Ok, this … is … thrilling.

Not quite two years ago, on October 6, 2013, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the National Geographic Society and the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa posted an odd, tantalizing ad on facebook:

Dear Colleagues – I need the help of the whole community and for you to reach out to as many related professional groups as possible. We need perhaps three or four individuals with excellent archaeological/palaeontological and excavation skills for a short term project that may kick off as early as November 1st 2013 and last the month if all logistics go as planned. The catch is this – the person must be skinny and preferably small. They must not be claustrophobic, they must be fit, they should have some caving experience, climbing experience would be a bonus. They must be willing to work in cramped quarters, have a good attitude and be a team player. Given the highly specialized, and perhaps rare nature of what I am looking for, I would be willing to look at an experienced Ph.D. student or a very well trained Masters student, even though the more experience the better (PH.D.’s and senior scientists most welcome). No age limit here either. I do not think we will have much money available for pay – but we will cover flights, accommodation (though much will be field accom., food and of course there will be guaranteed collaboration further up the road). Anyone interested please contact me directly on lee.berger@wits.ac.za copied to my assistant Wilma.lawrence@wits.ac.za . My deadlines on this are extremely tight so as far as anyone can spread the word, among professional groups.
Many thanks
Lee

What Lee Berger needed was a team of experienced excavator/cavers capable of retrieving newly discovered fossils from a small, remote chamber in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system, thirty meters—nearly one hundred feet—below ground level, and eighty meters—two hundred-sixty feet—from the cave entrance. The final approach to the chamber includes a twelve meter drop, forty feet down a chute of jagged rock that at its narrowest is just 18 centimeters—seven inches—wide.

He expected no more than a handful of people could meet requirements like this, but within only a few days, from around the world, he had fifty-seven well-qualified applicants who did. By the second week in October, Lee and his colleagues on the project had selected six women for the advance team of scientists to enter the chamber. By the first week in November, they were at the cave site, setting up camp.

On September 10, 2015, they finally announced to the world what they found.

Continue reading →

John Hawks is a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In winter of 2014 he offered a 7-week MOOC (“massively open online course”) through Coursera, entitled Human Evolution: Past and Future. Superbly done, offered for free, the course included 71 videos, most of them interviews with people who are actively working in the wide array of fields essential for discovering the evolutionary lineage that led to us. The conversations weave together what we currently know about our origins and the methods that are used to uncover it. You also get to see that these people, for whom this is their life’s work, love what they do.

Many of Coursera’s already-completed courses allow you to sign up even after their end date, so you can access the videos and course material. Unfortunately, this is not one of them. Everything is still there, but it can only be seen by those of us who enrolled before it finished. At some point in the next year or two, the course will be updated and offered again, and you can ask to be notified when that happens. In the meantime, more than two dozen of its videos can now be seen at Prof. Hawks’ youtube channel.

An example is a visit to caves at Gibraltar, Deciphering the Behavior of Neandertals with Geraldine Finlayson and Clive Finlayson, from week six of the course, “Emerging Culture – Neandertals and Modern Humans.”

Clive is director of the Gibraltar Museum, Geraldine is an archaeologist, and they describe what they’re finding at two excavation sites: Gorham’s Cave and Vanguard Cave. At the extreme western edge of the Mediterranean, in layers of sediment dated to about 32,000 years before present, these caves hold what is currently the last known evidence anywhere for the presence of Neandertal peoples.

Towards the end, Geraldine comes to the remains of a single event in the life of Gorham’s Cave—fragments of charcoal from a small fire, along with mussel shells and flakes from stone tools—revealed when layers of sand were removed, exposing what lay underneath.

At that time, the world was in an ice age. With so much water imprisoned in glacial ice, sea level was much lower. These days, the Mediterranean is quite close to the mouth of the cave. Back then, it would have been a half kilometer to a kilometer or more away, depending on which direction you headed. Even so, the cave received so much wind-blown sand that anything left inside, by animals or people, was quickly covered over.

It’s for things like this, that I love these conversations so much.

17:11–18:52

GF: This is the beauty of this cave, This cave gives you events that are maybe hours or days long at most. So you’ve got this group of possibly two individuals, they come in with their little bundle of mussels that they have foraged nearby on the coastline. We don’t know exactly where the coastline would have been, but it can’t be very far ’cause you don’t carry seafoods for very long ’cause they spoil very easily.

And they come into the cave, they build a very small fire. There’s not much charcoal left from that fire, and there’s not much alteration on the sediment, so there wasn’t a huge heat on that fire, probably just enough to open those mussels. They consume the mussels. Once they’re there, they’re retouching the lithics that they’re using—their stone tools. They take those away with them, when they go, but they leave all the debitage behind. And then that’s it, y’know. They’ve gone.

So this might– they may have stayed overnight, or it may have been, y’know, just a brief few hours, but the fact is when they go, the sand covers it up, and it’s left there untouched until we come along and re-excavate it. I think that’s a huge resolution. I mean, that is unique, I think.

JH: It’s completely remarkable.

GF: It’s beautiful.

JH: It is the closest that we come anytime in this to seeing what somebody’s life is like…

GF: Absolutely, yes, yes.

JH: …and that I think is just amazing.

GF: It tells us a lot as well, because it tells us that they needn’t necessarily have always been sitting around, y’know. They move from place to place. They stopped temporarily, had a quick picnic, and then carried on, y’know? And in this particular case, it was just two individuals. There’s no evidence it was any more than that.

The Rising Star Expedition is a joint project of the National Geographic Society and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Originally expected to be a brief expedition to recover a single partial hominid skeleton from a newly discovered site in one of the ancient limestone caves in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa, it quickly became apparent that this was a hominid fossil site of such breath-taking richness that it will keep paleontologists busy for decades to come.

After three weeks of deep-cave hominid fossil recovery, the Rising Star Expedition has wrapped on its final day of excavations.

The caver/scientists known as “underground astronauts” will return Wednesday [27 Nov 2013] to complete the 3D scans of the entire fossil chamber, walls and all. They will be aided by the caving support team as they remove the hi-tech equipment that has made this NASA-like mission possible.

There are 17 sleeping tents, plus the storage tent and the larger mess hall, Cavers tent, Science tent, and Command Center to disassemble, pack, and ship out.

There are also the more than 1200 cataloged hominid fossil elements to transfer to Wits University.

Plans are now being made for how to handle all these new fossils, not only in terms of how to move them, but also how to process and study them. Paleoanthropologists and students generally only have a few new hominid fossil elements to work with from any given site at any given time. Having dozens of elements is unusual. Totals in the hundreds have generally taken years or decades to reach. To come out of three weeks of excavation with more than a thousand hominid fossils is unheard of in Southern Africa.

Handling all this material will require the creation of new systems, new forms of collaboration, and new opportunities for young and up-and-coming scientists. Lee Berger and his team of senior scientists are developing such a plan now.

via Rising Star Expedition – News Watch.

All that and they literally barely scratched the surface of the cave floor in the first chamber.