Name: This Face TOTALLY Changes the Human Story
Uploaded: 2022-06-15T14:49:25.000Z
Duration: 14 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

You immediately descend into the mouth of a cave...We suit up, we put harnesses on

and we clip into some safety ropes and then we're climbing this knife edge of

The second conditional

rock. It goes about 20 meters up and so if you were to fall off the Dragons Back

that would be very bad. If any of us was injured on the sort of the far side of

the cave, the paramedics would be sent down to us and you had to live

underground until you could get yourself back out. You go through that little

tunnel and then you come out and there was a more open chamber. But, we only had

our headlamps on at that point and so everywhere we looked you could just see

Hey smart people, Joe here. There may be nearly 8 billion humans on earth, but homo sapiens is a lonely species. And not just because we

stared our phones all day, or never go outside, or just watch YouTube videos all the time.

Because our species is a relict. The only surviving member of the group

of upright Apes known as homo. But it wasn't always like that. Walk backwards

through time and you'll see that at various points, many other human and

hominid species walked the earth. Some like us and some very different.

Everything we know about those ancient species stories we know from fossil bones.

And in many cases that means we don't know very much at all.

Which is frustrating because we all want to know where we fit in this story.

How did this one species of intelligent ape come to dominate the planet and where do we fit

in with all the others. Well that story just got a whole lot

more complicated thanks to a ridiculously awesome bunch of fossils

discovered in South Africa. Over the past several years, which added a new species

to the ancient human family. For the first time ever, these fossils travelled

outside South Africa to Dallas, Texas. So I stopped by the Perot Museum of Nature

and Science to check them out and meet the scientists who discovered them...

and to take a selfie with my ancient cousin. We'll get to that. How many people have

found new human species like ever? Probably a dozen maybe, maybe 15. And you

found two! Yes! Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger

lives and works in South Africa searching for ancient human fossils.

Scientists have been digging up human fossils in this area for decades but

thanks to new technology and satellite imagery, in 2013,

Lee had identified a few spots he thought others might have missed. Expert

cavers on Lee's team had discovered an unexplored section and what's known as

the Rising Star cave system. They named it the Dinaledi Chamber, meaning

chamber of stars in one of the local South African languages. When they

descended to the bottom of that chamber they did find something bright shining

back at them; fossil bones, piles of them. When Lee saw pictures of the fossils in

the chamber, he immediately knew they were fossils of an ancient human

relative. Problem was that he was too big to fit inside the cave to study them so

he did what any of us would do. He put out a Facebook post asking for help:

"Volunteers needed. Excellent archaeological paleontological and

excavation skills, they must be skinny and preferably small and they must not

be claustrophobic." I mean, who wouldn't respond to that. They were looking for

archaeologists with caving and climbing experience and before I started studying

archaeology, I was doing outdoor leadership. So it sort of sounded like me, but I

didn't really expect to hear anything. But pretty soon I was underground! My

supervisor sent me the ad and said, "Hey you have climbing experience. Don't you"

have caving experience, too?" I said well yes and so it sounded bizarre and

bizarre enough that I would want to do it. Becca Peixotto and Marina Elliott are

two members of the six scientists team who descended into the cave to unearth

these fossils and bring them to the surface to study. Excavating these

fossils required what was essentially a military-level operation. Kilometers

worth of cables were strung so Lee and others in a command tent on the surface

could watch every moment of the excavation and communicate with the team

underground. We got dubbed the underground astronauts.

And the people who were on the surface who couldn't come underground with us

we're watching us on these sort of grainy CCTV cameras and it reminded them

of watching astronauts, you know working on spacewalks in the space station.

To say that it wasn't easy for them to get to work every day would be

a bit of an understatement. We have to travel through this cave where the

narrowest point that we have to get through is 18 centimeters wide. You have

to get down on your belly and sort of do a belly crawl to get through it. It's

called the Superman crawl because folks with broader shoulders have to put one

hand over their head, and  sort of push themselves along with their

feet sort of flying like Superman. You come out from under the Superman crawl and

you can stand up and you're in a pretty big chamber and that's where the base of

the Dragons Back is. Yeah, and then we end up in an area called the top of the

chute and the chute is actually a long crack or fissure in the dolostone, or in the rock. meters high. At its widest, it's

And it's about 45 centimeters. At its narrowest it's that 18 centimeters. 18

centimeters is like the size of my head - it's just not possible. I have a big head. See if I've got what it takes to

As they brought the fossils to the surface, and began to look at their features, they began to realize they had found

something very strange. For one thing it was a totally new species. They named it

Homo naledi. And this wasn't just one individual. This cave held many

individuals, like plural. In that first 2013 expedition we brought up..whatever

it was 1350 fossil fragments which in itself is is crazy. But they all came

from a single excavation unit 80 centimeters by 80 centimeters by 20

centimeters deep. And we found bones representing, I think we're up to 22

individuals now. All of the body parts are represented, so there's foot bones

and hand bones and rib bones and vertebra and teeth and all of it.

The Rising Star site, the Dinaledi Chamber, the Lesedi Chamber, and other areas

around there, we've discovered more individual hominid remains than the

entire record of hominin evolution from the continent of Africa.

I think our field had convinced itself there was nothing left to find, and

people stopped looking. This is a message that there's more out there, and there's

not just a little bit more there's a lot more.

Okay now I don't know how you think fossil hunting works especially the

search for ancient human, but that is not how this usually goes. When people find

hominid fossils, you're finding part of a jaw, you're finding some teeth, maybe

you're finding just one little digit from a hand and that's how species are

described. So there are whole species that are known from just really small

parts of the body. Whereas, with Homo naledi, we have the whole body from a

bunch of different individuals several times over. Homo naledi's bones

don't look like the bones of other ancient humans or hominids. At least they

don't look like anything we've ever seen together in one single species. So we're

behind the scenes in the Perot museum and we're just going to go in and have a

peek at an at a reconstruction of Neo. So what those bones might have looked

like in life. And this is our buddy Neo here. So Homo Naledi has a sort of mosaic

of features. Some aspects of Homo naledi look a lot like our bodies and some

aspects look a lot like our more ancient relatives. So they have a really tiny

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This Face TOTALLY Changes the Human Story

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