Cave of Bones, with Lee Berger

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 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. We study the culture of these ancients spies, and that's going to be I think particularly important to these most recent discoveries.

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 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.

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. 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 the first non human species culture in history.

how potentially profound that the discoveries are. I guess I guess maybe starting with the setting a little bit before 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.

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, 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 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

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 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.

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.

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.

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. 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 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 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 obviously did get out, but it's about as close to not surviving at e vent as I've ever been.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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

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 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.

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 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 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

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 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 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. 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

and things, so there's no sign of that. There's no significant water movement of anything in that cave system.

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 where they cooked animal remains, the other where they buried their dead.

to just talk. And if you watch Netflix documentary, you'll 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

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, and they draw those same images. You know there's something there and maybe this will be what we need to break through that.

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 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 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, 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,

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 that not to affect you when you're in a space like that.

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 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

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 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 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 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.

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 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

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 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 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 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.

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 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 of are at this critical moment in human history where literally the balance of life on this planet is at stake because of us.

are the older writings. You know, it's quite fun if you go back and read Skull in the Rock, Almost Human, 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,

what has got to be the greatest age of exploration we're living through right now.