Lee:
By the end of a 21-day excavation
we had discovered the richest early Hominid site
ever discovered in the history of the planet.
This site is one mile away from the site of Sterkfontein.
It's less than half that distance
from the second best known site
in the entire continent of Africa
the site of Swartkrans, 800 meters away.
It was right under our nose.
It was an incredible environment of science.
There, we had a fossil tent
where we kept joking that we need a bigger safe
and we had to buy more boxes
and more bags than we ever envisioned.
We'd set up a thing to find a skeleton
and we had, first, hundreds of remains
and by the end of it, thousands of remains of hominids.
We would work late into the night.
I, sometimes couldn't get the scientists out of the cave
as they excavated for shifts of six or seven hours
in these cramped, humid conditions.
And no one could go get them anyway
so they could just stay there as long as they wanted.
( audience laughter )
Some people have said, "Well, it really isn't that dangerous."
Rick is going to demonstrate to you, though that
just because we did not kill anyone
that this is every bit as dangerous
and extraordinary a risk as has ever been undertaken.
These are the easy parts you're looking at.
This was an original thing we called "Superman Crawl"
which you go through.
I can get through that.
So, that's not a particularly tight squeeze
in the scheme of what we're doing here.
For those of you who are squeamish about closed spaces
you may look away, because it gets worse.
This is the type of journey that these remarkable scientists
the runners, the people who assisted us
would take on a daily basis
usually three, four, five times a day,
getting to these sites.
Some people said to me
"Why haven't you opened this cave up?"
I hope you can begin to see, how fragile this cave is.
You do not want to do
any opening of caves in that environment
because if you do, you may destabilize the entire system
and it could collapse.
And secondly, I didn't want to do that.
Who was it for me to destroy a cave
that's potentially millions of years old
just so it could be large enough that my ego could get in there
when there is technology and extraordinary people
who have the capability of doing that work today.
Here, this is kind of a normal, narrow passage.
You're going to see the chute and parts of it here.
And you'll get an idea of the depth
as you see Steve Tucker's light in the distance
as we look down into the chute
and you get an idea of how narrow those spaces are
that they are traversing down.
You'll see how dangerous some of those loose rocks are.
This rock that Rick is about to touch
actually fell on a National Geographic Photographer
and shattered his fingers, as he was under there.
Oh and... Rick can dislocate his shoulders. Watch.
I just showed you that for fun.
( audience laughter )
Extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.
By the end of a a 21-day excavation
we had discovered the richest early hominid site
ever discovered in the history of the planet.
More fossil hominids had come out individually
than had been discovered in the previous 90 year history
of the search for human origins in Southern Africa.
All because of these remarkable scientists.
We would name a new species, "Homo naledi".
Homo naledi was an incredible creature.
A brain, the size of an orange
primitive characters and advanced characters
teeth that are remarkable in being a little bit human-like
and then primitive in so many other ways.
Things we'd never seen before.
We would eventually find 15 individuals.
One thousand, five hundred and seventy four fossils.
From an area, that big by that big.
The entire floor is comprised of these fossils.
We had every age group represented.
From near fetal aged infants
to the extreme elderly with their teeth worn right out
and everything in between, males and females.
We had fossils like this field has never seen before.
That is the most complete foot
ever discovered in the history of paleoanthropology.
One of six.
This is the most complete hand
ever discovered in the history of paleoanthropology.
One of eight.
The assemblage was remarkable.
Remarkable in its diversity, remarkable in its preservation
remarkable in its quality.
We simply had seen nothing like it.
All lying on the floor of this chamber.
We would name a new species, "Homo naledi".
It's a crazy creature.
Brain, the size of an orange, ape-like shoulders
human-like arms ending in a human-like hand
with the most curved fingers we have ever seen
outside the most primitive hominids.
Four or five million year old equivalents.
It's bizarre.
It's thorax, starts ape-like, becomes more and more advanced.
It's pelvis is like that of Lucy, wide and flared.
So, we know what its legs and feet look like.
They should be primitive too
but they are at the top and become progressively more and
more and more human-like until you reach the feet.
And those are the most human-like feet ever discovered
since humans.
Look at the size of that head.
That is a normal sized, modern human in the background.
That is an adult female of Homo naledi.
About 450 cubic centimeters.
We had truly never seen anything like this.
To give you an idea of how strange they would've looked.
That's Lucy on the left, in the middle is a very famous skeleton
called, "Turkana Boy" of Homo Erectus.
And there, you can see a relatively human-like visage.
There on the right, is that almost, without being derogatory
pin-headed look of Homo naledi, with its very strange profile.
And it is not an aberrancy because we have
multiple individuals and they all look exactly alike.
We now know more about this remarkable species, perhaps
than almost any other species of primitive human relative
that's ever been discovered.
We, very quickly realized, something was--
strange going on
with the way in which these fossils were in that chamber.
During the course of the excavation
we had found on the first day
to be transparent, three bird bones.
That were owl, that were lying on the surface.
They were clearly much younger. Some owl had got in there.
And then we found, during the course of the excavation
a few, tiny, rodent incisors, mixed into the sediment.
And nothing else.
Nothing but hominids.
Now, we had on the team
world experts in many, many different things.
But, all of us had the same basic training
in physical anthropology, forensic anthropology
archeology, all related to human biology.
And those senior members of the team knew
that there was something very strange from word go
when you see an assemblage like that.
We, of course, began trying to eliminate the obvious.
It's gotta be a predator accumulation.
But there are no predatory-- marks of damage
on any of this bone.
There's no marks of scavenging.
We knew, very early on
that the material had not been transported in.
There was no sign in the sediments of water transport.
We also could tell from the way they were set
that they'd come in one by one by one, over time.
There was time involved in this.
Over on the right hand side of this image
is where that chute is.
You can see that the floor slopes away from that
and quite literally, from that point all the way to the end
are these bones of Homo naledi.
Literally, from underneath the chute.
We have used, I can tell you
ground penetrating radar and other methods.
We can find no other entrance.
And we were left, eventually, with the unlikely conclusion
that in fact, this must be some sort of
deliberate body disposal site.
That we had, for the first time
found a species other than humans
that in a ritualized, and I mean, repeated fashion
had taken it's dead into a chamber
and secreted them there over time to
prevent whatever from happening to them for whatever reason.
And that is the hypothesis we put forward.
That's a fairly remarkable thing.
Because, until that moment, on September 10th last year
when we announced the existence of Homo naledi
and this situation...
we had seen deliberate body disposal
as sort of the last bastion of what identified us as human.
When Jane Goodall wrote to Louis Leakey saying
"I have seen a chimpanzee using tools."
He said, prophetically
"We're going to have to redefine what it means to be human."
We had precious little left until September 10th
except, we deliberately disposed of our dead
and whatever that means.
And should this hypothesis hold true
for the first time in history
you are meeting another species that did just that.
What these discoveries tell you is that
we may have walked or set foot over most of this planet
but we have not seen what we were walking on.
We've not understood what we were looking at.
There are extraordinary things to be found.
And if it is true in a field
like paleoanthropology
then it must be true in every field of science.
We need to use discoveries like this
to inspire this and the next generation to be explorers.
To get out in the field.
To look, to prepare yourself to make discoveries
to use the technology to inform you,
but to physically go out and make those discoveries.
We need, ladies and gentlemen,
to inspire exploration.
Thank you very much.
( audience applause )