Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger talks Homo naledi

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]Deep inside a cave in South Africa, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger made a new discovery of something that's very old. Berger uncovered Homo Naledi, a species dating back about 300,000 years.

[00:00:13]Berger, a National Geographic Explorer in Residence, presents Cave of Bones May 31st and June 1st at the Workland Center. And joining me from Johannesburg, South Africa is Lee Berger. It's wonderful to see you.

[00:00:27]It's great to see you and I'm fresh out of the field. Literally an hour ago I was in a cave.

[00:00:32]>> Oh, that is incredible. We'll talk about that in just a second. But in terms of this discovery, how much did that discovery change what we understand about the origin of human beings?

[00:00:45]You know, this was a sort of discovery of a generation.

[00:00:49]It was discovery of the largest assemblage of ancient human relative remains in all of history. And it remains so to this day. A new species, about a quarter of a million years old, incredibly primitive though, looking like it should have come out of millions of years ago, yet existed at the same time that early Homo sapiens did here in Southern Africa. At the time we announced it, it was world news. It it shocked the world because it it shook up our ideas of the very steady pace that we thought human evolution had occurred.

[00:01:23]And what was maybe even more dramatic was that at the same time we announced the species, we announced that it was a cultural species that we thought that it had deliberately disposed of its dead.

[00:01:35]Well, now we've gone further than that.

[00:01:36]We have new evidence. New evidence that this was an incredibly [snorts] complex species, maybe one of the first species as complex as we humans are, but existed hundreds of thousands of years before we became that complex. And I'm going to be talking about that when I get to Calgary. And it wasn't just one or two of these individuals of these species.

[00:01:59]You found 18 of them and there's a real range in ages as well. So so how did that paint in the picture more for you?

[00:02:07]Well, let me give you an update. We're now much closer to about 40 individuals of these and I'll be telling you some of those secrets to your your audience as we get there. It is an incredible assemblage deep in an underground cave and just 30 km behind me right over my shoulder here uh just outside of Johannesburg. It's an unusual space and it was a ritual burial space by this species. So I want you to imagine that we have evidence of a non-human species burying its dead making carvings in the wall above its dead, doing things that until this moment we thought were uniquely human. That's transformational.

[00:02:50]I I and I want your listeners to let that sink in for a moment. A non-human species with the cultural complexity of us. Mhm.

[00:02:59]So tell us about specifically your work today. What were you doing today?

[00:03:04]Well, today I'm doing more of that. We are busy exploring these caves in and around Johannesburg. We have a an area here, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where we are constantly exploring. I have 55 explorers and technicians in the field every single day, almost 300 days a year. We are constantly looking for new discoveries, searching these old discoveries, doing excavations, but all in these extreme environments and I'll be telling the audiences in Calgary about that. Uh these are some of the most extreme environments that any scientists have ever undertaken archaeological work. It's It's exciting.

[00:03:42]It's fun and it's incredibly dangerous.

[00:03:45]>> Mhm. It is called Cave of Bones and and your crew are going deep deep underground in in a rather narrow situation as well, is claustrophobia ever a thing with these people?

[00:03:58]Well, we we we we make sure that no one who enters these spaces is claustrophobic. That is that is probably job description number one in our work.

[00:04:09]A lot of that's a mental game and when I say we go into narrow spaces, are you saying these are are spaces? I just have to give your your viewers an idea that some of these spaces are 17 or 18 cm wide, just wider than a human head. Do we get there? There Rick is going into one of these spaces. We do this day after day moving into these spaces to recover these these fossils. It's an incredibly exciting time, incredibly dangerous. We have setups that are are somewhat equivalent to what NASA uses to talk to to space missions. And I imagine these people they've been doing it so long that they kind of get used to it.

[00:04:51]And there are safety measures as well to make sure everything's okay, too.

[00:04:56]We have never lost anyone yet and that's because of the extreme efforts we go to to to make this safe work. But I think you can get an idea from those images they're showing on the screens right now.

[00:05:10]This is not a job for anyone who's not prepared. Yeah, no kidding. Now, South Africa is known as the cradle of humankind.

[00:05:19]Why are there so many of these discoveries and so much of this this evidence of early life there?

[00:05:26]So, there is a remarkable situation just behind me out in the the mountains that and hills that exist behind me, a dolomitic limestone that forms these caves that captures this evidence. But I and and that is a part of it, but I often tell the world that this is the greatest age of exploration and a lot of it's because we're like drunks looking for our lost car keys under the near street lamp. This is where we're looking now.

[00:05:55]We need more explorers out here in Africa, across the planet. What the last couple of decades has shown us is there's so much more to be found and we just need an explorer mindset and more explorers in the field. You know, I can tell just talking to you that you love your job.

[00:06:15]What would you say to a young person who would be interested in becoming a paleoanthropologist?

[00:06:22]Man, there is this is it really isn't a job, but don't tell National Geographic that. This exploration is is is a lifestyle and and and a a pleasure to do on a daily basis.

[00:06:35]If you want to do things like this, first get the training, get the education, you know, you got to go through those processes, but follow your passions. Live an explorer lifestyle, live by the explorer code, which is never stop exploring. Mhm. Of course, there there are so many sciences related to this. What What was the first science class you took where you went, "Aha, this really fascinates me."

[00:07:03]It was dinosaurs. Uh you know, I was like most kids, I wanted to be a dinosaur paleontologist. I was going to chase those things across the Americas, North America, and in those great dinosaur fields. And then I I read a book called Lucy written by Don Johanson and in it he said that these are the rarest sought-after objects on Earth, these fossils of our ancient human relatives.

[00:07:25]And that hooked me. The idea that you could enter a field that if you made even the tiniest discovery, and at that time there were more scientists looking for and studying these fossils than there were fossils to study.

[00:07:39]>> Mhm.

[00:07:40]And I thought you could make a difference if you made just the smallest discovery. That's now changed, and I'll be talking about those those changes and those dramatic new discoveries when I get to Calgary. Of course, we have quite a few dinosaur fossils outside of Calgary, not too far, so maybe you can spare some time to go have a visit to Drumheller.

[00:08:00]No, oh, it's still one of my great passions. Yeah, absolutely. Lee, thanks very much for speaking with us.

[00:08:07]Oh, it's fantastic. I look forward to being in Calgary. All right, take care.

[00:08:11]Lee Berger presents Cave of Bones as part of the National Geographic Live series, May 31st and June 1st at the Workland Centre.