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[ominous music playing]
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[man 1] We knew something weird was going on from the first week.
[woman] If you find one bone fragment or one tooth, that's a huge thing, right?
Now, we have this discovery of at least 15 individuals…
1,500 individual bone fragments.
They're everywhere. It's amazing.
[man 1] And they're not human.
They aren't us.
[woman] These bones are in dangerous cave environments.
Just so intense and so physical.
You think, "How does a body get through this?"
Are you seeing what I'm seeing?
[man 1] Oh my God.
[man 2] Why is it that all these bones are here?
[woman] Why is it of just one species?
Why aren't there other bones, you know? [chuckling]
To have so many voices,
these teeth and bone fragments all telling you something,
that's never happened anywhere else in the world.
[man 1] It's one of the biggest moments in human history.
[music fades out]
[contemplative music playing]
[music becomes dramatic]
[music fades out]
[melancholic music playing]
[Berger] I dig up dead people.
That's what I've trained my whole life to do.
Actually, I dig up dead "not people."
[chuckling] That's really what I do.
In 2013, in the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa,
we discovered a new species.
[mysterious music playing]
And that species is primitive in every way.
It's got a very small brain,
just a little bit larger than a chimpanzee.
During the first expedition,
[chuckling] we found more individuals
than any other species of ancient human relative that's ever been discovered.
[applause]
We named it Homo naledi,
placing it in the genus Homo, the same genus as humans are in.
Homo naledi and Rising Star captured the world's imagination.
And then…
[music transitions to low hum]
…we discovered something really amazing.
I remember there was this moment sitting in command center with Lee…
and we were watching the monitors of the Dinaledi Chamber,
and I think, accidentally, someone just swept their light across the floor.
And you could distinctly see a difference in the soil pattern, right?
And that's where you're just like, "Wait, what's happening here?"
[Berger] We were kind of looking over their shoulders
in a way that they could never see,
'cause you couldn't stand up in that place.
And you could see the edges of that pit outlined so beautifully.
[Molopyane] Holy mother of… [beeped].
[Berger] It was a body inside of an oval hole.
[shutter click sound]
A hole in the ground
that had once had a body in it,
and now had a collapsed skeleton in it.
[ominous music playing]
That's a burial.
[music transitions to contemplative music]
That's something that until this moment, this moment in history,
we thought that only humans do.
The very act of burial is a ritual.
Now, does that mean that Homo naledi was contemplating religion,
spirituality, afterlife?
All the things that spill off of the rituals that we perform with death.
[music fades out]
I don't know, I don't know. I can't, right now, go there.
You've gotta remember, Homo naledi is one of the great mysteries
of all of archaeology and paleoanthropology.
They are at a time and place, southern Africa,
at around 250-300,000 years ago,
where we thought there were only humans.
Are they related to us? Are they not related to us?
Yes, we have a lot of them.
But we know nothing about how they were living.
Unraveling this mystery, that's going to take a huge team.
and they're all going to be detectives in this,
and each one's going to add a little bit until we have an answer.
[Molopyane] Naledi is a puzzle piece that I think we'll be looking at
for a very long time.
It will help us study ourselves,
and how we have evolved to becoming modern humans, Homo sapiens.
[contemplative music playing]
Welcome, everyone.
It's been four years since we've been underground and working here.
We're going into an area that is the likely direction
in which Homo naledi took their dead.
So, you know, the goal of this is to see what's under this surface.
What if there are more graves? What if there are other rituals?
What if we're missing something right under our feet?
[Molopyane] It is definitely a love-hate relationship
when it comes to the Rising Star Cave system.
It's-- It's physically challenging. It's also mentally challenging.
When a lot of people think about archaeology,
you have this image of Lara Croft and Indiana Jones.
Rising Star does give that to you.
Welcome to Rising Star.
This is… the main entrance of the cave.
Watch your head here. It's a bit low.
[Fuentes] This is my first time in the cave.
Strangely for a scientist,
but for me, the first word that comes to mind is "emotional."
To be able to, you know, even over this computer and touch this stuff.
You know, you're touching a quarter of a million years ago.
I'm interested in everything about us, about humans.
Where do we come from? Where are we going?
Why are we the way we are?
If naledi intentionally buried their dead
150-200,000 years before humans,
that changes everything.
It challenges us to question, "What does it even mean to be human?"
[music fades out]
[Molopyane] All right.
-[chime on computer] -[tapping on keyboard]
You're in what we call the "Command Center."
Uh, it's just the entrance to Rising Star.
It's a artificial entrance carved out by miners
back, I think, in the late 1900s and early 20th century, looking for lime.
The entrance that we think Homo naledi went in is ten meters away from us,
but it's now collapsed.
[contemplative music playing]
So, miners opened up sort of gateways into the spaces where naledi was.
Kilometers of underground networks of caves.
And we actually did an extensive mapping of that.
[Molopyane] We're going to Dragon's Back Chamber today.
It hasn't been excavated before.
[Berger] This is where the Chute is.
[Molopyane] This chimney is about 18 centimeters in width
that goes down 12 meters.
[Berger] They did this incredible, terrible journey down that chute,
with the dead bodies of their relatives.
And this place is the Dinaledi Chamber.
And that's where we found a bunch of holes in the ground
with bodies of Homo naledi in them, and then buried.
[music fades out]
I've never been, and I never will be, physically in the Dinaledi Chamber.
It's not possible.
[low wind-like drone]
It's at the bottom of the Chute, which, you know, I will never fit through.
[beeping]
[man] The cameras are okay. I've lost two-way audio.
You have?
-Yeah. The pictures are beautiful. -[Berger] Yeah.
[man over speaker ] I think they're all in this chamber already.
[Hawks] So I can send Team Two.
[man over speaker] You can.
[contemplative music playing]
[Molopyane] It is difficult to get to Dragon's Back.
I think every part of Rising Star is difficult to get to.
So mind your step, everything here.
-I scared you? -[man] No.
[Hawks] Hm. Where is everyone? [chuckling]
[groans]
[person over speaker] …and watch TV.
-Team Two, you are coming in, all right? -[man] All right.
[Berger] Welcome to Dragon's Back.
This is the gateway to the place where Homo naledi took their dead.
Think of the gateways to the Valley of the Kings.
What was going on here in front of the entrance to the Dinaledi Chamber?
Did they live here?
Were they building fires here?
Did they bring animals in here?
Did they stop here and think about what they were doing
before they took their dead up that and down there?
-[music fades out] -I don't know.
That's-- That's-- That's what we're finding out.
Do we have kits?
So you can pass this along.
[indistinct chatter]
[contemplative music playing]
29.3 centimeters.
[Berger] We're trying to reconstruct the life of a creature
that we didn't know existed nine years ago.
And so there is no clue that's not important.
[Molopyane] Janika, we're going to try to work your square
'cause you have interesting stuff in the corner.
That soil is red.
It's sort of like a dark brown, black.
[Janika] Definitely looks very different from the rest.
[person] Mm-hm.
[Hawks] Really does look like there could be a fire there.
Why do you think that?
'Cause it's got a layer that's blackened and localized.
-It really does look like that. -It really does look like…
-The thing is, it's so hopeless. -[Fuentes] Yeah.
You know, there's nowhere that you find well-preserved fire, you know.
And yet this cave,
-everything seems to happen. -Yeah.
That would be another huge… if we can document that.
[Hawks sighs]
Yep.
-Yep. -Yeah.
We're collecting all these details, sometimes at enormous effort,
and it's basically in the service of a forensic case.
Every one of these clues is a part of a pattern of behavior.
What we're trying to do is to put together those little clues
to understand the overall pattern.
Every human society has some kind of funerary practices, mortuary practices.
Some of them expose the bodies and let the vultures pick the flesh off,
and some of them bury the bodies in very special places.
Did naledi have something like that?
[music fades out]
-[woman] Hey, Kene. -[Molopyane] Mm.
[woman] I found a little bone. -[person] Uh…
[woman] So…
-[woman 1] It looks like-- -[woman 2] Kinda like a tiny tibia.
[Molopyane] Probably a rodent…
-[woman] A little rat tibia. -[Molopyane] We'll bag it.
All righty.
[Molopyane] Mm. So we'll just make a note of that.
[contemplative music playing]
I've been obsessed with the whole concept of archaeology
since I was seven years old.
If you think about when you're excavating a site,
you're actually looking at a snapshot of that moment,
of when that place was abandoned many years ago.
My PhD focus was on trauma analysis,
all the atrocities and violence that happened during apartheid.
My research focus has shifted from modern humans
to our ancient human ancestors.
-Yeah? -[woman] S2E0.
S2E0.
[Berger] You call it.
[woman] Thirty-five.
Just to confirm, we're taking measurements in millimeters?
[Hawks] In millimeters, yes.
-But spits in centimeters? -[Hawks] Well, f--
How do we convert centimeters to millimeters?
Why must you make my life difficult?
[laughter]
[Molopyane continuing] I joined the Rising Star team in 2018
as an Underground Astronaut trainee.
"Underground Astronaut" was a term that was coined by Lee Berger.
Essentially, what we are are a group of researchers, scientists,
trained in archaeology and paleoanthropology.
We go down into very dangerous cave environments to excavate.
But we also have some level of madness to us.
[music fades out]
I would say it's a little bit different now
because I'm not the junior archaeologist. Um…
I'm the senior one, I'm supposed to know what's happening.
[indistinct chatter]
I make the decisions of where we dig, how we dig.
Getting all the junior Underground Astronauts
comfortable with their workspace.
Whether your bones are from 50 years ago to 100,000 years ago,
the skill is the same.
If you know how to read the bones,
you could tell the story of that individual.
[contemplative music playing]
[Hawks] When we had the first bones from Rising Star,
as our team discovered that we were not looking at a skeleton,
we were looking at many skeletons,
it created this sort of need to understand what was going on.
Why is it that all these bones are here?
[chuckling] You know, it's--
It is true, there's sort of an "ultimate forensic case" element to it.
It's the cold case from 250,000 years ago.
Our first thing was,
"Did carnivores take some of these into the cave?" right?
We can see that, no, we have no tooth marks whatsoever.
We can see that there are little beetle marks on the bones,
which tells us that there was flesh on them when they were in this cave.
We've got an ankle that is totally intact.
The bones are exactly as they should be in a skeleton, right?
They don't get that way unless they get there with flesh on them.
We studied these bones for a long time and we said, "Here's a hypothesis."
"Naledi was dropping bodies into these chambers by way of the Chute."
[Berger] And that's where we went in those initial papers, with,
you know, "ritualized disposal of the dead."
We put that evidence out there, and it was strong evidence.
But other scientists, they said, "It's impossible, brain's too small."
There were critics that would say
that humans had taken them and put them in there
in some sort of human ritual, like a pet cemetery.
[chuckling]
[sighing]
-And yet, there was a worry, you know. -[music fades out]
I don't know if we'd made a mistake
in putting forward a hypothesis that might never be able to be tested,
this ritualized disposal of the dead.
What if it had just been this giant bone bed?
What if that's all we ever find?
[ominous music playing]
In 2018, we returned back into the Dinaledi Chamber to excavate.
[Molopyane] And that's when we found these pits.
[Hawks] All of us looked at each other and said, "This looks like a pit burial."
[Berger] And suddenly everything began to make sense.
And we realized, there'd always been graves.
-That it wasn't a bed of bones. -[music fades out]
These were graves in the cave.
We'd talked around this for a long time,
and we would go through a lot of mental gymnastics about,
"Well, you have to understand, burial is a very specific thing."
"You have to dig a hole, put the body in, and cover it up."
"We might not be looking at that."
I'll tell you what,
when we found something that looked like a hole was dug,
and a body was put in, and it was covered up,
that clarified things. [chuckling]
That was, "Oh, yeah, of course."
"This is burial, and it is clearly similar
to what we see in human societies where burial is practiced."
[ominous music playing]
The earliest modern human burials are in Israel.
And they're something like 100,000, 120,000 years old.
The naledi burials are between 236-335,000 years old.
[Berger] Not just a little bit before us.
Hundreds of thousands of years
before we have the first evidence of us doing this.
That's profound.
But I think that pales into insignificance
in the fact it's being done by a non-human species.
That's the big deal.
[ominous music continues]
[Hawks] Paleoanthropologists have found hundreds of fossils other than Homo naledi
in the Cradle of Humankind.
But many of them are very fragmentary.
You know, a couple of teeth, or part of a jaw bone.
Nothing like the naledi sample,
where we have skeletons of many individuals of all different ages.
-[music fades out] -So I wanna do something we haven't done.
I want to take all our evidence
and see if we can build an adult skeleton.
Okay, I think this is…
We're trying to learn how it ran, how it climbed,
how it used its fingers at the same time
that it might have been doing something with its feet, right?
That has to be worked out in the context of a whole skeleton.
All right.
-[Berger] Got him? -Yep.
All right.
[Berger] So…
[contemplative music playing]
…we have the top of the cranium here… -Mm-hm.
-…and the brow ridge. -Mm-hm.
-We're going to put that there like that… -Yeah.
…into position but now we need an occipital, right?
Okay.
[Berger] You know, you look at that staining on his teeth, it is…
-[Hawks] Yeah, it's really amazing. -We need to pay more attention to that.
What if I set the skull up on some of that soft stuff so it sits up,
and back everything up just a little bit?
[Hawks, scoffing] I wouldn't do it.
-You wouldn't do it? -I wouldn't do it.
I don't think the skull will hold itself that way.
No?
I just want to see the eyes.
[Hawks, chuckling] I'm gonna bury myself in my numbers.
[Berger chuckles]
[contemplative music continues]
[chuckles faintly]
[Berger] That looks more like a face.
Now you can look into his eyes.
[exhales deeply]
[Berger chuckles]
[Hawks] Okay.
You're starting to see it's not human.
Human vertebrae would be twice that size.
-[Hawks] Okay, there we go. -All right.
[exhaling]
[Berger whistles faintly]
[music fades out]
Oh, that… is… beautiful.
It's that.
Right there.
Beautiful.
You know some people go, "These are just apes."
Let me show you why it's not an ape.
[chuckling]
That.
Which is closer?
The extraordinary length of a knuckle-walking ape
that's evolved to climb in trees and use these huge grasps?
But no thumb.
No prehensile thumb at all.
And that hand? Like my hand.
[contemplative music playing]
They're so like us and so absolutely not like us.
[Hawks] Across the skeleton,
there were features that were unusually close to modern humans.
And other features that look like some of the earliest hominins.
Bone after bone,
each of them was telling us something different.
Initially, we thought, "Are there two different kinds of things here?"
[chuckling] "Are there three kinds?"
Because it was a mixture of features that we didn't expect to find together.
But as we found more and more bones, we saw.
They're all consistent,
but they're all a pattern we hadn't seen.
And that's what led us to name it a new species.
[Fuentes] You gotta take with a grain of salt
whenever we reconstruct the past hominins.
Without a time machine, we don't really know what they look like.
[Molopyane] Were they hairy, were they dark, were they light?
There's no way of knowing that because a skeleton does not show you.
But we have this great skeletal data. So we know what their bodies look like,
and we can sort of guesstimate what the muscles look like on to add,
then we can lay some skin on that, maybe some hair too.
If naledi walked into this room…
she would walk in on two legs, right?
Walking like a human, but not quite.
Her gait would be different, her movement,
her longer arms would be swinging in a different sort of way.
When they got into the light, they'd probably be terrifying.
[deep breathing]
[Hawks] They have no projecting nose, right?
Their nose is pretty flat against their face,
very flat, really like an ape's nose.
Their teeth, very much like ours,
but in a jaw that is kind of sticking forward.
And a brow ridge that covers both of their eyes.
It would be alien to us.
There's no better term for that.
[Fuentes] She might even look back at us and we would see something in her eyes.
It'd strike us as human, but not like you and me.
[upbeat music playing]
[Molopyane] They were quite short.
I'm short. [chuckling] Maybe they were about my height.
[Hawks] Something like 4'8" to 5'2".
They're really skinny.
Their legs are skinny, their arms are skinny.
And their feet and legs looked like
they were really well suited to long-distance walking,
to moving across big landscapes.
[distant creature shrieking]
They were better made for climbing than we are.
We think that they were probably climbing either in trees, or rocks, or both,
quite a bit more than today's people tend to,
and that that was an important part of their lives.
-[groaning faintly] -[music fades out]
We don't know whether naledi had language.
[distant howling]
[Fuentes] To assume they had language is a bad assumption.
To assume they had pretty good cognitive capacities for communicating
is a very robust assumption.
Remember, most of the communication you and I do today
as modern contemporary humans, right,
most of our communication is not with words.
We show. I'm throwing my hands around here, right?
We light up our eyes, our eyebrows go up.
One of the cool things about humans is we have very small canine teeth.
These small ones.
Mine are kind of big for humans.
But the thing is that when you look at gorillas, chimpanzees, right,
other kinds of primates,
they have often super-long canines.
And in fact, when you're baring your canines to them,
you're threatening, right?
They're using these to communicate, they're using them to communicate threats.
Humans are using them to communicate a smile.
[contemplative music playing]
Naledi has beautiful little canines, right?
Naledi was smiling.
Almost certainly.
Homo naledi were members of the genus Homo.
There's a ton of different members of the genus Homo
over the last 2.5 million years.
Including us, right? Homo sapiens.
The genus Homo is the only genus on the planet
that was ever able to look at a rock, to take a rock, to look at this rock,
and to recognize that inside this rock…
is a stone tool.
An incredible manipulation of this into this.
Now, we don't have any good evidence
of direct connection between Homo naledi and tools.
But we know that Homo naledi had that capacity
because every member of the genus Homo
for the last two million years has had that capacity
to imagine things in the mind
and to make them into material reality.
And
to teach others how to do that.
So, Homo naledi is part of this family of the genus Homo,
that is doing these incredible things,
living complex, ecological lives, where they were eating plants and animals,
and manipulating the world around them.
Caring for one another in deep ways.
And in the case of Homo naledi,
engaging in what appears, by almost any definition,
to be intentional mortuary behavior.
[music fades out]
This different mind, the naledi mind,
shares an aspect of our humanity, burying its dead,
that we didn't expect to find in an ancestor like naledi, but we did.
It doesn't go along with giant brain sizes like we have today.
[contemplative music playing]
[Berger] We have this lovely story of an ever-increasing brain size.
The inevitable progression of small brain to big brain,
and that it's that big brain
that allows us to do
these complex behaviors that we associate with humans.
Drop Homo naledi into that like a bomb.
The weird thing about the naledi brain is that it's small, right?
[Berger] Naledi's brain is about the size of an orange,
a third the size of ours.
When you hear that, you think, "Oh, maybe they were dumb," right?
Because your brain is only this small.
Um, but that's not necessarily true, right?
Um, It's not about the size of the brain. I think it's what the brain can do.
[contemplative music continues]
[Berger] Today, we're going on the grand cave tour. [chuckling]
We are intending to go up Dragon's Back,
taking Agustin around to show him the Chute.
Stay close, Agustin.
[Molopyane, chuckling] Don't get lost.
[Fuentes] I was staring off into the distance.
Just watch your step here, Agustin.
-This is slick. -[Fuentes] Yeah.
Use the footholds.
[Berger] Wait till I'm clear, I'll tell you when.
We like to keep people clear,
once you're clear, in case it collapses or something…
-Right. -…in there. It shouldn't, but it could.
[chuckling]
[contemplative music continues]
[man] Come right up here.
-Keep coming. You can go either way. -Yeah.
[Berger] You can stand.
You're now in the spaces where naledi was.
[music fades out]
-If you slide-- -[Fuentes] Yeah.
-[Berger] You see the tibia there? -Yes, I do.
-[Berger] You see how long and thin it is? -Yes, I do.
It's hard to imagine that that is anything but a naledi tibia.
-Yeah. -Turn the light off there and watch this.
-Look at the thick cortex on that. -[Fuentes] Oh my God. Yeah.
Yeah.
-[Fuentes] Oh, wow. -You see?
[Fuentes] Yeah.
-Oh, man! -[Berger chuckles]
Oh man! This is really cool.
-[Hawks] This is Dragon's Back. -[contemplative music playing]
So where is that, John, where you were showing me,
where you guys think there might be that discoloration?
-Is it just under side-- -It's actually right under this. Yeah.
[Fuentes] Wow!
-Oh my gosh! -[Molopyane] Yay!
-[Fuentes] Oh, that… -[Berger] Oh my goodness.
That looks like a small fire about this big.
[chuckling]
-Yeah. -Right?
-Yes. -Absolutely.
That you just found.
Absolutely.
[Berger] That is stunning.
Clear fire.
[Berger] Clear fire. 100%.
Someone built a fire and cooked in it.
On that floor.
I think it's Homo naledi.
[Hawks] It's at a comparable depth to what we found in the Dinaledi Chamber
with the bones.
So this is probably of similar age.
Something like 250,000 years old.
-This is the charred bone. -[Fuentes] Oh, that's the charred bone.
-[Fuentes] That's a long… -[Berger] That's cool.
Um… it is…
I'd say that's, like, a small…
A small antelope bone.
-[Fuentes] From a foreleg or something? -From a forelimb. Yeah.
Something the size of a spring buck.
-Naledi diet! -Wow!
That is incredible.
[Berger] There are archaeologists that have said,
"It's impossible that Homo naledi made fire."
And now we likely have the evidence.
-That's huge. -[music fades out]
Well done.
[laughing]
It's hard to imagine that they are traveling
to the extremely dangerous places without fire.
[contemplative music playing]
[Fuentes] Everything that we know suggests that this is the way into Dinaledi, right?
-[Berger] There-- -There's not another way?
There is no evidence
of any other entrance into the Dinaledi Chamber.
-[Fuentes] Yeah. -[Berger] Except this route.
If you fall or slip, just hold yourself there.
We'll come to you, all right? And we'll deal with it from there,
or we'll give you instruction from a distance
what to do, depending on how you're feeling.
-All right? -Mm-hm.
[man] You always just want to unclip one, and then unclip the other one.
You always have at least one on the rope.
[action music playing]
[man] Do you have enough light there?
[indistinct chatter]
-So… Agustin? -[Fuentes] Yeah.
[Berger] See that flat bit behind the ropes there?
-[Fuentes] That, here? -[Berger] Yeah, get onto that.
Okay. All right.
[action music continues]
[groaning]
-This is this ledge here, right? -[Berger] This ledge is the tough bit.
Okay.
[Berger] You wouldn't do this in the dark.
-[Fuentes] No. You kidding me? -[chuckling]
You got a favorite foothold? I'm just gonna pull myself…
-[Berger] I put my knee in it. -Yeah.
[Berger] And then haul yourself up using the rope.
I actually have a better chance doing it just with my upper body.
[Berger] There you go.
There you go.
-[Fuentes] Hell yeah. -[music fades out]
[Berger] And think about this, Agustin. Look in my direction now.
-They had to cross this gap then. -Yeah.
-We used to leap across it. -[Fuentes] Yeah.
-Imagine getting a body-- -[Fuentes] You kidding?
No. This was a leap, we leaped across this to here.
-And imagine… -[Fuentes] Yeah.
One person could not get a body across this.
-No. No way. -Because it would fall.
No.
-It makes me think… -That handoff…
It just makes me think, a great place to look for a Homo naledi, down there.
[both laugh]
For that one that missed. [laughing]
All right, are you ready to see the Chute?
[Fuentes] Yes.
[contemplative music playing]
-[Berger] So… -All right.
[music becomes ominous]
[Berger] You're above the Chute now.
-That is the Chute? -[Berger] Yeah, right there.
Oh, Jesus Christ!
[Berger] And down you go, 12 vertical meters
until you drop into the Dinaledi Chamber.
And that's the only way in.
[music fades out]
[exhales deeply]
[Fuentes] I don't care how many measurements you offer of this,
it's so difficult to convey.
If you're gonna go through that,
to bury a body in there…
-[Berger] That's why I wanted you up here. -Yeah.
No, you're right. There's no other way.
I wanted you to see that beginning of the journey.
I remember the first time I climbed up here,
and I had my son, Matthew, 15,
and I sent him down that hole to take those pictures,
earning my father-of-the-year badge.
[laughter]
-I had to convince myself it was real. -[Fuentes] Yeah.
And I sat here for 45 minutes on my own in the dark.
So just shut your lights off for a bit.
And now think about, you know, that journey with zero light.
[Fuentes] Yeah, they had to have fire.
[contemplative music playing]
[Berger] So, I'm going to pretend I'm Homo naledi with fire,
and you're gonna be my family.
We've collected some kindling.
We're going on a journey into darkness in a place that would be dangerous.
[music fades out]
And I'm going to use that to walk down into this area.
And now I'm going to build a small fire right here.
[Berger] When you go deep into these caves,
even if you're naledi and can do it really well, it's challenging.
So what do you do?
You go with a little bit of fire and your family.
[contemplative music playing]
Need a family member to bring some fire?
No.
You got it? There you go.
[Fuentes] Fire changes the way you perceive, sense, and experience the world.
You're seeing different.
You hear different.
Your brain and body is different in these caves.
But you're together.
That climb up Dragon's Back,
thinking about what must have gone through the minds and bodies of those Homo naledi
carrying up their deceased community members,
250, 280,000, 300,000 years ago.
[Berger] Just imagining what it must have taken
to take those individuals after death.
And your culture, I guess, tells you that now, here, we do this.
[birds cawing]
They dragged that body, three, four, five of them carried that body,
got to this cave, this pitch-black cave.
[groans faintly]
[blowing]
[groaning faintly]
[Berger] And then they had to crawl,
dragging the body with them.
[groaning faintly]
That body, was it loose? Was it rigor mortis?
Was it curled already and things? Did they bind it?
And then, them looking down the Chute…
That extraordinarily difficult chute.
[Fuentes] They go down,
scratching their bodies, risking life and limb,
just so they could take their dead comrade
and place them where they should be.
[music fades out]
[Berger] And then they enter the Dinaledi Chamber.
[groaning faintly]
And they dig this hole.
They probably dig it together.
Maybe it's someone teaching someone else.
I don't know, but there must have been a group thing to it.
[groaning faintly]
[Hawks] When we look at what naledi did,
I imagine, what happens when someone dies in our society?
We have specialists whose jobs are to handle this situation.
Priests, morticians,
shamans.
When an individual dies, they come together socially,
and somebody leads a ritual.
[sorrowful music playing]
[Fuentes] Did they chant?
Did they sing?
Did they sit and hold hands after they buried the body?
When we think, you know,
why would you go to the effort of taking bodies and putting them anywhere, right?
Much less a special, very different kind of place like naledi is doing,
I think it's kind of easy to answer that.
Love is a powerful motivator.
[groaning faintly]
You say, "I can't bear the experience that I'm going to have
if I see your body torn apart."
"I can't bear what I'm going to feel if I see your body decay."
They went back and back and back into these spaces,
and buried their dead… again, and again, and again.
That-- That…
Of course they cared about them.
[sorrowful music continues]
They were taking them in the transition
from life through death.
Then they drag themselves, they crawl through on the way out.
And I just-- I just-- I want to be there for that moment
when the first three, four, five of them sort of emerge from the cave
after spending hours risking life and limb
doing this incredibly stressful, emotional, traumatic event,
and they step out into the sunlight.
What do they do right then in that moment?
[bird chirping]
Do they hug each other?
[groaning faintly]
Do they just go on their ways?
[groaning faintly]
[music fades out]
[various birds chirping]
[upbeat music playing]
You can watch monkeys all day. Or at least I can.
They're letting the little guy have it.
And here he's going to chase him.
[music fades out]
They know each other, they've grown up together
and have these kinds of social interactions.
Social bonds, sort of getting together, watching one another.
This is the kind of social stuff that is typical for primates.
When these monkeys experience a loss…
[melancholic music playing]
…when their kid dies, or their mom dies, or best friend dies…
they're gonna feel it deeply, emotionally,
in many ways that we feel that sort of sense of absence.
The others may gather around, poke it, spend time with it.
If it was an infant, the mom might even carry it for a while.
But they're not gonna respond as a group. They're not gonna respond systematically.
What we're seeing in naledi, what we see in us,
is that when an individual dies, member of a community or family dies…
[music fades out]
…we come together and we do what's right and what's necessary for that individual,
and for the community.
[contemplative music playing]
[wood crackling and crashing]
[groaning faintly]
[Berger] Homo naledi did things with their dead that no other animal does…
except humans.
And so, you have to ask yourself,
"Are they us?"
Are we connected through this kind of love and care for others?
This commitment to others.
As crazy as it might sound, is this what it means to be human?
[Berger] In 2017, my team was conducting excavations at the base of the Chute.
I'm sitting in the command center.
And the, you know, scientists down there, the explorers,
wave to the camera to get my attention.
I look down there and I see these little fingers coming out.
[Hawks] You can see the finger bones and the joints.
And then some other bones around it, right?
A couple of hand bones, couple of wrist bones.
They looked like the bones of a small individual.
Maybe this is a child's skeleton.
[Berger] It's extraordinary.
To count children's skeletons in the deep past is…
You can do it on probably one hand and have fingers left over.
This might be a child of another species,
not human, hundreds of thousands of years old.
Who knows what's… what's in there?
There might be food particles, might be DNA, might be proteins.
Might be the only time anyone ever has one of these.
But wow, it's very fragile.
I did not want to excavate this thing.
[Hawks] And so we thought about, "How do we get this out of the cave
and into the lab intact?"
So we wrapped it in plaster.
In a plaster jacket like you'd do with a dinosaur fossil in the field,
and took the whole thing out of the cave.
That was a tremendously difficult thing, right?
This is a big chunk of plaster,
and it had to go out this tiny chute that's seven and a half inches wide.
[contemplative music continues]
[distant indistinct chatter]
So, I took it over to the medical CT scanner
at the Charlotte Maxeke Hospital where my wife works.
She's a radiologist.
And you see this body of a child.
[Hawks] It's crunched in kind of a fetal position.
Holy cow, you know, there's somebody in there.
And then we saw something incredible.
It was a different density.
A rock.
The rock, we ignored at first.
I gotta be honest, we weren't looking for rocks, [chuckling] and…
I was looking for bones, right?
Now, rocks are really rare in that chamber.
I mean, they're-- We hardly ever see them, and they tend to be just roof fall.
But this rock didn't look like just any rock.
It looked like a tool.
[Hawks] We've taken to calling it "the tool-shaped rock."
And even more remarkably, it's sitting right in the hand.
[Fuentes] Stone tools are central to the genus Homo.
But you know what we don't have?
A fossil of a member of the genus Homo
holding onto a tool that died like this, saying, "This is my tool."
We don't have that.
Till now.
If this tool-like rock is indeed a tool,
it's the first example of a tool in the hand.
Then it's, of course, in a grave.
[contemplative music continues]
If you place objects of importance with the dead,
what does that say?
[Fuentes] That's that next level of mortuary behavior.
It's…
It's almost more than you could ask for.
If it matters enough to risk your life and do all sorts of things
to take your dead and to place them in particular places,
and to give them tools that you use,
to take those tools out of circulation, and to give it to the dead,
you obviously think something about life and death,
and possibly about an afterlife.
Why give a dead body a tool unless you think they're going to use it?
[Berger] If this tool-shaped rock is definitively a tool,
that child would be one of the most famous individuals
ever discovered in the history of archaeology.
[music fades out]
[Hawks] But looking at the images that we have,
we can't tell for sure that this is a tool.
We need better imagery.
That takes a higher resolution scanner.
[contemplative music playing]
[Berger] The medical CT wasn't good enough.
You were never going to prove anything to anyone,
and so that's why we're here.
[single beep]
I came to this place, this most amazing, gigantic machine,
'cause it was the only machine on the planet…
[music fades out]
that could take this child in a plaster jacket…
I'll just keep my hand underneath.
…and scan it down to a millionth of a meter,
and give us an image…
[man] We have to be at 45 degrees.
[Berger] …of that tool-shaped rock and its fine edges,
so we could determine whether or not it is a tool,
or whether it's just a tool-shaped rock.
-Let's do a test. -Okay.
Okay.
[beeping]
[Berger] Nobody in here. [chuckling]
[man] So in principle, it's quite similar to a hospital x-ray,
except that you have a bit more power.
[blaring sound]
So, when I say a bit, it's ten power 14 more power,
meaning, one and zero and 14 zeroes after.
It's a kind of x-ray you do not want to have for a chest x-ray or whatever,
because if you are without a disease before the x-rays, you're dead after.
-[blaring sound continues] -[contemplative music playing]
Let's say we are in a charcuterie.
So, you take a sausage and you cut it in slices.
It is exactly what we are doing.
We take here… The fossil is a big sausage, and we make slices in the sausage.
Except that you are not using a knife to do that,
and you are not really cutting, you are making virtual slices.
Once you have all the slices in your sausage,
you can put back all the slices together
and you have the sausage in three dimensions.
[Berger] We're scanning down around 20 microns.
You're acquiring this amount of data, this precisely, it's super slow.
[machine humming]
And? [chuckling]
So, you want to see the first results?
I do. Desperately.
Let's go in 3D now.
[Berger] It's beautiful.
Wow.
So, can you zoom in on that edge? That upper edge there?
-This one? -Yeah.
I mean, this could be…
Along that edge, could be flaking along that.
But that is a real edge, isn't it? That's a…
Yeah.
-This one, yes, it's quite sharp. -Yeah.
Wow, it looks like a blade, doesn't it?
When you start seeing a very, very sharp edge that is in a curve,
looks like it's been made to scrape or work wood, or do something like that,
and you start seeing what look like micro flakes off of the end of it,
that begins to look a lot more like maybe that edge was made.
My feeling is, it looks indeed like a tool.
For me, it's a tool that has been used for quite some time.
[music fades out]
Um…
I think that there's a good chance this is a tool.
And that's going to change a lot about how we, as humans, think about the world.
And…
it's exciting and a little bit scary… at the same time.
More exciting than scary.
You know, I've been involved in big discoveries before, but
if this is a tool, it's the biggest discovery I've ever been involved with.
[melancholic music playing]
For sure.
You're looking at
the possibility that another creature, before humans did it,
may have been contemplating an afterlife.
[music transitions to suspenseful music]
I'm often deeply uncomfortable talking about things like spirituality,
because it's not science.
But Agustin and his team have really opened my mind to this idea
of sacred spaces and special places,
and someone who has kind of the whole knowledge
needs to get into the Dinaledi Chamber
and see it, and experience it,
and start answering the questions that you can't get off a video.
All right, folks, same as, uh, every day, we're gonna kit up, briefing.
One change is I'm going down to Dinaledi today.
[music stops abruptly]
Look at Maropeng smile.
[laughter]
I told the world I'll never be in that space,
but I'm feeling fit and thinner than I've been,
uh, since, so I'm going down.
Stop grinning, Maropeng.
[laughter]
When I heard that for the first time, I was like, "Eesh!"
"It's going to be a long day for us."
[suspenseful music resumes]
[Berger] I've never been in that chamber, and I honestly never thought I would.
You know, I'm turning 57.
If I was ever going to actually get into that system,
I was probably running out of time.
I'm nervous because it's one of the most difficult spaces there are.
[music fades out]
[Mpete] He's in good shape now.
You know, he was working out, not telling us anything.
-Feels good. -[man] Feels good?
[objects clicking]
Bye.
[Berger snickering faintly]
-Wish me luck! [chuckling] -[Fuentes] I will.
[ominous music playing]
-Feels good, Maropeng. -[Mpete] All right. Cool.
All right.
So I'm gonna take the same route that Homo naledi almost certainly took
with its bodies into the place where they buried their dead.
[Mpete] Climbing up the Dragon's Back and everything,
we've done it with him a couple of times.
[breathing fast]
[Mpete] But going down the Chute…
that's another level, you know?
[music fades out]
[Berger] I can start?
[Mpete] Yes.
-[Berger] I'll just… Yep. -[man] Maropeng is out of the way.
[Berger] He is. I'll just go in this way.
-And then in like this? -[contemplative music playing]
-[Mpete] Yes, you're holding on… -[Berger] Yep.
[groaning] Yep. I'll just get that foot under me.
-[Mpete] Yes. -[Berger] Like that.
Yeah.
[indistinct chatter]
[Berger groans]
What a… Okay.
[Mpete] You can go down. You can go down.
[Berger] All right.
Now you use…
-Like this? -[Mpete] Both legs down, yes.
[Berger] Both legs free?
[Mpete] Both legs free, yes.
[Berger] Oops.
I'm hung back there.
What? Yep. Good.
-[Mpete] Yeah. -[Berger] Okay.
[Mpete] Yep. Good. Yeah.
-[Berger] Like that? -[Mpete] Yes, lower the whole body down.
Yes.
That was easy by the pinnacle there?
[Berger, groaning] Not there. Okay?
Where do I go now?
-[man] Yeah. Yeah. -[Berger] Yeah?
Okay. Yeah.
[indistinct chatter]
[Berger] I'm stuck a bit here now.
[man] I think you need to go up a bit.
[groaning]
[Berger] I have now wedged myself…
[Berger groans]
[Berger groaning]
Wow.
All right.
Okay.
My chest is sticking. It is, like, a centimeter.
[man] Yeah.
[Berger] You have a hammer? [chuckling]
[hammering]
[contemplative music continues]
All right. [groans]
[Berger groaning]
Okay, I'm past it.
[man] You are down. That's it.
-[Berger] Wow. -[man] Take your foot down.
-[Berger] Let me just… -[man] Out of your way?
[Berger] …take this in for a moment.
-Oh my goodness. -[man] Yeah, you're in!
-This-- -[man] After how many years?
Eight plus years.
Wow. [breathing heavily]
[man] Well done. Yeah.
-[man chuckling] -I can't believe I'm in here.
[man] Yeah. Jeez.
-I honestly thought I'd never be in here. -[man] Yeah.
Oh my goodness.
[man] All right, Lee's down!
[breathing fast]
-[indistinct chatter] -Oh my gosh.
-You are in the-- -Hill Antechamber.
[contemplative music continues]
I've seen it on TV.
-[man] Now you are here. -I can't believe it.
Yeah.
-[person] Welcome. -Man.
[chuckling] Yeah! Well done! Jeez!
[contemplative music continues]
[indistinct chatter]
[music fades out]
[Berger] Okay, so now I would like to head down the passage towards Dinaledi.
Oh my God.
Look at what I'm seeing on the wall here, folks.
[contemplative music playing]
There are definite scratches.
They're pictographs.
This is amazing.
The whole entrance area around this corner has real scratches on it.
And they're right where they should be if you're marking this passage.
Saying, "Go back there."
"Go back into Dinaledi."
[man] You don't think that's just the natural--
I do not think that's natural. How can you get natural across here?
How can you go natural in that direction?
How do you do that?
-And look, it's not there. -[man] Hmm.
[Berger] You see, if you go here, it's not here, right?
[man] Yeah.
And I think that's one of them too.
But you see this stuff?
Don't you think that's carved in there?
Look at-- That's got to be carved.
Holy crap.
[contemplative music continues]
I've looked at symbology and I've looked at rock art,
but it does not exist with these small-brained things.
I mean, if that's naledi…
Different level. Different level.
[music fades out]
Holy cow.
[chuckling]
Okay, we're going to move down the passage now, um, into Dinaledi.
And I'm going to now turn my black light off and,
well, turn my headlight on
for the first time.
And I'm in the Dinaledi Chamber.
[contemplative music playing]
Okay.
Um, wow.
Again, never thought I'd be in here.
But when you look straight up, you get this magnificent ceiling.
Now I'm seeing for the first time
what we call Feature One, the burial. And…
Oh my goodness. It's-- It's…
I wish everyone could see this in real life,
because there's no doubt, when you look at it from here,
that this is, in actuality… a grave.
Wow. [chuckling]
I mean, it really is obvious to trace the edge of this feature.
And it's amazing.
[contemplative music continues]
You have to come to these places because
it's really still.
And it's quiet and it's… it's tomb-like.
You see why they… they came here.
[music fades out]
You know, eight years, uh, I've sat and watched this and,
um,
really thought I wouldn't be in this space,
and… it is very emotional for me.
I've invested a big chunk of my life,
and I've watched other people come in and out of here.
I've risked people's lives in here and, uh,
it is utterly and absolutely breathtaking.
[contemplative music playing]
Thank you, guys. [chuckling]
I-- I-- I would have gone--
I would have gone to my grave with the wrong--
-with the wrong image of this place. -[man] Yeah.
I would not have seen this.
[Berger groaning]
-[indistinct chatter] -[groaning]
[indistinct chatter]
[Mpete] Slide more that way. Yes.
[anguished groaning]
Yes!
-I'm panicking. [chuckling] -[laughter]
I'm absolutely panicking,
'cause I'm not there and I don't know what's happening.
[Molopyane continuing] Oh yeah, the Chute.
I know how tough it can be,
and to have to sit there and to wait…
And you're like, "Oh God, is something wrong,
did someone get stuck?"
[groaning and breathing fast]
-[distant laughter] -[music fades out]
[laughter]
[Molopyane] That's Berg-Berg.
-[chuckling] -[Hawks] That's awesome.
-Hello. -[Hawks] Welcome back.
[chuckling quietly]
-[Berger] I am back. -[chuckling]
That is the most insane and awful
and wonderful thing I've ever done in my life.
[man] Sure.
-[Berger] Oh my gosh. -[chuckling]
It…
It's unbelievable.
And it is…
There must be dozens of bodies buried down there.
I think there are carvings on the wall.
[Fuentes] Carvings?
-Um… Yeah, I do. -[Fuentes] Do you want a hand?
Yeah, hold up, hold on.
I could give everyone a hug too. Oh my God.
[contemplative music playing]
-[chuckling] -All right.
[Berger] Oh.
It's-- It's-- It's-- It's madness.
Don't think I have any strength left. [chuckling]
Um…
You know, eight and a half years ago, I told the world I'd never go there.
-[Molopyane] And you did it today. -I know, I can't believe it.
-[Molopyane] Going back tomorrow? -No.
[laughter]
[contemplative music continues]
[Berger continuing] I-- I don't understand what happened to me.
I mean, I really did come out of that a very, very different person.
[music fades out]
[contemplative music playing]
That Dinaledi trip, um, it's still very deep within me.
When I saw this…
I had a hallucination.
I don't know if you've ever seen those movies
about mathematicians or, whatever, physicists,
when those glowing numbers start appearing in the air around them?
That happened for me in that space.
Uh, it's a kind of thing that shouldn't happen to a person like me. [chuckling]
And it did.
[music fades out]
I-- I will never forget that moment
when I came out and I told you guys there were engravings,
-but I hadn't shown you. -Yeah.
Then I remembered I had 'em on my phone.
I found the image and I turned it towards you, [chuckling]
and Agustin leapt up,
and John started fumbling with his phone and looking down,
and you both turned around and showed me that.
[ominous music playing]
[Fuentes] This is a hash mark made by Neanderthals
60,000 years ago in southern Spain, Gibraltar.
On the right we have a hash mark that is almost identical to the one on the left,
made by Homo naledi,
looking almost the same.
I'm going to show you an image that's done by early Homo sapiens.
This is Blombas,
the earliest art done by Homo sapiens.
Homo naledi.
We've just seen, I think convincingly, three species
-that are all drawing the same patterns. -[music fades out]
It-- It blows the mind, right?
It-- It's redefining what it is that makes us complex humans.
And apparently we're not as complex and special as we seem to be.
Because we might have learned this from someone else.
-[chuckling] -We're not that special.
How is this not... simply
the shared shapes that sit inside our mind that we're born with? They're genetic.
How is it possible that that's not in us,
that this isn't the Rosetta Stone to the mind,
the language and the symbols that are in all of the shared minds?
You know, the tool-shaped rock
that's buried almost directly below these engravings.
[contemplative music playing]
This is from Blombas.
And so let me put the two together.
Kene's about to faint.
[laughing]
And…
that's pretty remarkable.
Um, if I was going to carve something as hard as that flowstone,
I would want a rock that fit into my hand,
that had a little point, that I could really gouge with.
[chuckling]
Homo naledi's tool here may be--
At least I would argue there's a robust possibility
that it is the oldest evidence we have
of a tool of any member of the genus Homo used to create imagery.
What do you vote, Kene? Tool or no tool? [chuckling]
Listen, it's a pen.
[Hawks, Berger and Fuentes chuckling]
-[Fuentes] The pen-shaped rock. -[Berger] The pen-shaped rock.
I think it's kind of ridiculous.
We're all dancing around this because none of us want to say the word
'cause we're afraid of what people will say when we say
that Homo naledi made art in that cave.
-Right. -That's what they did.
-With a utensil designed for the purpose. -Right?
[melancholic music playing]
[Fuentes] Taking that tool
and putting it in the hand of that dead individual,
so they can take it with them.
[Hawks] You know, why do we bury bodies?
A lot of people will give you the answer that, you know, we bury the dead
because we believe that there's something beyond,
and putting the dead under the ground is a part of that passageway, right,
it's a part of connecting to the next world.
Was naledi having an image
that death is a transition, it's a passage to another place?
It's hard to escape that idea
when literally naledi is enacting a passage to another place
in order to deposit the dead.
[melancholic music continues]
[Fuentes] Humans create these places of incredible meaning.
[Berger] Humans build high spaces and places that
they want others to feel spiritually small in.
Go in the Dinaledi Chamber and you'll feel very, very small.
[Fuentes] You cannot do what naledi does
unless you have a full commitment, a belief that this,
the images, the light, the fire, the camaraderie,
the changing, the covering of these walls…
the engaging with the dead,
that all of this means something.
If we're talking about belief and belief systems,
then we can look at this 250-300,000 years ago time frame
and we can say, "There. There is a kernel…
is a beginning,
is hard evidence…
for this incredible capacity…
for religiousness and eventually religion…
that flourishes and grows, for better and for worse,
in contemporary humans."
[cheering]
[Berger] Would I call what they were doing "spirituality" if I saw it in humans?
[music fades out]
Yes.
But they're not human.
[melancholic music playing]
[Hawks] Even after years and years of study,
I can't say that I know what it's like to be a naledi.
I can't look through their bones to their lives.
[Berger] The Rising Star system is the richest hominid site ever discovered.
And yet there were so many things that we didn't have.
I almost felt that we had reached a point
where we were going to end up with this tiny little window
that was wholly inadequate to understand who they were.
And then on that last expedition,
it's so funny how it happened, you know, that
Dragon's Back, we find that little hearth, and there's fire suddenly.
And there's symbols.
And then, Kene, you found food.
I mean, when you know-- when you know what someone ate,
you know their soul.
[chuckling] You know, you know what they're doing.
And suddenly we have a culture
of another species.
I mean, this
is human-level complexity
in something else, and that deserves respect.
That deserves respect by the entire
human race.
[birds chirping]
[music fades out]
[contemplative music playing]
[music fades out]