August 1, 2023 • 44 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with paleoanthropologist Lee Berger about his team’s amazing discoveries in South Africa's Rising Star cave system and previously unknown extinct species of hominin named Homo naledi. His new book is “Cave of Bones” and it’s also the subject of the Netflix documentary “Unknown: Cave of Bones.”
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. On today's episode of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, I'm going to be speaking with noted
paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, author of the new book Cave of Bones,
a true story of discovery, adventure, and human origins, and
he's also featured in the Netflix documentary Unknown Cave of Bones.
(00:34):
Let's get right to the interview. Hi, Lee, Thanks for
coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
It's great to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
To start off, just really generally, how should listeners understand
the mission and the challenges of paleoanthropology.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
So paleoanthropology is, in its loosest definition, the search for
understanding human origins, but it's a little broader than that.
It's also hominine origins. And the reason I make that
distinction is that we humans tend to self center everything
around ourselves, and hominins are bipedal apes that are part
(01:12):
of our journey, but they're not all our direct ancestors.
If you will. There's been a mass and almost braided
stream of ancient relatives that walked on two legs that
are closer related to us than chimpanzees and gorillas are
so there if you imagine evolution of sort of coming
(01:34):
from a last common ancestor, gorilla's broke off first, then chimpanzees,
bona bo's breakoff, and all the rest of that story
between us and that moment are the hominins as we evolved,
bipedalism and special adaptations. We also, though, study not only
the physical morphology the kind of the way that evolution happens.
(01:57):
We study the culture of these ancients spies, and that's
going to be I think particularly important to these most
recent discoveries.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Now, you were previously the Philip Tobias Chair in Paleoanthropology
at the University of Atvadeschrand. I know you've taken on
some new titles recently. What is your role now with
National Geographic and how does all of this factor into
your other positions and your work?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Right, So, I am an explorer in residence is my
primary job at National Geographic Society. I'm also a Senior
Carnegie Science Fellow. That's a very recent appointment, as I've
joined that organization largely to push the sort of hard
sciences in our field and the relationship between that remarkable
group of scientists and organization. I still maintain a position
(02:46):
at VITZ an honorary professor, and I'm director of the
Center for the Exploration of the Deep Human Journey, so
all of those intersect with each other. I run a
very large science program that has a sort of collaborative
collegial group of scientists from around the world of over
one hundred and sixty at this time. It's growing almost
(03:08):
on a daily basis. That so it's a very large
science program. Some of those are based in the sort
of traditional university setting, others of them are based in
sort of institutional things like Carnegie or museums.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Now the book is Cave of Bones, a true story
of discovery, adventure and human origins. And then of course
we also have the Netflix documentary Unknown Cave of Bones.
They take readers and viewers to a particular cave system
in South Africa. Can you tell us about the Rising
Star Cave Complex?
Speaker 3 (03:42):
So the Rising Star Cave complex came deeply into my
life in twenty thirteen. I'd known about it before then.
It was a very well known system of caves where
amateur cavers and I'd even caved in in the nineteen
nineties just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, if you will,
a huge network of subterranean system almost four kilometers long.
(04:06):
So what is that two and a half miles or
so of underground passages networks, small and somewhat larger cave
systems that goes down maybe a two hundred feet or
so before you hit ground water. But it's like a
it's hard to describe for people who tend to think
of like the big mammoth cave systems. It's a latticework cave.
(04:29):
So it's like skyscrapers that are buried in the ground
with different floors, and you can move and traverse up
and down these and it can be impossibly difficult. And
so both the book and the Netflix documentary followed us
over a period of almost a year as we were
testing the idea of whether we had discovered burials in
(04:52):
a non human species, and that is a species called Homoletti,
which is a very small brained hominin. It's a a
brain slightly larger than a chimpanzee, but it was a
biped It walked on two legs and existed sort of
out of time and place. If we looked at a
hominin like that, we would normally think, oh, it's two million,
(05:13):
two and a half million years old based on its
entire anatomy. It turned out that homon Aletti is much
younger than that, something like two hundred and forty thousand
to three hundred and thirty thousand years before present. So
in finding these possible burials, and we go through that
sort of period of analysis and looking at in this
(05:35):
deep dark chamber almost three hundred and fifty feet back
into a system, we knew it was going to be
one of the most controversial things ever said, because until
that moment of seeing those the idea was that really
only humans and things very much like humans, like neanderthals
(05:57):
Bury their dead. It was our gg, one of the
last things we had that separated ourselves from the animal
kingdom and animal behavior. And so both the Netflix show
and the book carry us through that period and then
to what I kind of referred to as seventy two
hours of remarkable discovery, where I ended up losing about
(06:20):
fifty five pounds and got down into this incredibly difficult
to get to space where only forty six people had
been before almost died in the process of doing that,
I needed answers to some questions before we published that
burial paper that really I kind of only had the
broad experience to answer. And it was at that point
(06:40):
that I discovered etchings on the wall, engravings on the wall,
and evidence of fire on the roof. And then that
kind of broke everything free, because we suddenly realized there
was evidence of fire everywhere. And so now we're at
this kind of moment where my colleagues and I have
announced to the world that we believe we have discovered
(07:02):
the first non human species culture in history.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yes, having watched the documentary and read the book, this
is all this is just really mind blowing. I'm not
even sure of which direction to start with first, like
just the sheer challenges of the cave system, or just
how potentially profound that the discoveries are. I guess I
guess maybe starting with the setting a little bit before
(07:27):
you even ventured down there to the main chamber, how
did you go about carrying out these explorations, like with
the command center and finding the right people to send
down there.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
So when I was first shown where this material was,
I sent my then fifteen year old, very skinny son
down there to verify that it was real, and I
was shown by these two amateur cavers that I had
enlisted where this was. I knew I would never get
into that space. You know, if you imagine this vertical
squeeze that that moves in various directions, that squeezes down
(08:02):
to seven and a half inches in places my physic
I used to choke, my ego would never fit much
less my physique. I designed a system to work in
the space based on I've been very close friends with
both James Cameron and Bob Ballard and have been admirers
of the way they've handled their expeditions, which include, you know,
(08:25):
sort of deep sea work where you can't often go
to these places. Now James did, of course, and so
is Bob, but you can't often go to these places.
So they use remote operation. They use you know, tethered
operations and using remote operated vehicles, and so I designed
a system where I could be in that kind of
(08:47):
command center. It's also based loosely on NASA as well.
And then I found my own remote operated people, which
I put a Facebook add out, and you know, looking
for skinny scientists that had skills to climb and cave
and work in extreme environments. And I selected six just
(09:11):
remarkable scientists. It just happened to be women. That journey
has continued and we've constantly advanced the technology. We have
Wi Fi in the cave. Now it's a lot more sophisticated,
but we still have all that hardwiring. It goes in
there and I sit at the top with other scientists
and we monitor and watch over their shoulders and and
(09:32):
help them excavate the few people that could get into
that space. It's it was. It was a lot of fun,
very dramatic, I'll admit at times frustrating that you know,
I couldn't be there, and they would bring each piece
out after, you know, carefully excavating it, documenting it, and
then it would become part of a broader study it.
(09:53):
It's an extreme environment. It's an environment that can kill you,
and it's uh and I think it's probably pretty unique
amongst the world's you know, search for human origins, a
pretty unique environment to actually be physically working and constantly
constantly adapting changing, I mean the way you do it.
(10:14):
I think you can actually see that probably better in
the book than the documentary, where you actually feel as
we keep adapting things along the way, trying to improvise
and make it better as we hit roadblocks.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, I found both the documentary and the book we're
highly illustrated in different ways. I mean, obviously we're getting
some of the actual footage in the documentary, but you
have some some wonderful illustrations in the book that you know,
just lay out exactly how the cave system is oriented,
and then your descriptions of when you actually go down
(10:52):
and then have to ascend back up. That was some
of that was just very harowing to read.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
It gives me PTSD even reading that, and I wrote it.
It was also tough to watch that on the Netflix
stock movie. You you can imagine because the for your listeners,
what ultimately happened was, after deciding that we couldn't go
forward with the Barrel publication until we sort of sorted
(11:19):
out a few critical questions, I decided to make the
attempt in you know, turning fifty seven. It wasn't gonna
be many times I was going to be able to
attempt an extreme journey like this, and so I lost
the weight got in there. I knew it was going
to be terrible because I've told the world how terrible
it is. I had no idea how awful it was.
(11:41):
And it was a very strange experience. You know. I've
been an explorer all my life, and I've been in
life and death situation several times. But this was different
because I was having to make conscious choices to push
beyond places that I really did know deep in my
mind I might not be able to get back out of.
And those are those are hard. You learn a lot
(12:03):
about yourself and in those sort of moments when you
make a choice like that and and pass through it.
Going down was awful. Coming up was the most terrible
and wonderful thing in my whole life, you know. And
I had to I had to make a decision, you know.
I tried to remove a body part, you know, because
(12:25):
I was stuck and and I'd never been in that
situation before, you know, I'd never been in the kind
of situation where you have to make a deeply a
decision to try and hurt yourself to get out of something,
and you learn you learn a lot about yourself in
that situation too. But I obviously I'm here now. I
(12:45):
obviously did get out, but it's about as close to
not surviving at e vent as I've ever been.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Like even the names of sort of the three phases
to get down to that main chamber, it implies this
kind of my journey. You have, like the Superman crawl,
which already sounds harrowing. You go up the dragon's back,
which sounds very mythic, but then the shoot, right, the
shoot is the real choke point here.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
That's right. So you know, Superman's crawl, by the way,
is just named because you had to extend one arm
in the kind of flying Superman pose to fit through it.
Most people did. And there was this awful rock in
the middle of it that you had to crawl over.
And then you enter this giant, beautiful chamber dragons back
and up this jagged series of rocks. It's almost forty
(13:33):
feet tall, which if you fall off, you die, you
know kind of thing. And then you get to the
top and you stare down into this crevasse, into this
labyrinth of narrow squeezes and things, and you know, slide
in there and down you go in a place that
there's no point in it, that rocks aren't pressing on
(13:56):
both sides of your chest, almost no point in it
that you can move maneuver your head anywhere but down
and usually at an angle because it's just narrow enough
to just wide enough to you know, a helmet to fit.
It's tough, it's it's it's a hard space, but it is,
you know. While I was in there too, though, you
(14:16):
can actually see that home in the LETTI who was
thinner than we were, who had a smaller head than
we were, who had more powerful hands, grasping hands and
powerful shoulders, would have moved through their very different We're
just a bunch of big, clumsy apes in a space
we're not supposed to be, and they would have, I think,
moved through there very very differently.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
We think they are. They would have been arboreal, or
more arboreal than the nuts, right, so.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Careful about ar boreal. Better climbers. Our boreal means trees.
I think they could have done very well in trees, obviously,
and almost certainly climb them. But I think they were
very good rock climbers. Took and they have these curved
fingers and these powerful joint and they're very light and
build so I think they would have been very very
good rock climbers.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah. I love one of the parts in the book
where you're talking about having to navigate the Shoot and
you're imagining them moving rather effortlessly through that same space.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Yeah, you know I was. When I was I had
a lot of time in that space, a lot more
time than I'd like to think about. And you know,
part of what I was doing there was also looking
around and seeing the space in a very different way
when the first explorers had gone in there. The space
is so narrow that you really can't get cameras in
(15:35):
there to give any reflection about what is. We can't
get basic measuring tools, or we couldn't. We now have
done that, and so it took on this sort of
mythical thing of the Shoot that you talk about, and
actually was even drawn by some of our in our
early signific papers as a tube, you know, this vertical
tube from one place to the other, and it's not
at all. It turns out it's elabyrinth. And I'm not
(15:58):
sure how that sort of mythology got stuck even into
the science. We're now rewriting that. But that's why I
call it the Shoot labyrinth. Now it's not a uniform pipe.
Why is all this so important? Because this is one
of the hardest things that people have to understand why
this place especial and why wouldn't Aletti go to all
(16:21):
that effort just to put it's dead in there. I
ha's so many people who who It's very interesting. As
people talk to me about this, they go, but why
would they do that? And you know, I had a
very interesting experience. I was in London recently and I
was talking to someone about this and we were seeing
up on one of those high buildings in central London
and the cathedrals right right behind it, and their back
(16:44):
was to the cathedral, and I was looking at them,
and they said, you know, why would anyway? I just
can't understand why they would go to such effort for
their dead. And I went, you know, I just gestured
with my hand out the window to this gigantic cathedral.
The tens of thousands of people had built all this
tribute to death, and you know, we go to huge,
(17:04):
huge efforts to deal with that. We built awso warries,
we build catacombs under major cities, we build pyramids, we
build cathedrals, We dig holes six feet in the ground
when there's no need to and put bodies in them.
And yet here we say, as humans go. But why
would someone go to that extent for their loved ones?
And the answer is because they did. Even though they
(17:28):
didn't have our brain. Even though they didn't you know,
they aren't us, they clearly carried those same emotions and
feelings about death and perhaps the afterlife and things like that,
but certainly the emotions of death and love to to
make sure that their kin did not undergo the often
(17:52):
horrific processes that occur to things that are just left
to the decay process or an a the process of
scavengine that goes on outside, which is not particularly pleasant.
Whatever was their motivation they did that thing.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Now, as you discussed, there are of course other ways
that bones can find their way into caves and cave systems.
How do we eliminate such possibilities as predators bringing bones
down or water washing them down into the complex.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
So that's just from a process of scientific analysis and
also a process of elimination. If carnivores or scavengers are
dealing with the dead, then they leave marks on them,
leave tooth marks, scratch marks, they dismember. They're doing it
almost certainly to eat the bodies, you know, because they're
(18:53):
not collecting. Humans are hominins and so that leaves very
character damage. So that doesn't exist on this very very
large sample of home on Letty and we're over thirty individuals, remember,
and lot thousands of bones, so there's no evidence of that.
So you can eliminate scavengers and predators. Then you get
(19:17):
to the point of, well, how do you know they
just all didn't go down there and die? So the
first part of that was, well, if they did, only
one species did that. That is, they went again and again,
and they did it over time. We can see that
there are events posed, imposed on events imposed on events,
so there's time involved in the accumulation, so that would
(19:40):
be odd, it wouldn't be impossible. But that was actually
for the first several years our initial hypothesis that they
were perhaps being brought there and just left there. It
was only when we then began to see that the
floor was actually not a bone bed, it was actually
sterile floor that then was interrupted by a pit or
(20:04):
a hole dug into the floor. That material was removed,
disrupting part of the sedimentary layers in the floor. A
fleshed body was put in. And the reason we know
that is that parts of bodies are articulated. And you
can see how the body dee compressed itself in the
(20:25):
sediments as it as it as it deteriorated, as the
spaces uh decayed within it. And then that body was
covered with dirt, the same dirt from the hole. We
can see the mixed up sedimentary layers. And then the
body went underwent natural collapse and decay and the and
the and the material sediment, and we can show all that.
You can show that through the analysis of the sedimentology
(20:48):
and the structure. Some people I know don't like that,
and one of the reasons is that simply we consider
calling that a grave or a burial a human thing.
And so you know, if you don't want to call
it a grave, then it is a hole dug into
the floor with a body in it, covered with dirt.
(21:12):
You can call that what you want, but the implication
is is that they did that. Oh oh sorry, by
the way, sorry you asked about water. Water leaves very
characteristic geological signatures when water moves sediment. Anyone who's been
to a stream can see what happens. When water moves.
You get sorting, you get different sized rocks and pebbles
(21:33):
and things, so there's no sign of that. There's no
significant water movement of anything in that cave system.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Now, in terms of them bringing the dead down through
the cave system to this chamber, it's thought then that
they would have had fire, they would have had some
sort of light.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
So we can see evidence of fire on the roof
of that chamber, their soot blackened into the flow stones
that have grown over it. In fact, while I was
in the chamber, my colleague doctor Kenelway Mola Panne was
in dragons back doing an excavation and discovered at the
same moment I was in there a hearth. She uncovered
a hearth where they had been cooking animal remains in
(22:17):
the adjacent chamber. Now that's that's kind of cool, because
there are no animal remains in the dental letti chamber
where the burials are. There are animal remains in the
dragon's back chamber, but there are no dental letti remains
in the Dragon's back chamber. So you've got this this
what appears to be two differential uses of space, one
(22:39):
where they cooked animal remains, the other where they buried
their dead.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Wow. Now coming back to this, this cross hatch. Tell
us about this cross hatch you discovered, and I mean,
and there are so many additional follow but like the
similarities to other marks that have been discovered, Like what
are we to make of all of this?
Speaker 3 (23:00):
So when I got into the cave, I had one
of these and it's worth telling that moment again because
it is. It was a really interesting moment. I decided
I was not going to take any digital images or
pictures because I've been watching this thing through a digital
screen for seven years, and so I decided to narrate it,
to just talk. And if you watch Netflix documentary, you'll
(23:23):
actually see me talking into a cell phone as I narrate,
because I think that sometimes you see things better when
you're forced to storytell as you as you, as you
explain things. And I was narrating the space, and it
was clear to me almost immediately that my explorers in
our team, our colleagues, had missed things, and one was
(23:46):
the space had been altered. You could actually see where
things like flowstones that's a layer of line like a rock,
had been broken and moved uphill. And so it was
very clear to me that we had misunderstood that they
had interacted with this space. And as I was narrating that,
there's this passageway that runs from where we land just
(24:08):
after the shoot labyrinth where we land called the hill
Ante Chamber, there's a like a doorway that goes between
there and the next chamber, which is Deniletti Chamber, another
burial chamber. And as I looked at that doorway, you
can hear me say, wow, it looks like a door.
It's smaller than I. And then you hear me pause.
(24:29):
Because I'm an archaeologist, you know, I spent my life
around doorways, and what we humans put around doorways always
it's something meaning signs. We tell you what's on the
other side of the doorway, or who's behind the doorway,
or all the or exit or a bathroom here, or
whatever the signal is. And I saw these non natural
(24:55):
etchings in the wall. I couldn't believe it. Squares, wreck
you know, rectangles, triangles, equal signs, crosses, right side up
and upside down. And there was even this sort of
fish shape thing that you know that may not be
what their intent of it was, but looks like a
fish shaped thing with an accent, and it appears to
(25:16):
have been covered with some substance, and I could not
believe what I was looking at. And my explorers had
walked right by the And that's largely because pathfinder syndrome.
You know, once people have been in a space, they
develop a sort of backyard syndrome. It becomes too familiar
and you quit looking at the space around you because
you know that it's been seen.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
You know, do that experiment at home where you've you know,
if you right now draw your own kitchen from memory
and then draw a place that you've just entered, the
place you've just entered, you'll draw better than your kitchen
because you've you've amalgamated your kitchen into a safe environment,
and you'll be surprised how poorly you you actually do
(26:00):
that that thing. And so I saw that, and I
turned on a black light. I always carry a UV
light with me because many minerals fluorescent caves. And I
had this hallucination. I had this un optical light shift
as they float. You've seen like Queen Scambit or something
where you see the chest pieces move and in the
air above, or a beautiful mind and the equations come.
(26:21):
And that happened to me, and scientifically, I know it happened,
you know, because I created an optical light shift, like
you do when you look in your rear view mirror
at night, and you've ever noticed how the headlights float
away from the the light of the headlights. That's a
that's a neural processing thing that's going on in your brain.
And so I know why it happened, but it freaked
(26:43):
me out completely as it happened. Had to shut the
light off, and I was embarrassed about it. And because
it it, you know, they moved and then and then
later found the hashtag on the way out, which is
it's a it's a cross hatch or that, and it
has these little pounding marks in it where it looks
like it's been pounded hundreds and hundreds of times. You
(27:05):
can see the little pinny and you can see those
in the illustration in the book, all these hundreds of
little pits that are done, you know. And then they
share these similarities. You know. We were having a beer
after I got out of it, and I took one
one cell phone picture while I was down there, and
that was of this cross hatch, and I showed it
to John Hawks and Augustine for winter and I just
(27:26):
turned it and immediately Augustine leapt up and said, I
need my car keys and he ran away, and I
was like what. And John Hawks started looking like a
teenager on his cell phone, and I'm like holding this,
and I'm like, you know, I almost died to get
this picture at least, And both of them turned around
with their phone simultaneously and showed me the Gibraltar Gorm's
(27:47):
Cave cross hatch etching that had been done by Neanderthal
sixty thousand years ago, and it's the same. And I
remember that moment so vividly because when John I looked
to John's I thought, why is he photo shopping the
crosshatch I just took and making it blue? And then
I realized he doesn't have the picture. I'm the only
(28:09):
one with the picture. And then, you know, the remarkable
thing was these are two people, two of the few
people in the entire planet who physically seen that, and
so their mind immediately went to that. And of course
there are also similarities with the oldest, the oldest geometric
engravings from places like Blumboss that are attributed to Homo
(28:31):
sapiens at seventy eight thousand years Why is that that's
something that we're working on right now. We've assembled a
team of neural scientists, people who study geometric rock guard artists.
I suspect it's because it's part of the shared mind
of our deep ancestry, and that I suspect that those
(28:55):
shared symbols, which by the way, are all very familiar
to us today, the symbols we use for mathematics, music,
these type of things, and I suspect that they may
have something to do with the way we formulate math,
the way we formulate language in sort of a symbolic
(29:16):
way inside of our head. And I think it comes
from very deep time. I think that's the only way
to really explain how they're shared between three species. It
really have almost no connection to each other at those
temporal periods. And also I think, you know, we kind
of knew that must be true, the way geometric rock
(29:38):
art around the world all looks the same, and that
they're clearly something inside of us, and there was something
in the Letti and there's something in Neanderthals. So it's
kind of cool to think, maybe, as this science goes on,
that what those panels inside of that those burial chambers
really are is the Resetta stone to the mind and
maybe we can begin to unlock that.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, I mean, just looking at like the comparison, I
guess like you can imagine that the simplest way of
looking at it would be like, Okay, I make right
angles that don't occur in nature that frequently, and this
kind of marks this as a place where I have,
you know, impressed my will. But then there's there seems
to be so much else going on with these markings
(30:21):
in addition to that.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Absolutely, and I think that part of the fun is that,
you know, we've never really had markings from another species
to compare to. That's always you know, even the Neanderthal ones.
One it's a singular event. And two, although there is
now begin to emerge some other rock art by Neanderthals,
(30:43):
but they have a big brain, you know, they have
this gigantic, huge brain, and and so they're kind of us.
This is by something that doesn't have our brain. And
so I think part of the real excitement going forward
is going to be what do they mean? Can we
ever know? Oh? What they mean? Now? I have hope
with things like neural imaging, and you know, you've seen
(31:05):
some of these experiments where they can actually visualize what
the brain is seen. I think that. You know, a
friend of mine, Brian Moure Rescue, who wrote The Immortality Key,
when I showed him some of the images, he was
just having to be in London. He'd just come out
of this experiment where he was watching people given psychedelics
and and then they were asked to draw what they're seeing,
(31:28):
and they draw those same images. You know there's something
there and maybe this will be what we need to
break through that.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Now you talk about the experience of being in in
that cave, and this is obviously like a novel environment
for you and I guess cardon the pun, but it
would have also been a novel environment for the homo
idea as well. Right, do you feel like there is
and maybe this is just stretching too far? Is there
(32:09):
any kind of you think there's any kind of like
kinship between like the way you interpret such an environment,
how your senses adapt to such an environment, and what
they might have experienced.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
You know, I speak about I think the experience of
being in caves a lot in the book, and you
knows caves are not natural to humans. They're not our space.
Even though we use the term like caveman all the time.
The evidence that humans go deep into cave systems is
a very very recent phenomena by and large. I mean,
(32:41):
there are a few exceptions, but we don't like to
move beyond the twilight zone, you know, where there's still
light filtering in. We just it's just not our space. No,
Letty clearly was much more comfortable in those spaces. Having
said that, when you're in those spaces, and you know,
your whole focus narrows down to artificial lighting, and you
(33:05):
lose a sense of sound because sound isn't very important
to you in those spaces, and so you you lose that,
but your sense of touch is increased, and these things
and and you start seeing these spaces and things in
these artificial lights and fire, by the way, is artificial light.
Of course, they do have an effect on you. And
(33:26):
I think that you know, if you think about the
spaces that that humans term is symbolic or sacred or whatever,
we're often kind of replicating that the droll like ceilings,
the the idea of disassociation of places that are are
are natural to you. We tend to lower light levels,
(33:47):
you know, and and and change the way that that
your eye is perceiving things, and you know, and flame
is particularly good at that because it can add motion,
and it can add it can add the the pception
of movement in spaces like this, and so so you know,
I think that they are powerful spaces. I don't want,
(34:09):
you know, I'm a scientist. I'm trying to not go there,
but it they do affect you when you're in these spaces,
and particularly when you understand that, you know, as I
guess I did very deeply that you know, they chose
this space, and they chose this space for their dead,
and you'd have to have a pretty cold heart for
(34:31):
that not to affect you when you're in a space
like that.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
So it's possible then that that what we're seeing, it
was certainly is a ritual behavior. But then is it
this sort of thing that, at least broadly speaking, like
over time, that ritual takes on other meanings and maybe
like religious ideas emerge out of that.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
I've got to be very careful because you know, there
are thousands of colleagues with daggers on when you use
the word ritual loosely or what it has, because these
have human meaning, and you know, we're dealing with a
non human at least at the grade level of anatomy.
And you're dealing with a non human. So where this
(35:15):
takes you, I don't know. I think that's going to
be part of the next years and decades excitement we're
going to go there. I mean, they have used this
entire subterranean space, they have altered it. We don't have
evidence that they're living there. What they appear to be
doing is interacting at least at least the deeper spaces
(35:38):
in these ways. And you know, I have some colleagues
who say that must be spirituality and religion. You know,
it's a form of religion. I don't think we can
be there yet. But you know, the fact is is
that the last couple of decades have shown us the
(35:58):
arrogance of human exceptism. And you know, as we've begun
to actually more openly study animal behavior, we understand now,
of course, that cetaceans have culture, elephants have culture, that
other primates have cultures, that chimps and gorilla certainly have cultures.
And yet we had eliminated that from things that are
(36:19):
closer to us, like Homoletti. And I think we have
to start the field over in some ways, I think
we have to start again. I mean, we had approached
everything is if the null hypothesis of finding a dead
hominine body was natural, you had to explain it naturally
as opposed to the null hypothesis being cultural. And I
(36:41):
think that was a mistake. I think it was a mistake.
And I think a big thing that's going to come
out of this moment in history is a recognition that
we had made an air of the science. We had
deculturized things that clearly must have had culture, and in
doing that, we weren't seeing their cultures. And I will
bet you that what will flow out of this discovery
(37:03):
and this moment is a new acceptance of these ancient
human relatives being cultural beings. And I think that's really
exciting because that will lead us into not missing things
in the way we have missed things before.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Absolutely. Now, coming back to the book, particularly and specifically,
you've authored other books before. What really propelled this book
into being? What led you to write and what did
you really want to get out there with Cave of Bones?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
So this book started as a completely different book. It
literally started as a follow up, a five year follow
up to almost human which was the first book on
the discovery of Homonoletti and what that meant. And it
was meant to take all of the research that had
been done and kind of the size it to where
(38:01):
we were. And we were in a very strange place
when I began developing the concept of this book with
my co author John Hawks, and that is we had
one of the best known hominine species ever discovered, but
all we had were its bones. And so it was
meant to be this kind of journey around the state
(38:21):
of where we were and ending with this sort of
but we need more. And then the burials were discovered,
and that became the center of the book because you know,
I literally thought when those burials, when we recognized that
those were holes in the ground, dug with bodies and
them covered by dirt from the hole, I thought that
(38:42):
was gonna be the biggest discovery of my life. You know,
here we were, you know, we're right into now this
sacred space of humanity, you know, burial of the dead,
and all the things you talked about that spill out
of that self recognition of mortality, possibly spirituality, all those
things fall deeply from that. And then I got in
(39:04):
the chamber and saw the symbols and you're like, wow,
the fire funny enough, was never surprising. Fire has been
around for millions of years. I mean, of course they
had fire, it just was I had talked our entire
team out of the evidence that the evidence for fire
was going to be easy to see when it was
right in front of us the entire time. So you
know that's my fault. But you know, the symbols are
(39:28):
are are are different level of stuff. But all that
in combination is the book. And it became a journey,
and the book became very We trashed the first version
of the book and then it became very easy to write,
and actually wrote it very very quickly because it was
a narrative journey of a very deeply personal experience with
(39:53):
the discovery of the species, discovery of the culture around
this species, and in the end it gave me the
chance to explore meaning and a very in a very
open way and discuss some of these concepts of human
exceptionalism and and where I think this field is going awesome.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Well, the documentary kicks off with with a with a
great sense of mystery and I and I also have
to say, like the book just really like literally throws
you right into the cave. There you are in the cave.
It has a very I think sometimes people might some
listeners might be hesitant to pick up a book about
this topic. But but I mean, really, this one just
(40:35):
throws you right into the cave. It has a very
riveting beginning and just doesn't let go for the entire length.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
Thank you for saying so. I mean, it's as I said,
it's it's been a very personal journey for me. It's uh.
And and I think that that you know, there's there's
a lot of meaning in home on No Letti and
a lot of good that humans as individuals can take
out from understanding that that there have been other species
(41:02):
with complex cultures. This thing that we're living right now,
it's neither the first, nor is it some sort of
God given right to be because it's happened before. And
I think that's an important message, you know, the idea
that you know, because I think that anyone who looks
around the planet understands that the idea of human exceptionalism
(41:26):
is part of why we do so much damage to
this place. We think we own it, and we think
it was given to us, and by learning that there
have been other experiments in this you know, maybe we
should step off of that high force or stool or
whatever and step down a little bit, as we kind
(41:48):
of are at this critical moment in human history where
literally the balance of life on this planet is at
stake because of us.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
All right, well, we have we have the book, we
have the documentary, the additional books. Where else can listeners
go to learn more and or follow your work?
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Right? So, you can follow me on Twitter at Lee
or Berger. I'm also on Facebook at Prof Lee Burger,
and if you follow National Geographic. You know, we're there
a lot, a lot of presents in that space, and
there's going to be more so, you know, and there
are the older writings. You know, it's quite fun if
you go back and read Skull in the Rock, Almost Human,
(42:26):
and then this chapter because it's kind of a narrative
of the history of this science, and even further back
Footsteps of Eve, which was in the nineteen nineties, where
you can actually kind of understand the evolution of this
whole science over the last thirty plus years that at
least from my perspective that I've experienced it in you know,
(42:47):
what has got to be the greatest age of exploration
we're living through right now.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Awesome. Well, thank you once more for coming on the
show talking about your work, the book, the documentary. It's
been a play.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
It's great to be here.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Thanks again to Lee Berger for coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Here.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
The book again is Cave of Bones, a true story
of discovery, adventure, and human origins, and it's out now
in physical, digital, and audio formats. The documentary Unknown Cave
of Bones is currently streaming on Netflix. Thanks as always
to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show, and
if you want to reach out to us, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
(43:27):
dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Four Fox
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. On today's episode of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, I'm going to be speaking with noted
paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, author of the new book Cave of Bones,
a true story of discovery, adventure, and human origins, and
he's also featured in the Netflix documentary Unknown Cave of Bones.
(00:34):
Let's get right to the interview. Hi, Lee, Thanks for
coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
It's great to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
To start off, just really generally, how should listeners understand
the mission and the challenges of paleoanthropology.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
So paleoanthropology is, in its loosest definition, the search for
understanding human origins, but it's a little broader than that.
It's also hominine origins. And the reason I make that
distinction is that we humans tend to self center everything
around ourselves, and hominins are bipedal apes that are part
(01:12):
of our journey, but they're not all our direct ancestors.
If you will. There's been a mass and almost braided
stream of ancient relatives that walked on two legs that
are closer related to us than chimpanzees and gorillas are
so there if you imagine evolution of sort of coming
(01:34):
from a last common ancestor, gorilla's broke off first, then chimpanzees,
bona bo's breakoff, and all the rest of that story
between us and that moment are the hominins as we evolved,
bipedalism and special adaptations. We also, though, study not only
the physical morphology the kind of the way that evolution happens.
(01:57):
We study the culture of these ancients spies, and that's
going to be I think particularly important to these most
recent discoveries.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Now, you were previously the Philip Tobias Chair in Paleoanthropology
at the University of Atvadeschrand. I know you've taken on
some new titles recently. What is your role now with
National Geographic and how does all of this factor into
your other positions and your work?
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Right, So, I am an explorer in residence is my
primary job at National Geographic Society. I'm also a Senior
Carnegie Science Fellow. That's a very recent appointment, as I've
joined that organization largely to push the sort of hard
sciences in our field and the relationship between that remarkable
group of scientists and organization. I still maintain a position
(02:46):
at VITZ an honorary professor, and I'm director of the
Center for the Exploration of the Deep Human Journey, so
all of those intersect with each other. I run a
very large science program that has a sort of collaborative
collegial group of scientists from around the world of over
one hundred and sixty at this time. It's growing almost
(03:08):
on a daily basis. That so it's a very large
science program. Some of those are based in the sort
of traditional university setting, others of them are based in
sort of institutional things like Carnegie or museums.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Now the book is Cave of Bones, a true story
of discovery, adventure and human origins. And then of course
we also have the Netflix documentary Unknown Cave of Bones.
They take readers and viewers to a particular cave system
in South Africa. Can you tell us about the Rising
Star Cave Complex?
Speaker 3 (03:42):
So the Rising Star Cave complex came deeply into my
life in twenty thirteen. I'd known about it before then.
It was a very well known system of caves where
amateur cavers and I'd even caved in in the nineteen
nineties just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, if you will,
a huge network of subterranean system almost four kilometers long.
(04:06):
So what is that two and a half miles or
so of underground passages networks, small and somewhat larger cave
systems that goes down maybe a two hundred feet or
so before you hit ground water. But it's like a
it's hard to describe for people who tend to think
of like the big mammoth cave systems. It's a latticework cave.
(04:29):
So it's like skyscrapers that are buried in the ground
with different floors, and you can move and traverse up
and down these and it can be impossibly difficult. And
so both the book and the Netflix documentary followed us
over a period of almost a year as we were
testing the idea of whether we had discovered burials in
(04:52):
a non human species, and that is a species called Homoletti,
which is a very small brained hominin. It's a a
brain slightly larger than a chimpanzee, but it was a
biped It walked on two legs and existed sort of
out of time and place. If we looked at a
hominin like that, we would normally think, oh, it's two million,
(05:13):
two and a half million years old based on its
entire anatomy. It turned out that homon Aletti is much
younger than that, something like two hundred and forty thousand
to three hundred and thirty thousand years before present. So
in finding these possible burials, and we go through that
sort of period of analysis and looking at in this
(05:35):
deep dark chamber almost three hundred and fifty feet back
into a system, we knew it was going to be
one of the most controversial things ever said, because until
that moment of seeing those the idea was that really
only humans and things very much like humans, like neanderthals
(05:57):
Bury their dead. It was our gg, one of the
last things we had that separated ourselves from the animal
kingdom and animal behavior. And so both the Netflix show
and the book carry us through that period and then
to what I kind of referred to as seventy two
hours of remarkable discovery, where I ended up losing about
(06:20):
fifty five pounds and got down into this incredibly difficult
to get to space where only forty six people had
been before almost died in the process of doing that,
I needed answers to some questions before we published that
burial paper that really I kind of only had the
broad experience to answer. And it was at that point
(06:40):
that I discovered etchings on the wall, engravings on the wall,
and evidence of fire on the roof. And then that
kind of broke everything free, because we suddenly realized there
was evidence of fire everywhere. And so now we're at
this kind of moment where my colleagues and I have
announced to the world that we believe we have discovered
(07:02):
the first non human species culture in history.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yes, having watched the documentary and read the book, this
is all this is just really mind blowing. I'm not
even sure of which direction to start with first, like
just the sheer challenges of the cave system, or just
how potentially profound that the discoveries are. I guess I
guess maybe starting with the setting a little bit before
(07:27):
you even ventured down there to the main chamber, how
did you go about carrying out these explorations, like with
the command center and finding the right people to send
down there.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
So when I was first shown where this material was,
I sent my then fifteen year old, very skinny son
down there to verify that it was real, and I
was shown by these two amateur cavers that I had
enlisted where this was. I knew I would never get
into that space. You know, if you imagine this vertical
squeeze that that moves in various directions, that squeezes down
(08:02):
to seven and a half inches in places my physic
I used to choke, my ego would never fit much
less my physique. I designed a system to work in
the space based on I've been very close friends with
both James Cameron and Bob Ballard and have been admirers
of the way they've handled their expeditions, which include, you know,
(08:25):
sort of deep sea work where you can't often go
to these places. Now James did, of course, and so
is Bob, but you can't often go to these places.
So they use remote operation. They use you know, tethered
operations and using remote operated vehicles, and so I designed
a system where I could be in that kind of
(08:47):
command center. It's also based loosely on NASA as well.
And then I found my own remote operated people, which
I put a Facebook add out, and you know, looking
for skinny scientists that had skills to climb and cave
and work in extreme environments. And I selected six just
(09:11):
remarkable scientists. It just happened to be women. That journey
has continued and we've constantly advanced the technology. We have
Wi Fi in the cave. Now it's a lot more sophisticated,
but we still have all that hardwiring. It goes in
there and I sit at the top with other scientists
and we monitor and watch over their shoulders and and
(09:32):
help them excavate the few people that could get into
that space. It's it was. It was a lot of fun,
very dramatic, I'll admit at times frustrating that you know,
I couldn't be there, and they would bring each piece
out after, you know, carefully excavating it, documenting it, and
then it would become part of a broader study it.
(09:53):
It's an extreme environment. It's an environment that can kill you,
and it's uh and I think it's probably pretty unique
amongst the world's you know, search for human origins, a
pretty unique environment to actually be physically working and constantly
constantly adapting changing, I mean the way you do it.
(10:14):
I think you can actually see that probably better in
the book than the documentary, where you actually feel as
we keep adapting things along the way, trying to improvise
and make it better as we hit roadblocks.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, I found both the documentary and the book we're
highly illustrated in different ways. I mean, obviously we're getting
some of the actual footage in the documentary, but you
have some some wonderful illustrations in the book that you know,
just lay out exactly how the cave system is oriented,
and then your descriptions of when you actually go down
(10:52):
and then have to ascend back up. That was some
of that was just very harowing to read.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
It gives me PTSD even reading that, and I wrote it.
It was also tough to watch that on the Netflix
stock movie. You you can imagine because the for your listeners,
what ultimately happened was, after deciding that we couldn't go
forward with the Barrel publication until we sort of sorted
(11:19):
out a few critical questions, I decided to make the
attempt in you know, turning fifty seven. It wasn't gonna
be many times I was going to be able to
attempt an extreme journey like this, and so I lost
the weight got in there. I knew it was going
to be terrible because I've told the world how terrible
it is. I had no idea how awful it was.
(11:41):
And it was a very strange experience. You know. I've
been an explorer all my life, and I've been in
life and death situation several times. But this was different
because I was having to make conscious choices to push
beyond places that I really did know deep in my
mind I might not be able to get back out of.
And those are those are hard. You learn a lot
(12:03):
about yourself and in those sort of moments when you
make a choice like that and and pass through it.
Going down was awful. Coming up was the most terrible
and wonderful thing in my whole life, you know. And
I had to I had to make a decision, you know.
I tried to remove a body part, you know, because
(12:25):
I was stuck and and I'd never been in that
situation before, you know, I'd never been in the kind
of situation where you have to make a deeply a
decision to try and hurt yourself to get out of something,
and you learn you learn a lot about yourself in
that situation too. But I obviously I'm here now. I
(12:45):
obviously did get out, but it's about as close to
not surviving at e vent as I've ever been.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Like even the names of sort of the three phases
to get down to that main chamber, it implies this
kind of my journey. You have, like the Superman crawl,
which already sounds harrowing. You go up the dragon's back,
which sounds very mythic, but then the shoot, right, the
shoot is the real choke point here.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
That's right. So you know, Superman's crawl, by the way,
is just named because you had to extend one arm
in the kind of flying Superman pose to fit through it.
Most people did. And there was this awful rock in
the middle of it that you had to crawl over.
And then you enter this giant, beautiful chamber dragons back
and up this jagged series of rocks. It's almost forty
(13:33):
feet tall, which if you fall off, you die, you
know kind of thing. And then you get to the
top and you stare down into this crevasse, into this
labyrinth of narrow squeezes and things, and you know, slide
in there and down you go in a place that
there's no point in it, that rocks aren't pressing on
(13:56):
both sides of your chest, almost no point in it
that you can move maneuver your head anywhere but down
and usually at an angle because it's just narrow enough
to just wide enough to you know, a helmet to fit.
It's tough, it's it's it's a hard space, but it is,
you know. While I was in there too, though, you
(14:16):
can actually see that home in the LETTI who was
thinner than we were, who had a smaller head than
we were, who had more powerful hands, grasping hands and
powerful shoulders, would have moved through their very different We're
just a bunch of big, clumsy apes in a space
we're not supposed to be, and they would have, I think,
moved through there very very differently.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
We think they are. They would have been arboreal, or
more arboreal than the nuts, right, so.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Careful about ar boreal. Better climbers. Our boreal means trees.
I think they could have done very well in trees, obviously,
and almost certainly climb them. But I think they were
very good rock climbers. Took and they have these curved
fingers and these powerful joint and they're very light and
build so I think they would have been very very
good rock climbers.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah. I love one of the parts in the book
where you're talking about having to navigate the Shoot and
you're imagining them moving rather effortlessly through that same space.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Yeah, you know I was. When I was I had
a lot of time in that space, a lot more
time than I'd like to think about. And you know,
part of what I was doing there was also looking
around and seeing the space in a very different way
when the first explorers had gone in there. The space
is so narrow that you really can't get cameras in
(15:35):
there to give any reflection about what is. We can't
get basic measuring tools, or we couldn't. We now have
done that, and so it took on this sort of
mythical thing of the Shoot that you talk about, and
actually was even drawn by some of our in our
early signific papers as a tube, you know, this vertical
tube from one place to the other, and it's not
at all. It turns out it's elabyrinth. And I'm not
(15:58):
sure how that sort of mythology got stuck even into
the science. We're now rewriting that. But that's why I
call it the Shoot labyrinth. Now it's not a uniform pipe.
Why is all this so important? Because this is one
of the hardest things that people have to understand why
this place especial and why wouldn't Aletti go to all
(16:21):
that effort just to put it's dead in there. I
ha's so many people who who It's very interesting. As
people talk to me about this, they go, but why
would they do that? And you know, I had a
very interesting experience. I was in London recently and I
was talking to someone about this and we were seeing
up on one of those high buildings in central London
and the cathedrals right right behind it, and their back
(16:44):
was to the cathedral, and I was looking at them,
and they said, you know, why would anyway? I just
can't understand why they would go to such effort for
their dead. And I went, you know, I just gestured
with my hand out the window to this gigantic cathedral.
The tens of thousands of people had built all this
tribute to death, and you know, we go to huge,
(17:04):
huge efforts to deal with that. We built awso warries,
we build catacombs under major cities, we build pyramids, we
build cathedrals, We dig holes six feet in the ground
when there's no need to and put bodies in them.
And yet here we say, as humans go. But why
would someone go to that extent for their loved ones?
And the answer is because they did. Even though they
(17:28):
didn't have our brain. Even though they didn't you know,
they aren't us, they clearly carried those same emotions and
feelings about death and perhaps the afterlife and things like that,
but certainly the emotions of death and love to to
make sure that their kin did not undergo the often
(17:52):
horrific processes that occur to things that are just left
to the decay process or an a the process of
scavengine that goes on outside, which is not particularly pleasant.
Whatever was their motivation they did that thing.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Now, as you discussed, there are of course other ways
that bones can find their way into caves and cave systems.
How do we eliminate such possibilities as predators bringing bones
down or water washing them down into the complex.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
So that's just from a process of scientific analysis and
also a process of elimination. If carnivores or scavengers are
dealing with the dead, then they leave marks on them,
leave tooth marks, scratch marks, they dismember. They're doing it
almost certainly to eat the bodies, you know, because they're
(18:53):
not collecting. Humans are hominins and so that leaves very
character damage. So that doesn't exist on this very very
large sample of home on Letty and we're over thirty individuals, remember,
and lot thousands of bones, so there's no evidence of that.
So you can eliminate scavengers and predators. Then you get
(19:17):
to the point of, well, how do you know they
just all didn't go down there and die? So the
first part of that was, well, if they did, only
one species did that. That is, they went again and again,
and they did it over time. We can see that
there are events posed, imposed on events imposed on events,
so there's time involved in the accumulation, so that would
(19:40):
be odd, it wouldn't be impossible. But that was actually
for the first several years our initial hypothesis that they
were perhaps being brought there and just left there. It
was only when we then began to see that the
floor was actually not a bone bed, it was actually
sterile floor that then was interrupted by a pit or
(20:04):
a hole dug into the floor. That material was removed,
disrupting part of the sedimentary layers in the floor. A
fleshed body was put in. And the reason we know
that is that parts of bodies are articulated. And you
can see how the body dee compressed itself in the
(20:25):
sediments as it as it as it deteriorated, as the
spaces uh decayed within it. And then that body was
covered with dirt, the same dirt from the hole. We
can see the mixed up sedimentary layers. And then the
body went underwent natural collapse and decay and the and
the and the material sediment, and we can show all that.
You can show that through the analysis of the sedimentology
(20:48):
and the structure. Some people I know don't like that,
and one of the reasons is that simply we consider
calling that a grave or a burial a human thing.
And so you know, if you don't want to call
it a grave, then it is a hole dug into
the floor with a body in it, covered with dirt.
(21:12):
You can call that what you want, but the implication
is is that they did that. Oh oh sorry, by
the way, sorry you asked about water. Water leaves very
characteristic geological signatures when water moves sediment. Anyone who's been
to a stream can see what happens. When water moves.
You get sorting, you get different sized rocks and pebbles
(21:33):
and things, so there's no sign of that. There's no
significant water movement of anything in that cave system.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Now, in terms of them bringing the dead down through
the cave system to this chamber, it's thought then that
they would have had fire, they would have had some
sort of light.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
So we can see evidence of fire on the roof
of that chamber, their soot blackened into the flow stones
that have grown over it. In fact, while I was
in the chamber, my colleague doctor Kenelway Mola Panne was
in dragons back doing an excavation and discovered at the
same moment I was in there a hearth. She uncovered
a hearth where they had been cooking animal remains in
(22:17):
the adjacent chamber. Now that's that's kind of cool, because
there are no animal remains in the dental letti chamber
where the burials are. There are animal remains in the
dragon's back chamber, but there are no dental letti remains
in the Dragon's back chamber. So you've got this this
what appears to be two differential uses of space, one
(22:39):
where they cooked animal remains, the other where they buried
their dead.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Wow. Now coming back to this, this cross hatch. Tell
us about this cross hatch you discovered, and I mean,
and there are so many additional follow but like the
similarities to other marks that have been discovered, Like what
are we to make of all of this?
Speaker 3 (23:00):
So when I got into the cave, I had one
of these and it's worth telling that moment again because
it is. It was a really interesting moment. I decided
I was not going to take any digital images or
pictures because I've been watching this thing through a digital
screen for seven years, and so I decided to narrate it,
to just talk. And if you watch Netflix documentary, you'll
(23:23):
actually see me talking into a cell phone as I narrate,
because I think that sometimes you see things better when
you're forced to storytell as you as you, as you
explain things. And I was narrating the space, and it
was clear to me almost immediately that my explorers in
our team, our colleagues, had missed things, and one was
(23:46):
the space had been altered. You could actually see where
things like flowstones that's a layer of line like a rock,
had been broken and moved uphill. And so it was
very clear to me that we had misunderstood that they
had interacted with this space. And as I was narrating that,
there's this passageway that runs from where we land just
(24:08):
after the shoot labyrinth where we land called the hill
Ante Chamber, there's a like a doorway that goes between
there and the next chamber, which is Deniletti Chamber, another
burial chamber. And as I looked at that doorway, you
can hear me say, wow, it looks like a door.
It's smaller than I. And then you hear me pause.
(24:29):
Because I'm an archaeologist, you know, I spent my life
around doorways, and what we humans put around doorways always
it's something meaning signs. We tell you what's on the
other side of the doorway, or who's behind the doorway,
or all the or exit or a bathroom here, or
whatever the signal is. And I saw these non natural
(24:55):
etchings in the wall. I couldn't believe it. Squares, wreck
you know, rectangles, triangles, equal signs, crosses, right side up
and upside down. And there was even this sort of
fish shape thing that you know that may not be
what their intent of it was, but looks like a
fish shaped thing with an accent, and it appears to
(25:16):
have been covered with some substance, and I could not
believe what I was looking at. And my explorers had
walked right by the And that's largely because pathfinder syndrome.
You know, once people have been in a space, they
develop a sort of backyard syndrome. It becomes too familiar
and you quit looking at the space around you because
you know that it's been seen.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
You know, do that experiment at home where you've you know,
if you right now draw your own kitchen from memory
and then draw a place that you've just entered, the
place you've just entered, you'll draw better than your kitchen
because you've you've amalgamated your kitchen into a safe environment,
and you'll be surprised how poorly you you actually do
(26:00):
that that thing. And so I saw that, and I
turned on a black light. I always carry a UV
light with me because many minerals fluorescent caves. And I
had this hallucination. I had this un optical light shift
as they float. You've seen like Queen Scambit or something
where you see the chest pieces move and in the
air above, or a beautiful mind and the equations come.
(26:21):
And that happened to me, and scientifically, I know it happened,
you know, because I created an optical light shift, like
you do when you look in your rear view mirror
at night, and you've ever noticed how the headlights float
away from the the light of the headlights. That's a
that's a neural processing thing that's going on in your brain.
And so I know why it happened, but it freaked
(26:43):
me out completely as it happened. Had to shut the
light off, and I was embarrassed about it. And because
it it, you know, they moved and then and then
later found the hashtag on the way out, which is
it's a it's a cross hatch or that, and it
has these little pounding marks in it where it looks
like it's been pounded hundreds and hundreds of times. You
(27:05):
can see the little pinny and you can see those
in the illustration in the book, all these hundreds of
little pits that are done, you know. And then they
share these similarities. You know. We were having a beer
after I got out of it, and I took one
one cell phone picture while I was down there, and
that was of this cross hatch, and I showed it
to John Hawks and Augustine for winter and I just
(27:26):
turned it and immediately Augustine leapt up and said, I
need my car keys and he ran away, and I
was like what. And John Hawks started looking like a
teenager on his cell phone, and I'm like holding this,
and I'm like, you know, I almost died to get
this picture at least, And both of them turned around
with their phone simultaneously and showed me the Gibraltar Gorm's
(27:47):
Cave cross hatch etching that had been done by Neanderthal
sixty thousand years ago, and it's the same. And I
remember that moment so vividly because when John I looked
to John's I thought, why is he photo shopping the
crosshatch I just took and making it blue? And then
I realized he doesn't have the picture. I'm the only
(28:09):
one with the picture. And then, you know, the remarkable
thing was these are two people, two of the few
people in the entire planet who physically seen that, and
so their mind immediately went to that. And of course
there are also similarities with the oldest, the oldest geometric
engravings from places like Blumboss that are attributed to Homo
(28:31):
sapiens at seventy eight thousand years Why is that that's
something that we're working on right now. We've assembled a
team of neural scientists, people who study geometric rock guard artists.
I suspect it's because it's part of the shared mind
of our deep ancestry, and that I suspect that those
(28:55):
shared symbols, which by the way, are all very familiar
to us today, the symbols we use for mathematics, music,
these type of things, and I suspect that they may
have something to do with the way we formulate math,
the way we formulate language in sort of a symbolic
(29:16):
way inside of our head. And I think it comes
from very deep time. I think that's the only way
to really explain how they're shared between three species. It
really have almost no connection to each other at those
temporal periods. And also I think, you know, we kind
of knew that must be true, the way geometric rock
(29:38):
art around the world all looks the same, and that
they're clearly something inside of us, and there was something
in the Letti and there's something in Neanderthals. So it's
kind of cool to think, maybe, as this science goes on,
that what those panels inside of that those burial chambers
really are is the Resetta stone to the mind and
maybe we can begin to unlock that.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
Yeah, I mean, just looking at like the comparison, I
guess like you can imagine that the simplest way of
looking at it would be like, Okay, I make right
angles that don't occur in nature that frequently, and this
kind of marks this as a place where I have,
you know, impressed my will. But then there's there seems
to be so much else going on with these markings
(30:21):
in addition to that.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Absolutely, and I think that part of the fun is that,
you know, we've never really had markings from another species
to compare to. That's always you know, even the Neanderthal ones.
One it's a singular event. And two, although there is
now begin to emerge some other rock art by Neanderthals,
(30:43):
but they have a big brain, you know, they have
this gigantic, huge brain, and and so they're kind of us.
This is by something that doesn't have our brain. And
so I think part of the real excitement going forward
is going to be what do they mean? Can we
ever know? Oh? What they mean? Now? I have hope
with things like neural imaging, and you know, you've seen
(31:05):
some of these experiments where they can actually visualize what
the brain is seen. I think that. You know, a
friend of mine, Brian Moure Rescue, who wrote The Immortality Key,
when I showed him some of the images, he was
just having to be in London. He'd just come out
of this experiment where he was watching people given psychedelics
and and then they were asked to draw what they're seeing,
(31:28):
and they draw those same images. You know there's something
there and maybe this will be what we need to
break through that.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Now you talk about the experience of being in in
that cave, and this is obviously like a novel environment
for you and I guess cardon the pun, but it
would have also been a novel environment for the homo
idea as well. Right, do you feel like there is
and maybe this is just stretching too far? Is there
(32:09):
any kind of you think there's any kind of like
kinship between like the way you interpret such an environment,
how your senses adapt to such an environment, and what
they might have experienced.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
You know, I speak about I think the experience of
being in caves a lot in the book, and you
knows caves are not natural to humans. They're not our space.
Even though we use the term like caveman all the time.
The evidence that humans go deep into cave systems is
a very very recent phenomena by and large. I mean,
(32:41):
there are a few exceptions, but we don't like to
move beyond the twilight zone, you know, where there's still
light filtering in. We just it's just not our space. No,
Letty clearly was much more comfortable in those spaces. Having
said that, when you're in those spaces, and you know,
your whole focus narrows down to artificial lighting, and you
(33:05):
lose a sense of sound because sound isn't very important
to you in those spaces, and so you you lose that,
but your sense of touch is increased, and these things
and and you start seeing these spaces and things in
these artificial lights and fire, by the way, is artificial light.
Of course, they do have an effect on you. And
(33:26):
I think that you know, if you think about the
spaces that that humans term is symbolic or sacred or whatever,
we're often kind of replicating that the droll like ceilings,
the the idea of disassociation of places that are are
are natural to you. We tend to lower light levels,
(33:47):
you know, and and and change the way that that
your eye is perceiving things, and you know, and flame
is particularly good at that because it can add motion,
and it can add it can add the the pception
of movement in spaces like this, and so so you know,
I think that they are powerful spaces. I don't want,
(34:09):
you know, I'm a scientist. I'm trying to not go there,
but it they do affect you when you're in these spaces,
and particularly when you understand that, you know, as I
guess I did very deeply that you know, they chose
this space, and they chose this space for their dead,
and you'd have to have a pretty cold heart for
(34:31):
that not to affect you when you're in a space
like that.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
So it's possible then that that what we're seeing, it
was certainly is a ritual behavior. But then is it
this sort of thing that, at least broadly speaking, like
over time, that ritual takes on other meanings and maybe
like religious ideas emerge out of that.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
I've got to be very careful because you know, there
are thousands of colleagues with daggers on when you use
the word ritual loosely or what it has, because these
have human meaning, and you know, we're dealing with a
non human at least at the grade level of anatomy.
And you're dealing with a non human. So where this
(35:15):
takes you, I don't know. I think that's going to
be part of the next years and decades excitement we're
going to go there. I mean, they have used this
entire subterranean space, they have altered it. We don't have
evidence that they're living there. What they appear to be
doing is interacting at least at least the deeper spaces
(35:38):
in these ways. And you know, I have some colleagues
who say that must be spirituality and religion. You know,
it's a form of religion. I don't think we can
be there yet. But you know, the fact is is
that the last couple of decades have shown us the
(35:58):
arrogance of human exceptism. And you know, as we've begun
to actually more openly study animal behavior, we understand now,
of course, that cetaceans have culture, elephants have culture, that
other primates have cultures, that chimps and gorilla certainly have cultures.
And yet we had eliminated that from things that are
(36:19):
closer to us, like Homoletti. And I think we have
to start the field over in some ways, I think
we have to start again. I mean, we had approached
everything is if the null hypothesis of finding a dead
hominine body was natural, you had to explain it naturally
as opposed to the null hypothesis being cultural. And I
(36:41):
think that was a mistake. I think it was a mistake.
And I think a big thing that's going to come
out of this moment in history is a recognition that
we had made an air of the science. We had
deculturized things that clearly must have had culture, and in
doing that, we weren't seeing their cultures. And I will
bet you that what will flow out of this discovery
(37:03):
and this moment is a new acceptance of these ancient
human relatives being cultural beings. And I think that's really
exciting because that will lead us into not missing things
in the way we have missed things before.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
Absolutely. Now, coming back to the book, particularly and specifically,
you've authored other books before. What really propelled this book
into being? What led you to write and what did
you really want to get out there with Cave of Bones?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
So this book started as a completely different book. It
literally started as a follow up, a five year follow
up to almost human which was the first book on
the discovery of Homonoletti and what that meant. And it
was meant to take all of the research that had
been done and kind of the size it to where
(38:01):
we were. And we were in a very strange place
when I began developing the concept of this book with
my co author John Hawks, and that is we had
one of the best known hominine species ever discovered, but
all we had were its bones. And so it was
meant to be this kind of journey around the state
(38:21):
of where we were and ending with this sort of
but we need more. And then the burials were discovered,
and that became the center of the book because you know,
I literally thought when those burials, when we recognized that
those were holes in the ground, dug with bodies and
them covered by dirt from the hole, I thought that
(38:42):
was gonna be the biggest discovery of my life. You know,
here we were, you know, we're right into now this
sacred space of humanity, you know, burial of the dead,
and all the things you talked about that spill out
of that self recognition of mortality, possibly spirituality, all those
things fall deeply from that. And then I got in
(39:04):
the chamber and saw the symbols and you're like, wow,
the fire funny enough, was never surprising. Fire has been
around for millions of years. I mean, of course they
had fire, it just was I had talked our entire
team out of the evidence that the evidence for fire
was going to be easy to see when it was
right in front of us the entire time. So you
know that's my fault. But you know, the symbols are
(39:28):
are are are different level of stuff. But all that
in combination is the book. And it became a journey,
and the book became very We trashed the first version
of the book and then it became very easy to write,
and actually wrote it very very quickly because it was
a narrative journey of a very deeply personal experience with
(39:53):
the discovery of the species, discovery of the culture around
this species, and in the end it gave me the
chance to explore meaning and a very in a very
open way and discuss some of these concepts of human
exceptionalism and and where I think this field is going awesome.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Well, the documentary kicks off with with a with a
great sense of mystery and I and I also have
to say, like the book just really like literally throws
you right into the cave. There you are in the cave.
It has a very I think sometimes people might some
listeners might be hesitant to pick up a book about
this topic. But but I mean, really, this one just
(40:35):
throws you right into the cave. It has a very
riveting beginning and just doesn't let go for the entire length.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
Thank you for saying so. I mean, it's as I said,
it's it's been a very personal journey for me. It's uh.
And and I think that that you know, there's there's
a lot of meaning in home on No Letti and
a lot of good that humans as individuals can take
out from understanding that that there have been other species
(41:02):
with complex cultures. This thing that we're living right now,
it's neither the first, nor is it some sort of
God given right to be because it's happened before. And
I think that's an important message, you know, the idea
that you know, because I think that anyone who looks
around the planet understands that the idea of human exceptionalism
(41:26):
is part of why we do so much damage to
this place. We think we own it, and we think
it was given to us, and by learning that there
have been other experiments in this you know, maybe we
should step off of that high force or stool or
whatever and step down a little bit, as we kind
(41:48):
of are at this critical moment in human history where
literally the balance of life on this planet is at
stake because of us.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
All right, well, we have we have the book, we
have the documentary, the additional books. Where else can listeners
go to learn more and or follow your work?
Speaker 3 (42:04):
Right? So, you can follow me on Twitter at Lee
or Berger. I'm also on Facebook at Prof Lee Burger,
and if you follow National Geographic. You know, we're there
a lot, a lot of presents in that space, and
there's going to be more so, you know, and there
are the older writings. You know, it's quite fun if
you go back and read Skull in the Rock, Almost Human,
(42:26):
and then this chapter because it's kind of a narrative
of the history of this science, and even further back
Footsteps of Eve, which was in the nineteen nineties, where
you can actually kind of understand the evolution of this
whole science over the last thirty plus years that at
least from my perspective that I've experienced it in you know,
(42:47):
what has got to be the greatest age of exploration
we're living through right now.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Awesome. Well, thank you once more for coming on the
show talking about your work, the book, the documentary. It's
been a play.
Speaker 3 (43:00):
It's great to be here.
Speaker 2 (43:02):
Thanks again to Lee Berger for coming on the show.
Speaker 3 (43:04):
Here.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
The book again is Cave of Bones, a true story
of discovery, adventure, and human origins, and it's out now
in physical, digital, and audio formats. The documentary Unknown Cave
of Bones is currently streaming on Netflix. Thanks as always
to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show, and
if you want to reach out to us, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
(43:27):
dot com.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Four Fox
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.