Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert Lamb. On today's episode of Stuff to
Speaker 2: Blow Your Mind, I'm going to be speaking with noted
Speaker 2: paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, author of the new book Cave of Bones,
Speaker 2: a true story of discovery, adventure, and human origins, and
Speaker 2: he's also featured in the Netflix documentary Unknown Cave of Bones.
Speaker 2: Let's get right to the interview. Hi, Lee, Thanks for
Speaker 2: coming on the show.
Speaker 3: It's great to be here.
Speaker 2: To start off, just really generally, how should listeners understand
Speaker 2: the mission and the challenges of paleoanthropology.
Speaker 3: So paleoanthropology is, in its loosest definition, the search for
Speaker 3: understanding human origins, but it's a little broader than that.
Speaker 3: It's also hominine origins. And the reason I make that
Speaker 3: distinction is that we humans tend to self center everything
Speaker 3: around ourselves, and hominins are bipedal apes that are part
Speaker 3: of our journey, but they're not all our direct ancestors.
Speaker 3: If you will. There's been a mass and almost braided
Speaker 3: stream of ancient relatives that walked on two legs that
Speaker 3: are closer related to us than chimpanzees and gorillas are
Speaker 3: so there if you imagine evolution of sort of coming
Speaker 3: from a last common ancestor, gorilla's broke off first, then chimpanzees,
Speaker 3: bona bo's breakoff, and all the rest of that story
Speaker 3: between us and that moment are the hominins as we evolved,
Speaker 3: bipedalism and special adaptations. We also, though, study not only
Speaker 3: the physical morphology the kind of the way that evolution happens.
Speaker 3: We study the culture of these ancients spies, and that's
Speaker 3: going to be I think particularly important to these most
Speaker 3: recent discoveries.
Speaker 2: Now, you were previously the Philip Tobias Chair in Paleoanthropology
Speaker 2: at the University of Atvadeschrand. I know you've taken on
Speaker 2: some new titles recently. What is your role now with
Speaker 2: National Geographic and how does all of this factor into
Speaker 2: your other positions and your work?
Speaker 3: Right, So, I am an explorer in residence is my
Speaker 3: primary job at National Geographic Society. I'm also a Senior
Speaker 3: Carnegie Science Fellow. That's a very recent appointment, as I've
Speaker 3: joined that organization largely to push the sort of hard
Speaker 3: sciences in our field and the relationship between that remarkable
Speaker 3: group of scientists and organization. I still maintain a position
Speaker 3: at VITZ an honorary professor, and I'm director of the
Speaker 3: Center for the Exploration of the Deep Human Journey, so
Speaker 3: all of those intersect with each other. I run a
Speaker 3: very large science program that has a sort of collaborative
Speaker 3: collegial group of scientists from around the world of over
Speaker 3: one hundred and sixty at this time. It's growing almost
Speaker 3: on a daily basis. That so it's a very large
Speaker 3: science program. Some of those are based in the sort
Speaker 3: of traditional university setting, others of them are based in
Speaker 3: sort of institutional things like Carnegie or museums.
Speaker 2: Now the book is Cave of Bones, a true story
Speaker 2: of discovery, adventure and human origins. And then of course
Speaker 2: we also have the Netflix documentary Unknown Cave of Bones.
Speaker 2: They take readers and viewers to a particular cave system
Speaker 2: in South Africa. Can you tell us about the Rising
Speaker 2: Star Cave Complex?
Speaker 3: So the Rising Star Cave complex came deeply into my
Speaker 3: life in twenty thirteen. I'd known about it before then.
Speaker 3: It was a very well known system of caves where
Speaker 3: amateur cavers and I'd even caved in in the nineteen
Speaker 3: nineties just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, if you will,
Speaker 3: a huge network of subterranean system almost four kilometers long.
Speaker 3: So what is that two and a half miles or
Speaker 3: so of underground passages networks, small and somewhat larger cave
Speaker 3: systems that goes down maybe a two hundred feet or
Speaker 3: so before you hit ground water. But it's like a
Speaker 3: it's hard to describe for people who tend to think
Speaker 3: of like the big mammoth cave systems. It's a latticework cave.
Speaker 3: So it's like skyscrapers that are buried in the ground
Speaker 3: with different floors, and you can move and traverse up
Speaker 3: and down these and it can be impossibly difficult. And
Speaker 3: so both the book and the Netflix documentary followed us
Speaker 3: over a period of almost a year as we were
Speaker 3: testing the idea of whether we had discovered burials in
Speaker 3: a non human species, and that is a species called Homoletti,
Speaker 3: which is a very small brained hominin. It's a a
Speaker 3: brain slightly larger than a chimpanzee, but it was a
Speaker 3: biped It walked on two legs and existed sort of
Speaker 3: out of time and place. If we looked at a
Speaker 3: hominin like that, we would normally think, oh, it's two million,
Speaker 3: two and a half million years old based on its
Speaker 3: entire anatomy. It turned out that homon Aletti is much
Speaker 3: younger than that, something like two hundred and forty thousand
Speaker 3: to three hundred and thirty thousand years before present. So
Speaker 3: in finding these possible burials, and we go through that
Speaker 3: sort of period of analysis and looking at in this
Speaker 3: deep dark chamber almost three hundred and fifty feet back
Speaker 3: into a system, we knew it was going to be
Speaker 3: one of the most controversial things ever said, because until
Speaker 3: that moment of seeing those the idea was that really
Speaker 3: only humans and things very much like humans, like neanderthals
Speaker 3: Bury their dead. It was our gg, one of the
Speaker 3: last things we had that separated ourselves from the animal
Speaker 3: kingdom and animal behavior. And so both the Netflix show
Speaker 3: and the book carry us through that period and then
Speaker 3: to what I kind of referred to as seventy two
Speaker 3: hours of remarkable discovery, where I ended up losing about
Speaker 3: fifty five pounds and got down into this incredibly difficult
Speaker 3: to get to space where only forty six people had
Speaker 3: been before almost died in the process of doing that,
Speaker 3: I needed answers to some questions before we published that
Speaker 3: burial paper that really I kind of only had the
Speaker 3: broad experience to answer. And it was at that point
Speaker 3: that I discovered etchings on the wall, engravings on the wall,
Speaker 3: and evidence of fire on the roof. And then that
Speaker 3: kind of broke everything free, because we suddenly realized there
Speaker 3: was evidence of fire everywhere. And so now we're at
Speaker 3: this kind of moment where my colleagues and I have
Speaker 3: announced to the world that we believe we have discovered
Speaker 3: the first non human species culture in history.
Speaker 2: Yes, having watched the documentary and read the book, this
Speaker 2: is all this is just really mind blowing. I'm not
Speaker 2: even sure of which direction to start with first, like
Speaker 2: just the sheer challenges of the cave system, or just
Speaker 2: how potentially profound that the discoveries are. I guess I
Speaker 2: guess maybe starting with the setting a little bit before
Speaker 2: you even ventured down there to the main chamber, how
Speaker 2: did you go about carrying out these explorations, like with
Speaker 2: the command center and finding the right people to send
Speaker 2: down there.
Speaker 3: So when I was first shown where this material was,
Speaker 3: I sent my then fifteen year old, very skinny son
Speaker 3: down there to verify that it was real, and I
Speaker 3: was shown by these two amateur cavers that I had
Speaker 3: enlisted where this was. I knew I would never get
Speaker 3: into that space. You know, if you imagine this vertical
Speaker 3: squeeze that that moves in various directions, that squeezes down
Speaker 3: to seven and a half inches in places my physic
Speaker 3: I used to choke, my ego would never fit much
Speaker 3: less my physique. I designed a system to work in
Speaker 3: the space based on I've been very close friends with
Speaker 3: both James Cameron and Bob Ballard and have been admirers
Speaker 3: of the way they've handled their expeditions, which include, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of deep sea work where you can't often go
Speaker 3: to these places. Now James did, of course, and so
Speaker 3: is Bob, but you can't often go to these places.
Speaker 3: So they use remote operation. They use you know, tethered
Speaker 3: operations and using remote operated vehicles, and so I designed
Speaker 3: a system where I could be in that kind of
Speaker 3: command center. It's also based loosely on NASA as well.
Speaker 3: And then I found my own remote operated people, which
Speaker 3: I put a Facebook add out, and you know, looking
Speaker 3: for skinny scientists that had skills to climb and cave
Speaker 3: and work in extreme environments. And I selected six just
Speaker 3: remarkable scientists. It just happened to be women. That journey
Speaker 3: has continued and we've constantly advanced the technology. We have
Speaker 3: Wi Fi in the cave. Now it's a lot more sophisticated,
Speaker 3: but we still have all that hardwiring. It goes in
Speaker 3: there and I sit at the top with other scientists
Speaker 3: and we monitor and watch over their shoulders and and
Speaker 3: help them excavate the few people that could get into
Speaker 3: that space. It's it was. It was a lot of fun,
Speaker 3: very dramatic, I'll admit at times frustrating that you know,
Speaker 3: I couldn't be there, and they would bring each piece
Speaker 3: out after, you know, carefully excavating it, documenting it, and
Speaker 3: then it would become part of a broader study it.
Speaker 3: It's an extreme environment. It's an environment that can kill you,
Speaker 3: and it's uh and I think it's probably pretty unique
Speaker 3: amongst the world's you know, search for human origins, a
Speaker 3: pretty unique environment to actually be physically working and constantly
Speaker 3: constantly adapting changing, I mean the way you do it.
Speaker 3: I think you can actually see that probably better in
Speaker 3: the book than the documentary, where you actually feel as
Speaker 3: we keep adapting things along the way, trying to improvise
Speaker 3: and make it better as we hit roadblocks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I found both the documentary and the book we're
Speaker 2: highly illustrated in different ways. I mean, obviously we're getting
Speaker 2: some of the actual footage in the documentary, but you
Speaker 2: have some some wonderful illustrations in the book that you know,
Speaker 2: just lay out exactly how the cave system is oriented,
Speaker 2: and then your descriptions of when you actually go down
Speaker 2: and then have to ascend back up. That was some
Speaker 2: of that was just very harowing to read.
Speaker 3: It gives me PTSD even reading that, and I wrote it.
Speaker 3: It was also tough to watch that on the Netflix
Speaker 3: stock movie. You you can imagine because the for your listeners,
Speaker 3: what ultimately happened was, after deciding that we couldn't go
Speaker 3: forward with the Barrel publication until we sort of sorted
Speaker 3: out a few critical questions, I decided to make the
Speaker 3: attempt in you know, turning fifty seven. It wasn't gonna
Speaker 3: be many times I was going to be able to
Speaker 3: attempt an extreme journey like this, and so I lost
Speaker 3: the weight got in there. I knew it was going
Speaker 3: to be terrible because I've told the world how terrible
Speaker 3: it is. I had no idea how awful it was.
Speaker 3: And it was a very strange experience. You know. I've
Speaker 3: been an explorer all my life, and I've been in
Speaker 3: life and death situation several times. But this was different
Speaker 3: because I was having to make conscious choices to push
Speaker 3: beyond places that I really did know deep in my
Speaker 3: mind I might not be able to get back out of.
Speaker 3: And those are those are hard. You learn a lot
Speaker 3: about yourself and in those sort of moments when you
Speaker 3: make a choice like that and and pass through it.
Speaker 3: Going down was awful. Coming up was the most terrible
Speaker 3: and wonderful thing in my whole life, you know. And
Speaker 3: I had to I had to make a decision, you know.
Speaker 3: I tried to remove a body part, you know, because
Speaker 3: I was stuck and and I'd never been in that
Speaker 3: situation before, you know, I'd never been in the kind
Speaker 3: of situation where you have to make a deeply a
Speaker 3: decision to try and hurt yourself to get out of something,
Speaker 3: and you learn you learn a lot about yourself in
Speaker 3: that situation too. But I obviously I'm here now. I
Speaker 3: obviously did get out, but it's about as close to
Speaker 3: not surviving at e vent as I've ever been.
Speaker 2: Like even the names of sort of the three phases
Speaker 2: to get down to that main chamber, it implies this
Speaker 2: kind of my journey. You have, like the Superman crawl,
Speaker 2: which already sounds harrowing. You go up the dragon's back,
Speaker 2: which sounds very mythic, but then the shoot, right, the
Speaker 2: shoot is the real choke point here.
Speaker 3: That's right. So you know, Superman's crawl, by the way,
Speaker 3: is just named because you had to extend one arm
Speaker 3: in the kind of flying Superman pose to fit through it.
Speaker 3: Most people did. And there was this awful rock in
Speaker 3: the middle of it that you had to crawl over.
Speaker 3: And then you enter this giant, beautiful chamber dragons back
Speaker 3: and up this jagged series of rocks. It's almost forty
Speaker 3: feet tall, which if you fall off, you die, you
Speaker 3: know kind of thing. And then you get to the
Speaker 3: top and you stare down into this crevasse, into this
Speaker 3: labyrinth of narrow squeezes and things, and you know, slide
Speaker 3: in there and down you go in a place that
Speaker 3: there's no point in it, that rocks aren't pressing on
Speaker 3: both sides of your chest, almost no point in it
Speaker 3: that you can move maneuver your head anywhere but down
Speaker 3: and usually at an angle because it's just narrow enough
Speaker 3: to just wide enough to you know, a helmet to fit.
Speaker 3: It's tough, it's it's it's a hard space, but it is,
Speaker 3: you know. While I was in there too, though, you
Speaker 3: can actually see that home in the LETTI who was
Speaker 3: thinner than we were, who had a smaller head than
Speaker 3: we were, who had more powerful hands, grasping hands and
Speaker 3: powerful shoulders, would have moved through their very different We're
Speaker 3: just a bunch of big, clumsy apes in a space
Speaker 3: we're not supposed to be, and they would have, I think,
Speaker 3: moved through there very very differently.
Speaker 2: We think they are. They would have been arboreal, or
Speaker 2: more arboreal than the nuts, right, so.
Speaker 3: Careful about ar boreal. Better climbers. Our boreal means trees.
Speaker 3: I think they could have done very well in trees, obviously,
Speaker 3: and almost certainly climb them. But I think they were
Speaker 3: very good rock climbers. Took and they have these curved
Speaker 3: fingers and these powerful joint and they're very light and
Speaker 3: build so I think they would have been very very
Speaker 3: good rock climbers.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I love one of the parts in the book
Speaker 2: where you're talking about having to navigate the Shoot and
Speaker 2: you're imagining them moving rather effortlessly through that same space.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know I was. When I was I had
Speaker 3: a lot of time in that space, a lot more
Speaker 3: time than I'd like to think about. And you know,
Speaker 3: part of what I was doing there was also looking
Speaker 3: around and seeing the space in a very different way
Speaker 3: when the first explorers had gone in there. The space
Speaker 3: is so narrow that you really can't get cameras in
Speaker 3: there to give any reflection about what is. We can't
Speaker 3: get basic measuring tools, or we couldn't. We now have
Speaker 3: done that, and so it took on this sort of
Speaker 3: mythical thing of the Shoot that you talk about, and
Speaker 3: actually was even drawn by some of our in our
Speaker 3: early signific papers as a tube, you know, this vertical
Speaker 3: tube from one place to the other, and it's not
Speaker 3: at all. It turns out it's elabyrinth. And I'm not
Speaker 3: sure how that sort of mythology got stuck even into
Speaker 3: the science. We're now rewriting that. But that's why I
Speaker 3: call it the Shoot labyrinth. Now it's not a uniform pipe.
Speaker 3: Why is all this so important? Because this is one
Speaker 3: of the hardest things that people have to understand why
Speaker 3: this place especial and why wouldn't Aletti go to all
Speaker 3: that effort just to put it's dead in there. I
Speaker 3: ha's so many people who who It's very interesting. As
Speaker 3: people talk to me about this, they go, but why
Speaker 3: would they do that? And you know, I had a
Speaker 3: very interesting experience. I was in London recently and I
Speaker 3: was talking to someone about this and we were seeing
Speaker 3: up on one of those high buildings in central London
Speaker 3: and the cathedrals right right behind it, and their back
Speaker 3: was to the cathedral, and I was looking at them,
Speaker 3: and they said, you know, why would anyway? I just
Speaker 3: can't understand why they would go to such effort for
Speaker 3: their dead. And I went, you know, I just gestured
Speaker 3: with my hand out the window to this gigantic cathedral.
Speaker 3: The tens of thousands of people had built all this
Speaker 3: tribute to death, and you know, we go to huge,
Speaker 3: huge efforts to deal with that. We built awso warries,
Speaker 3: we build catacombs under major cities, we build pyramids, we
Speaker 3: build cathedrals, We dig holes six feet in the ground
Speaker 3: when there's no need to and put bodies in them.
Speaker 3: And yet here we say, as humans go. But why
Speaker 3: would someone go to that extent for their loved ones?
Speaker 3: And the answer is because they did. Even though they
Speaker 3: didn't have our brain. Even though they didn't you know,
Speaker 3: they aren't us, they clearly carried those same emotions and
Speaker 3: feelings about death and perhaps the afterlife and things like that,
Speaker 3: but certainly the emotions of death and love to to
Speaker 3: make sure that their kin did not undergo the often
Speaker 3: horrific processes that occur to things that are just left
Speaker 3: to the decay process or an a the process of
Speaker 3: scavengine that goes on outside, which is not particularly pleasant.
Speaker 3: Whatever was their motivation they did that thing.
Speaker 2: Now, as you discussed, there are of course other ways
Speaker 2: that bones can find their way into caves and cave systems.
Speaker 2: How do we eliminate such possibilities as predators bringing bones
Speaker 2: down or water washing them down into the complex.
Speaker 3: So that's just from a process of scientific analysis and
Speaker 3: also a process of elimination. If carnivores or scavengers are
Speaker 3: dealing with the dead, then they leave marks on them,
Speaker 3: leave tooth marks, scratch marks, they dismember. They're doing it
Speaker 3: almost certainly to eat the bodies, you know, because they're
Speaker 3: not collecting. Humans are hominins and so that leaves very
Speaker 3: character damage. So that doesn't exist on this very very
Speaker 3: large sample of home on Letty and we're over thirty individuals, remember,
Speaker 3: and lot thousands of bones, so there's no evidence of that.
Speaker 3: So you can eliminate scavengers and predators. Then you get
Speaker 3: to the point of, well, how do you know they
Speaker 3: just all didn't go down there and die? So the
Speaker 3: first part of that was, well, if they did, only
Speaker 3: one species did that. That is, they went again and again,
Speaker 3: and they did it over time. We can see that
Speaker 3: there are events posed, imposed on events imposed on events,
Speaker 3: so there's time involved in the accumulation, so that would
Speaker 3: be odd, it wouldn't be impossible. But that was actually
Speaker 3: for the first several years our initial hypothesis that they
Speaker 3: were perhaps being brought there and just left there. It
Speaker 3: was only when we then began to see that the
Speaker 3: floor was actually not a bone bed, it was actually
Speaker 3: sterile floor that then was interrupted by a pit or
Speaker 3: a hole dug into the floor. That material was removed,
Speaker 3: disrupting part of the sedimentary layers in the floor. A
Speaker 3: fleshed body was put in. And the reason we know
Speaker 3: that is that parts of bodies are articulated. And you
Speaker 3: can see how the body dee compressed itself in the
Speaker 3: sediments as it as it as it deteriorated, as the
Speaker 3: spaces uh decayed within it. And then that body was
Speaker 3: covered with dirt, the same dirt from the hole. We
Speaker 3: can see the mixed up sedimentary layers. And then the
Speaker 3: body went underwent natural collapse and decay and the and
Speaker 3: the and the material sediment, and we can show all that.
Speaker 3: You can show that through the analysis of the sedimentology
Speaker 3: and the structure. Some people I know don't like that,
Speaker 3: and one of the reasons is that simply we consider
Speaker 3: calling that a grave or a burial a human thing.
Speaker 3: And so you know, if you don't want to call
Speaker 3: it a grave, then it is a hole dug into
Speaker 3: the floor with a body in it, covered with dirt.
Speaker 3: You can call that what you want, but the implication
Speaker 3: is is that they did that. Oh oh sorry, by
Speaker 3: the way, sorry you asked about water. Water leaves very
Speaker 3: characteristic geological signatures when water moves sediment. Anyone who's been
Speaker 3: to a stream can see what happens. When water moves.
Speaker 3: You get sorting, you get different sized rocks and pebbles
Speaker 3: and things, so there's no sign of that. There's no
Speaker 3: significant water movement of anything in that cave system.
Speaker 2: Now, in terms of them bringing the dead down through
Speaker 2: the cave system to this chamber, it's thought then that
Speaker 2: they would have had fire, they would have had some
Speaker 2: sort of light.
Speaker 3: So we can see evidence of fire on the roof
Speaker 3: of that chamber, their soot blackened into the flow stones
Speaker 3: that have grown over it. In fact, while I was
Speaker 3: in the chamber, my colleague doctor Kenelway Mola Panne was
Speaker 3: in dragons back doing an excavation and discovered at the
Speaker 3: same moment I was in there a hearth. She uncovered
Speaker 3: a hearth where they had been cooking animal remains in
Speaker 3: the adjacent chamber. Now that's that's kind of cool, because
Speaker 3: there are no animal remains in the dental letti chamber
Speaker 3: where the burials are. There are animal remains in the
Speaker 3: dragon's back chamber, but there are no dental letti remains
Speaker 3: in the Dragon's back chamber. So you've got this this
Speaker 3: what appears to be two differential uses of space, one
Speaker 3: where they cooked animal remains, the other where they buried
Speaker 3: their dead.
Speaker 2: Wow. Now coming back to this, this cross hatch. Tell
Speaker 2: us about this cross hatch you discovered, and I mean,
Speaker 2: and there are so many additional follow but like the
Speaker 2: similarities to other marks that have been discovered, Like what
Speaker 2: are we to make of all of this?
Speaker 3: So when I got into the cave, I had one
Speaker 3: of these and it's worth telling that moment again because
Speaker 3: it is. It was a really interesting moment. I decided
Speaker 3: I was not going to take any digital images or
Speaker 3: pictures because I've been watching this thing through a digital
Speaker 3: screen for seven years, and so I decided to narrate it,
Speaker 3: to just talk. And if you watch Netflix documentary, you'll
Speaker 3: actually see me talking into a cell phone as I narrate,
Speaker 3: because I think that sometimes you see things better when
Speaker 3: you're forced to storytell as you as you, as you
Speaker 3: explain things. And I was narrating the space, and it
Speaker 3: was clear to me almost immediately that my explorers in
Speaker 3: our team, our colleagues, had missed things, and one was
Speaker 3: the space had been altered. You could actually see where
Speaker 3: things like flowstones that's a layer of line like a rock,
Speaker 3: had been broken and moved uphill. And so it was
Speaker 3: very clear to me that we had misunderstood that they
Speaker 3: had interacted with this space. And as I was narrating that,
Speaker 3: there's this passageway that runs from where we land just
Speaker 3: after the shoot labyrinth where we land called the hill
Speaker 3: Ante Chamber, there's a like a doorway that goes between
Speaker 3: there and the next chamber, which is Deniletti Chamber, another
Speaker 3: burial chamber. And as I looked at that doorway, you
Speaker 3: can hear me say, wow, it looks like a door.
Speaker 3: It's smaller than I. And then you hear me pause.
Speaker 3: Because I'm an archaeologist, you know, I spent my life
Speaker 3: around doorways, and what we humans put around doorways always
Speaker 3: it's something meaning signs. We tell you what's on the
Speaker 3: other side of the doorway, or who's behind the doorway,
Speaker 3: or all the or exit or a bathroom here, or
Speaker 3: whatever the signal is. And I saw these non natural
Speaker 3: etchings in the wall. I couldn't believe it. Squares, wreck
Speaker 3: you know, rectangles, triangles, equal signs, crosses, right side up
Speaker 3: and upside down. And there was even this sort of
Speaker 3: fish shape thing that you know that may not be
Speaker 3: what their intent of it was, but looks like a
Speaker 3: fish shaped thing with an accent, and it appears to
Speaker 3: have been covered with some substance, and I could not
Speaker 3: believe what I was looking at. And my explorers had
Speaker 3: walked right by the And that's largely because pathfinder syndrome.
Speaker 3: You know, once people have been in a space, they
Speaker 3: develop a sort of backyard syndrome. It becomes too familiar
Speaker 3: and you quit looking at the space around you because
Speaker 3: you know that it's been seen.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: You know, do that experiment at home where you've you know,
Speaker 3: if you right now draw your own kitchen from memory
Speaker 3: and then draw a place that you've just entered, the
Speaker 3: place you've just entered, you'll draw better than your kitchen
Speaker 3: because you've you've amalgamated your kitchen into a safe environment,
Speaker 3: and you'll be surprised how poorly you you actually do
Speaker 3: that that thing. And so I saw that, and I
Speaker 3: turned on a black light. I always carry a UV
Speaker 3: light with me because many minerals fluorescent caves. And I
Speaker 3: had this hallucination. I had this un optical light shift
Speaker 3: as they float. You've seen like Queen Scambit or something
Speaker 3: where you see the chest pieces move and in the
Speaker 3: air above, or a beautiful mind and the equations come.
Speaker 3: And that happened to me, and scientifically, I know it happened,
Speaker 3: you know, because I created an optical light shift, like
Speaker 3: you do when you look in your rear view mirror
Speaker 3: at night, and you've ever noticed how the headlights float
Speaker 3: away from the the light of the headlights. That's a
Speaker 3: that's a neural processing thing that's going on in your brain.
Speaker 3: And so I know why it happened, but it freaked
Speaker 3: me out completely as it happened. Had to shut the
Speaker 3: light off, and I was embarrassed about it. And because
Speaker 3: it it, you know, they moved and then and then
Speaker 3: later found the hashtag on the way out, which is
Speaker 3: it's a it's a cross hatch or that, and it
Speaker 3: has these little pounding marks in it where it looks
Speaker 3: like it's been pounded hundreds and hundreds of times. You
Speaker 3: can see the little pinny and you can see those
Speaker 3: in the illustration in the book, all these hundreds of
Speaker 3: little pits that are done, you know. And then they
Speaker 3: share these similarities. You know. We were having a beer
Speaker 3: after I got out of it, and I took one
Speaker 3: one cell phone picture while I was down there, and
Speaker 3: that was of this cross hatch, and I showed it
Speaker 3: to John Hawks and Augustine for winter and I just
Speaker 3: turned it and immediately Augustine leapt up and said, I
Speaker 3: need my car keys and he ran away, and I
Speaker 3: was like what. And John Hawks started looking like a
Speaker 3: teenager on his cell phone, and I'm like holding this,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, you know, I almost died to get
Speaker 3: this picture at least, And both of them turned around
Speaker 3: with their phone simultaneously and showed me the Gibraltar Gorm's
Speaker 3: Cave cross hatch etching that had been done by Neanderthal
Speaker 3: sixty thousand years ago, and it's the same. And I
Speaker 3: remember that moment so vividly because when John I looked
Speaker 3: to John's I thought, why is he photo shopping the
Speaker 3: crosshatch I just took and making it blue? And then
Speaker 3: I realized he doesn't have the picture. I'm the only
Speaker 3: one with the picture. And then, you know, the remarkable
Speaker 3: thing was these are two people, two of the few
Speaker 3: people in the entire planet who physically seen that, and
Speaker 3: so their mind immediately went to that. And of course
Speaker 3: there are also similarities with the oldest, the oldest geometric
Speaker 3: engravings from places like Blumboss that are attributed to Homo
Speaker 3: sapiens at seventy eight thousand years Why is that that's
Speaker 3: something that we're working on right now. We've assembled a
Speaker 3: team of neural scientists, people who study geometric rock guard artists.
Speaker 3: I suspect it's because it's part of the shared mind
Speaker 3: of our deep ancestry, and that I suspect that those
Speaker 3: shared symbols, which by the way, are all very familiar
Speaker 3: to us today, the symbols we use for mathematics, music,
Speaker 3: these type of things, and I suspect that they may
Speaker 3: have something to do with the way we formulate math,
Speaker 3: the way we formulate language in sort of a symbolic
Speaker 3: way inside of our head. And I think it comes
Speaker 3: from very deep time. I think that's the only way
Speaker 3: to really explain how they're shared between three species. It
Speaker 3: really have almost no connection to each other at those
Speaker 3: temporal periods. And also I think, you know, we kind
Speaker 3: of knew that must be true, the way geometric rock
Speaker 3: art around the world all looks the same, and that
Speaker 3: they're clearly something inside of us, and there was something
Speaker 3: in the Letti and there's something in Neanderthals. So it's
Speaker 3: kind of cool to think, maybe, as this science goes on,
Speaker 3: that what those panels inside of that those burial chambers
Speaker 3: really are is the Resetta stone to the mind and
Speaker 3: maybe we can begin to unlock that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, just looking at like the comparison, I
Speaker 2: guess like you can imagine that the simplest way of
Speaker 2: looking at it would be like, Okay, I make right
Speaker 2: angles that don't occur in nature that frequently, and this
Speaker 2: kind of marks this as a place where I have,
Speaker 2: you know, impressed my will. But then there's there seems
Speaker 2: to be so much else going on with these markings
Speaker 2: in addition to that.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and I think that part of the fun is that,
Speaker 3: you know, we've never really had markings from another species
Speaker 3: to compare to. That's always you know, even the Neanderthal ones.
Speaker 3: One it's a singular event. And two, although there is
Speaker 3: now begin to emerge some other rock art by Neanderthals,
Speaker 3: but they have a big brain, you know, they have
Speaker 3: this gigantic, huge brain, and and so they're kind of us.
Speaker 3: This is by something that doesn't have our brain. And
Speaker 3: so I think part of the real excitement going forward
Speaker 3: is going to be what do they mean? Can we
Speaker 3: ever know? Oh? What they mean? Now? I have hope
Speaker 3: with things like neural imaging, and you know, you've seen
Speaker 3: some of these experiments where they can actually visualize what
Speaker 3: the brain is seen. I think that. You know, a
Speaker 3: friend of mine, Brian Moure Rescue, who wrote The Immortality Key,
Speaker 3: when I showed him some of the images, he was
Speaker 3: just having to be in London. He'd just come out
Speaker 3: of this experiment where he was watching people given psychedelics
Speaker 3: and and then they were asked to draw what they're seeing,
Speaker 3: and they draw those same images. You know there's something
Speaker 3: there and maybe this will be what we need to
Speaker 3: break through that.
Speaker 2: Now you talk about the experience of being in in
Speaker 2: that cave, and this is obviously like a novel environment
Speaker 2: for you and I guess cardon the pun, but it
Speaker 2: would have also been a novel environment for the homo
Speaker 2: idea as well. Right, do you feel like there is
Speaker 2: and maybe this is just stretching too far? Is there
Speaker 2: any kind of you think there's any kind of like
Speaker 2: kinship between like the way you interpret such an environment,
Speaker 2: how your senses adapt to such an environment, and what
Speaker 2: they might have experienced.
Speaker 3: You know, I speak about I think the experience of
Speaker 3: being in caves a lot in the book, and you
Speaker 3: knows caves are not natural to humans. They're not our space.
Speaker 3: Even though we use the term like caveman all the time.
Speaker 3: The evidence that humans go deep into cave systems is
Speaker 3: a very very recent phenomena by and large. I mean,
Speaker 3: there are a few exceptions, but we don't like to
Speaker 3: move beyond the twilight zone, you know, where there's still
Speaker 3: light filtering in. We just it's just not our space. No,
Speaker 3: Letty clearly was much more comfortable in those spaces. Having
Speaker 3: said that, when you're in those spaces, and you know,
Speaker 3: your whole focus narrows down to artificial lighting, and you
Speaker 3: lose a sense of sound because sound isn't very important
Speaker 3: to you in those spaces, and so you you lose that,
Speaker 3: but your sense of touch is increased, and these things
Speaker 3: and and you start seeing these spaces and things in
Speaker 3: these artificial lights and fire, by the way, is artificial light.
Speaker 3: Of course, they do have an effect on you. And
Speaker 3: I think that you know, if you think about the
Speaker 3: spaces that that humans term is symbolic or sacred or whatever,
Speaker 3: we're often kind of replicating that the droll like ceilings,
Speaker 3: the the idea of disassociation of places that are are
Speaker 3: are natural to you. We tend to lower light levels,
Speaker 3: you know, and and and change the way that that
Speaker 3: your eye is perceiving things, and you know, and flame
Speaker 3: is particularly good at that because it can add motion,
Speaker 3: and it can add it can add the the pception
Speaker 3: of movement in spaces like this, and so so you know,
Speaker 3: I think that they are powerful spaces. I don't want,
Speaker 3: you know, I'm a scientist. I'm trying to not go there,
Speaker 3: but it they do affect you when you're in these spaces,
Speaker 3: and particularly when you understand that, you know, as I
Speaker 3: guess I did very deeply that you know, they chose
Speaker 3: this space, and they chose this space for their dead,
Speaker 3: and you'd have to have a pretty cold heart for
Speaker 3: that not to affect you when you're in a space
Speaker 3: like that.
Speaker 2: So it's possible then that that what we're seeing, it
Speaker 2: was certainly is a ritual behavior. But then is it
Speaker 2: this sort of thing that, at least broadly speaking, like
Speaker 2: over time, that ritual takes on other meanings and maybe
Speaker 2: like religious ideas emerge out of that.
Speaker 3: I've got to be very careful because you know, there
Speaker 3: are thousands of colleagues with daggers on when you use
Speaker 3: the word ritual loosely or what it has, because these
Speaker 3: have human meaning, and you know, we're dealing with a
Speaker 3: non human at least at the grade level of anatomy.
Speaker 3: And you're dealing with a non human. So where this
Speaker 3: takes you, I don't know. I think that's going to
Speaker 3: be part of the next years and decades excitement we're
Speaker 3: going to go there. I mean, they have used this
Speaker 3: entire subterranean space, they have altered it. We don't have
Speaker 3: evidence that they're living there. What they appear to be
Speaker 3: doing is interacting at least at least the deeper spaces
Speaker 3: in these ways. And you know, I have some colleagues
Speaker 3: who say that must be spirituality and religion. You know,
Speaker 3: it's a form of religion. I don't think we can
Speaker 3: be there yet. But you know, the fact is is
Speaker 3: that the last couple of decades have shown us the
Speaker 3: arrogance of human exceptism. And you know, as we've begun
Speaker 3: to actually more openly study animal behavior, we understand now,
Speaker 3: of course, that cetaceans have culture, elephants have culture, that
Speaker 3: other primates have cultures, that chimps and gorilla certainly have cultures.
Speaker 3: And yet we had eliminated that from things that are
Speaker 3: closer to us, like Homoletti. And I think we have
Speaker 3: to start the field over in some ways, I think
Speaker 3: we have to start again. I mean, we had approached
Speaker 3: everything is if the null hypothesis of finding a dead
Speaker 3: hominine body was natural, you had to explain it naturally
Speaker 3: as opposed to the null hypothesis being cultural. And I
Speaker 3: think that was a mistake. I think it was a mistake.
Speaker 3: And I think a big thing that's going to come
Speaker 3: out of this moment in history is a recognition that
Speaker 3: we had made an air of the science. We had
Speaker 3: deculturized things that clearly must have had culture, and in
Speaker 3: doing that, we weren't seeing their cultures. And I will
Speaker 3: bet you that what will flow out of this discovery
Speaker 3: and this moment is a new acceptance of these ancient
Speaker 3: human relatives being cultural beings. And I think that's really
Speaker 3: exciting because that will lead us into not missing things
Speaker 3: in the way we have missed things before.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Now, coming back to the book, particularly and specifically,
Speaker 2: you've authored other books before. What really propelled this book
Speaker 2: into being? What led you to write and what did
Speaker 2: you really want to get out there with Cave of Bones?
Speaker 3: So this book started as a completely different book. It
Speaker 3: literally started as a follow up, a five year follow
Speaker 3: up to almost human which was the first book on
Speaker 3: the discovery of Homonoletti and what that meant. And it
Speaker 3: was meant to take all of the research that had
Speaker 3: been done and kind of the size it to where
Speaker 3: we were. And we were in a very strange place
Speaker 3: when I began developing the concept of this book with
Speaker 3: my co author John Hawks, and that is we had
Speaker 3: one of the best known hominine species ever discovered, but
Speaker 3: all we had were its bones. And so it was
Speaker 3: meant to be this kind of journey around the state
Speaker 3: of where we were and ending with this sort of
Speaker 3: but we need more. And then the burials were discovered,
Speaker 3: and that became the center of the book because you know,
Speaker 3: I literally thought when those burials, when we recognized that
Speaker 3: those were holes in the ground, dug with bodies and
Speaker 3: them covered by dirt from the hole, I thought that
Speaker 3: was gonna be the biggest discovery of my life. You know,
Speaker 3: here we were, you know, we're right into now this
Speaker 3: sacred space of humanity, you know, burial of the dead,
Speaker 3: and all the things you talked about that spill out
Speaker 3: of that self recognition of mortality, possibly spirituality, all those
Speaker 3: things fall deeply from that. And then I got in
Speaker 3: the chamber and saw the symbols and you're like, wow,
Speaker 3: the fire funny enough, was never surprising. Fire has been
Speaker 3: around for millions of years. I mean, of course they
Speaker 3: had fire, it just was I had talked our entire
Speaker 3: team out of the evidence that the evidence for fire
Speaker 3: was going to be easy to see when it was
Speaker 3: right in front of us the entire time. So you
Speaker 3: know that's my fault. But you know, the symbols are
Speaker 3: are are are different level of stuff. But all that
Speaker 3: in combination is the book. And it became a journey,
Speaker 3: and the book became very We trashed the first version
Speaker 3: of the book and then it became very easy to write,
Speaker 3: and actually wrote it very very quickly because it was
Speaker 3: a narrative journey of a very deeply personal experience with
Speaker 3: the discovery of the species, discovery of the culture around
Speaker 3: this species, and in the end it gave me the
Speaker 3: chance to explore meaning and a very in a very
Speaker 3: open way and discuss some of these concepts of human
Speaker 3: exceptionalism and and where I think this field is going awesome.
Speaker 2: Well, the documentary kicks off with with a with a
Speaker 2: great sense of mystery and I and I also have
Speaker 2: to say, like the book just really like literally throws
Speaker 2: you right into the cave. There you are in the cave.
Speaker 2: It has a very I think sometimes people might some
Speaker 2: listeners might be hesitant to pick up a book about
Speaker 2: this topic. But but I mean, really, this one just
Speaker 2: throws you right into the cave. It has a very
Speaker 2: riveting beginning and just doesn't let go for the entire length.
Speaker 3: Thank you for saying so. I mean, it's as I said,
Speaker 3: it's it's been a very personal journey for me. It's uh.
Speaker 3: And and I think that that you know, there's there's
Speaker 3: a lot of meaning in home on No Letti and
Speaker 3: a lot of good that humans as individuals can take
Speaker 3: out from understanding that that there have been other species
Speaker 3: with complex cultures. This thing that we're living right now,
Speaker 3: it's neither the first, nor is it some sort of
Speaker 3: God given right to be because it's happened before. And
Speaker 3: I think that's an important message, you know, the idea
Speaker 3: that you know, because I think that anyone who looks
Speaker 3: around the planet understands that the idea of human exceptionalism
Speaker 3: is part of why we do so much damage to
Speaker 3: this place. We think we own it, and we think
Speaker 3: it was given to us, and by learning that there
Speaker 3: have been other experiments in this you know, maybe we
Speaker 3: should step off of that high force or stool or
Speaker 3: whatever and step down a little bit, as we kind
Speaker 3: of are at this critical moment in human history where
Speaker 3: literally the balance of life on this planet is at
Speaker 3: stake because of us.
Speaker 2: All right, well, we have we have the book, we
Speaker 2: have the documentary, the additional books. Where else can listeners
Speaker 2: go to learn more and or follow your work?
Speaker 3: Right? So, you can follow me on Twitter at Lee
Speaker 3: or Berger. I'm also on Facebook at Prof Lee Burger,
Speaker 3: and if you follow National Geographic. You know, we're there
Speaker 3: a lot, a lot of presents in that space, and
Speaker 3: there's going to be more so, you know, and there
Speaker 3: are the older writings. You know, it's quite fun if
Speaker 3: you go back and read Skull in the Rock, Almost Human,
Speaker 3: and then this chapter because it's kind of a narrative
Speaker 3: of the history of this science, and even further back
Speaker 3: Footsteps of Eve, which was in the nineteen nineties, where
Speaker 3: you can actually kind of understand the evolution of this
Speaker 3: whole science over the last thirty plus years that at
Speaker 3: least from my perspective that I've experienced it in you know,
Speaker 3: what has got to be the greatest age of exploration
Speaker 3: we're living through right now.
Speaker 2: Awesome. Well, thank you once more for coming on the
Speaker 2: show talking about your work, the book, the documentary. It's
Speaker 2: been a play.
Speaker 3: It's great to be here.
Speaker 2: Thanks again to Lee Berger for coming on the show.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 2: The book again is Cave of Bones, a true story
Speaker 2: of discovery, adventure, and human origins, and it's out now
Speaker 2: in physical, digital, and audio formats. The documentary Unknown Cave
Speaker 2: of Bones is currently streaming on Netflix. Thanks as always
Speaker 2: to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show, and
Speaker 2: if you want to reach out to us, you can
Speaker 2: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 2: dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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