surviving member of the group of upright apes known as Homo. But it was not always like

this

. Walk back in time and you will see that at various points many other

human

and hominid species walked the earth. Some like us and others very different. Everything we know about those stories of ancient species we know from fossil bones.

And in many cases that means we don't know much at all. Which is frustrating because we all want to know where we fit into this

story

. How did this species of intelligent ape come to dominate the planet and where do we fit in with everyone else? Well, that

story

just got a lot more complicated thanks to a bunch of ridiculously impressive fossils discovered in South Africa. In recent years, a new species has been added to the ancient human family. For the first time, these fossils traveled outside of South Africa to Dallas, Texas. So I stopped by the Perot Museum of Nature and Science to see them and meet the scientists who discovered them...and to take a selfie with my elderly cousin.

We'll get to that. How many people have found new human species as always? Probably a dozen, maybe, maybe 15. And you found two! Yeah! Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger lives and works in South Africa searching for ancient human fossils. Scientists have been unearthing human fossils in this area for decades, but thanks to new technology and satellite images, in 2013, Lee identified some places that he thought others might have missed. The expert cavers on Lee's team had discovered an unexplored section and what is known as the Rising Star cave system. They called it Dinaledi Chamber, which means star chamber in one of South Africa's local languages.

When they descended to the bottom of that chamber, they found something shiny that shined back at them; Fossil bones, lots of them. When Lee saw photographs of the fossils in the camera, he immediately knew they were fossils of an ancient human relative. The problem was that he was too big to fit inside the cave to study them, so he did what any of us would do. He put up a post on Facebook asking for help: "Volunteers needed. Excellent archaeological, paleontological and excavation skills, they should be slim and preferably small and should not be claustrophobic." I mean, who wouldn't respond to that?

They were looking for archaeologists with experience in caving and climbing and before I started studying archaeology, I did outdoor leadership. It sounded like me, but I really wasn't expecting to hear anything. But very soon I was underground! My supervisor sent me the ad and said, "Hey, you have climbing experience. Don't you have caving experience too?" I said yes, and it sounded weird and strange enough that I wanted to do it. Becca Peixotto and Marina Elliott are two members of the team of six scientists who descended into the cave to unearth these fossils and bring them to the sur

face

to study them.

Excavating these fossils required what was essentially a military-grade operation. Miles of cables were laid, so Lee. and others in a command tent on the sur

face

were able to observe every moment of the excavation and communicate with the underground team. They called us underground astronauts. And we're looking at people who were on the surface who couldn't come underground with us. We on these kind of grainy CCTV cameras and it reminded them of astronauts, you know, working on spacewalks on the space station. To say it wasn't easy for them to get to work every day would be an understatement.

We have to go through this cave where the narrowest point we have to go through is 18 centimeters wide. You have to crouch face down and do a sort of crawl to get over it. It's called Superman crawl because people with broader shoulders have to put one hand on their head and push off with their feet as if they were flying like Superman. You come out from under Superman's crawl and you can get up and you're in a fairly large chamber and that's where the Dragons Back base is. Yeah, and then we end up in an area called the top of the parachute and the parachute is actually a long crack or fissure in the dolomite or the rock. meters high.

At its widest part, it measures about 45 centimeters. At its narrowest part it measures 18 centimeters. 18 centimeters is like the size of my head, it's just not possible. I have a big head. Let's see if I have what it takes to join the underground astronaut squad. When they brought the fossils to the surface and began to observe their features, they began to realize that they had found something very strange. On the one hand, it was a

totally

new species. They called him Homo naledi. And this wasn't just one individual. This cave housed many individuals, plural. On that first expedition in 2013, we unearthed... what was 1,350 fossil fragments, which in itself is crazy.

But they all came from a single excavation unit measuring 80 centimeters by 80 centimeters by 20 centimeters deep. And we found bones that represent, I think we are up to 22 individuals now. All parts of the body are represented, so there are foot bones, hand bones, ribs, vertebrae, teeth and all that. At the Rising Star site, the Dinaledi Chamber, the Lesedi Chamber, and other nearby areas, we have discovered more individual hominid remains than the entire record of hominid evolution on the African continent. I think our field had become convinced that there was nothing left to find and people stopped looking.

This is a message that there is more out there, and there is not just a little more, there is a lot more. Well, I don't know how you think searching for fossils works, especially searching for ancient humans, but that's not how it usually goes. When people find hominid fossils, they find part of a jaw, some teeth, maybe just a small finger on a hand, and that's how the species are described. So there are entire species that are known only from very small body parts. While in Homo naledi we have the complete body of a group of different individuals several times.

The bones of Homo naledi do not resemble the bones of other ancient humans or hominids. At least they don't look like anything we've seen together in a single species. So we're behind the scenes at the Perot museum and we're just going to go in and take a look at a reconstruction of Neo. So what might those bones have been like in life? And this is our friend Neo. So Homo Naledi has a kind of mosaic of characteristics. Some aspects of Homo naledi are very similar to our bodies, and other aspects are very similar to our oldest relatives.

So they have a really small brain. If you can, look at the skull here. They have a brain that is about the size of an orange. But when we take endoscopic casts of the inside of the skull, we can see that the brain has many similar features (in terms of the type of waves and folds on the outside of the brain) to ours. This indicates that although they have a small brain, perhaps they had a brain that had many functions. So the jaws are always fresh. Partly because everyone knows what their own teeth look like. And then you can see that Neo's teeth don't actually look that different from ours.

And of course, we found full Naledi hands. He becomes more and more human. And so the proportions of the wrist and hand are almost completely human except for two things; One the thumb. The thumb is absolutely unique. It is extremely long. And the fingers are curved. It is curved like the oldest hominids we have. So that would make sense if this was alive two million years ago. Absolutely! 3 million years ago. But it was not like that. When we started looking at the anatomy, I think a lot of people thought, "Oh, this thing has to be at least a million, maybe two million years old." Some of the teeth were tested using a technique called electron spin resonance.

That was one of the ways we were able to discover that Naledi was in this range of three hundred thousand years ago. It was really surprising to find out that Naledi was as young as he was in the time period that Homo naledi is. Anatomically modern humans were also on the African landscape. Modern, primitive and different at the same time. To date, the team has recovered fossils of at least 20 individuals from Dinaledi and a nearby chamber. This raises a big question: "How did all these bones get into this cave?" Our hypothesis is that Homo naledi deliberately disposed of their dead.

So we believe that Homo naledis was dying on the surface and his companions were bringing the dead to this cave system. We don't know why because we don't have any evidence of that and unfortunately we can't ask Neo. He's not too talkative. Deliberate disposal of the body was one of those behaviors, those rituals, one of the few things that only our species did and that made us unique. And this shatters that idea. It is another in a long list of things that we used to consider as exclusively part of our species and that are not. Until Jane Goodall saw chimpanzees fishing for termites, that was our job.

You might look at us and say, "Wow, we make tools that no one else makes." Okay, cross tools off the list. Art; We now know that other animals perform complex ornamentation and decoration. Birds do a great job with that, right? We know that other animals cry now. We know that they cry for their dead. They interact with death in a different way and many different species do so. So, we have lost it. And then there's the last thing we had. You know, this idea of ​​recognizing one's own mortality, of deliberate elimination of the body. The idea that we deal with our dead.

And the reason we think we did it is because we saw ourselves separated from nature. We saw ourselves as a creature different from other animals and therefore would not allow any of our individuals to go through those processes. If that hypothesis holds true here for these specimens in as many different places as we find them now. So you're looking at a creature that shared that. In my case, I often talk about humans and other animals. because we are animals. And I think when we think of ourselves as part of the animal kingdom, I think, for me, that helps us become co-inhabitants of this planet again.

This whole story leads to some important questions. Where does Homo naledi fit into our story? Is it our ancestor? It's something more? Well, the answer is not simple. We are all familiar with this version of human evolution. A primitive-looking thing that gives rise to something a little less primitive that gives rise to another and another and finally to something like us: something advanced. A march of progress. Well, that's not how evolution works. And Homo naledi is proof of this. I think this braided current model helps us get over the hurdle of thinking that you know one species and then the next generation is born and it's another species, but that evolution happens gradually and through multiple mechanisms over time.

The idea that we were this inevitable path to being this thing in humans or this successful dominant thing, we've barely been tested yet. Yes, if you take away air conditioning and food delivery, we are in trouble. Absolutely! Thanks to fossils like Homo naledi, we know that human history unfolded like a tangled braided stream. We are at the end of a branch near the end. But we are not the only branch, and along the way, over time, branches have split to fade away or perhaps even rejoin with others and combine again. It is not a tree that grows and some march towards the best ideal species.

It simply filters forward in time following the landscape carved by natural selection. We are simply taking a walk, looking back and trying to figure out where we came from and who our fellow travelers were along the way. Stay curious. I want to especially thank the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, for inviting me to see these fossils in person and meet the scientists. This is the first and probably the only time these fossils will be outside of South Africa and I feel truly honored to be able to stand alongside them and experience this.

They were even given South African passports.Are you kidding me! They will be on display until early 2020 as part of an exhibit at the museum called Origins. So if you're watching this early and happen to be in Dallas, check them out. I'm not getting paid to say that... it's just amazing and you should know that. There are links below in the description and I'll probably have a few more to show you from my visit in a few weeks, so stay tuned. And thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. You are awesome! And thanks to you, I can see interesting things like this and share them with everyone.

If you want to join our family, visit the Patreon page. We have many interesting advantages at different levels and you can even join the ranks of these Galaxy Brain followers.