In Search of Us

It took courage when young news videographer Lee Berger (’90) rescued a woman from the swirling currents of the Savannah River back in 1986. Then again, Berger has exhibited a fearless approach to life throughout his career – an attitude that he says was taught and nurtured by his Georgia Southern professors.

Last April, Berger showed a different kind of bravery, putting his professional reputation on the line when, before dozens of international news media, he unveiled a new species of human precursor, Australopithecus sediba. The find, one of the most significant in the history of paleoanthropology, was made by a Berger-led team and landed him on the front pages and broadcast leads of news outlets around the world – including CBS’ “60 Minutes.”

Berger, the senior research officer and a professor of paleoanthropology at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand, his son Matthew, and post-doctoral student Job Kibii were exploring a cave when they unearthed the fossilized bones of two individuals: a woman and a child. Both have skeletal features that place them squarely in the gap between early and modern humans, exhibiting some traits of each.

“Both of the skeletons we would eventually find are the most complete early human ancestral skeletons ever discovered,” Berger said, adding that both individuals have some traits of modern humans: small teeth, a projecting nose, an advanced pelvis and long legs. However, their long arms and small brain cases link them to older finds.

“They fall at a critical time period between the early ape men like Lucy and Mrs. Ples and our immediate ancestor, the species Homo erectus, at about 1.9 million years. And morphologically, they fit that gap. That is, they look like a mix of earlier things and later things and of course they represent a completely new and unexpected species, Australopithecus sediba.”

The fossil’s name comes from Latin australis (southern), Greek pithekos (ape) and sediba meaning “natural spring” or “well” in the South African Sotho language.

The discovery was just the latest of Berger’s forays into the international scientific spotlight. In 1995, he made headlines when he and colleague Ron Clarke put forth an explanation for what caused the death 2.5 million years ago of an individual known as the Taung Child. They attributed it to an attack by a bird of prey, theorizing that an eagle or other large bird not only collected the materials found around the fossil, but the child itself.

Their idea set off a lively scientific debate and resulted in a reexamination of the collecting habits of large predatory birds.

That same year, he unveiled a set of fossilized footprints found by geologist David Roberts which represented the oldest-known prints left by an anatomically modern human. The prints dated to about 117,000 years ago and have become popularly known as the “footprints of Eve.”

His recent and most stunning discovery, Australopithecus sediba, began quietly as a review of the terrain in an area known as the Cradle of Humankind in northeastern South Africa.

“It started with an exploratory project that I undertook,” said Berger, “and it’s funny that the project dates back more than a decade and a half where I first started to explore the region around the Cradle of Humankind, just outside of Johannesburg, looking for new fossil sites and trying to use aerial maps and satellite imagery.

“That was done in the middle-1990s and I had had very little success with it. I found a few fossil sites and a few caves, but I really didn’t find a great deal of new material. That study, as well as the work of others kind of perpetuated the idea that there was very little to be found out there.

“However,” Berger joked, “I was one of the last human beings on earth to discover Google Earth in that Christmas period between 2007 and into 2008, and I realized that it had a remarkable mapping ability particularly in that area. I put all of my information into Google Earth – 130 known cave sites with 20 known fossil sites that were in this large region. I immediately realized it looked like we’d missed a lot. I could see patterns and I could see where there might be other caves. I also realized some of our data was wrong. And, as I would move things, it was very easy to recognize a cave.

“I started walking the region in March of 2008,” said Berger. “My dog, Tau, and I or my son or some friends would walk once or twice a week. I would literally survey a new area so that by July I had found more than 600 previously unidentified new cave sites and almost 30 new fossil sites, which is remarkable because this is one of the most explored areas on planet Earth for these sorts of things. On August first, I found the site at Malapa. I realized I had found a new site that had some fossils.

“On the fifteenth of August I went back with my nine-year-old son Matthew, my dog and my postdoctoral student Job Kibii and a minute-and-a-half later Matthew said, ‘Dad, I found a fossil,’ and that has pretty much changed my life,” Berger said with a laugh.

While the popular press often reports scientific debate as “controversy,” nothing could be more natural among scientists, said Berger.

“One of the interesting things is people think it’s a negative thing when scientists are debating,” said Berger. “The big debate is of course, what genus is it in? We put it into Australopithecus, but should it not be in Homo? While some people say, ‘Oh, well, this is debated, then,’ the species isn’t in question. We predicted that they would debate which genus it should be in, because it is in fact a transitional fossil. That’s a fantastic debate that we’re in the middle of.”

Growing up on a farm outside of Sylvania, Ga., Berger often walked the newly plowed fields in search of projectile points and became interested in Native American artifacts and lifestyles. His college years nurtured and extended that interest into a formal approach to human ancestors.

“A big chunk of it started right there at Georgia Southern,” said Berger, who majored in anthropology with a minor in geology. “One of the things about Georgia Southern, which many people may not appreciate, is how unusual it is to have such a varied number of departments doing field work. When I was there, we had geologists that were vertebrate paleontologists and people working on everything from fossil crabs to dinosaurs to mosasaurs to almost anything you could imagine. At the same time you had archaeologists and anthropologists working on everything from Civil War- and Revolutionary War-era sites and Native American sites. It was the encouragement of doing field work – people encouraging you not to be afraid to go out and explore and be afraid not to find things.

“Some people may not realize it, but exploration is a scary thing,” he said. “You’re taking a significant chunk of money and precious amount of your time and you have to go out there and look for something you might not find. That takes courage, and all of those professors instilled that no-fear archaeology, that no-fear geology in us.”

What does Matthew, the world’s youngest fossil finder, think about all the excitement? “He’s the youngest human being on earth to have ever found one of these things,” said his proud dad. “And to have found maybe one of the most important ones in history is an extraordinary thing. He’s quite an amazing young man, and he’s taking it in stride. He wants to be a paleoanthropologist, but I warn him it’s going to be hard to beat his first find!

“This discovery is more than I could have ever dreamed of sitting in Sue Moore’s Anthropology 101 class at Georgia Southern,” said Berger. “I chose to be in an area of science that searches for the rarest objects sought after on the planet Earth. Most people who do what I do go their entire careers and never find a single fragment. To have found and been part of a find that is arguably to date the most significant in human archaeological paleoanthropological history is – who needs anything more?”

Given hundreds of caves yet to explore, the drive to continue searching is strong. “It’s just beginning,” Berger said. “What you’ve seen in the media is just the front of what is going to be a truly remarkable story.”