Contemporary Authors

• Redrawing the family tree? - 1998 National Geographic Press, Des Moines, IA
• Visions of the Past - 1999 Vision. End. Wild. Trust, Gauteng, South Africa
• Towards Gondwana Alive: promoting biodiversity and stemming the sixth extinction - 1999 Gondwana Alive Soc. Press, Cape Town, South Africa
• In The Footsteps of Eve - 2001 National Geographic, Des Moines, IA
• Change Starts in Africa - 2002 S.A. Good News Publishing, Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa
• Working and Guiding in the Cradle of Humankind - 2005 Prime Origins Publishing and The South African National Lottery, Brooklyn Sq, South Africa
• The Official Field Guide to the Cradle of Humankind: Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai and Environs World Heritage Site - 2002 Struik, Cape Town, South Africa
• The Concise Guide to Kruger - 2007 Struik, Cape Town, South Africa
• The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins - 2012 National Geographic, Des Moines, IA
• Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story - 2017 National Geographic, Des Moines, IA

• University of the Witwatersrand  Website - https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/graduations/2014---2012/biography-lee-berger.html

  Biography: Lee Berger
  1 June 2012 - By Wits University

  When it comes to digging up the past, Professor Lee Berger has, quite literally, done his bit for humanity. 
  Born and raised in the United States, Berger has been a resident of Gauteng for over 20 years, is a naturalised South African, and has made his name through the discovery and study of ancient hominid fossils. 
  Berger studied under renowned palaeoanthropologist, Professor Phillip Tobias, examining the bone structure of hominids, the species that preceded human beings. 
  Since these hominids lived millions of years ago, people like Berger have to locate and excavate ancient fossils buried in places like South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 
  That’s exactly what happened in 2008 when Berger’s 9-year-old son, Matthew, stumbled upon the fossil of an ancient hominid in the Malapa Fossil Site at the Cradle of Humankind. 
  Berger immediately realised that it was an important find, and set to work. Scientists are still uncertain whether or not the nearly 2-million-year-old remains represent a new species in the evolutionary chain. Berger named it Australopithecus sediba. “Sediba” means “natural spring” in Sotho. 
  Berger’s work helps us to understand how and when our ancestors learned to walk, when they started making and using tools, and even when the first use of language may have been. 
  Through studying changes in brain size, posture and teeth of these fossils, we can piece together the story of how our species, Homo sapiens, evolved.
  To listen to Berger's speech, click Lee Berger.mp3.

  Staff Profile
  Professor Lee Berger
  Position
  RESEARCH PROFESSOR
  Qualifications
  PhD, BA
  Phone
  0117176664
  Email
  Lee.Berger@wits.ac.za
  Organisational Unit
  Evolutionary Studies Institute
  Research Interests
  Hominind morphology and evolution, Hominid palaeoanthropology, palaeoecology and palaeoenvironmentology.

• Amazon -

  Prof. Lee R Berger FRSSaf ASSAf is a Research Professor in Human Evolution and the Public Understanding of Science in the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and an Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and the Explorers Club and is a Member of the South African Academy of Sciences. He discovered the site of Malapa in 2008, and is the discoverer of the new species of early human ancestor Australopithecus sediba. He also was Principal Scientific Director of the Rising Star Expedition in 2013 which recovered the new species of early hominid Homo naledi.

  Berger, an award-winning researcher, author and speaker is the recipient of the Friedel Sellschop Award for Young Researchers, the Golden Plate of the Academy of Achievement, and the National Geographic Society's first Prize for Research and Exploration. His work has been the recipient of Discover's top 100 Science Stories of the year on several occasions and he serves on the Senior Advisory Board of the Global Young Academy of Sciences. His work has been featured in National Geographic, Time and Scientific American. He was named the National Geographic Society's Rolex Explorer of the Year in 2016 and was named one of Time Magazines 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2015.

  He has written numerous books and more than 200 popular articles and academic articles. He has appeared in dozens of television documentaries and is a regular commentator on evolution and palaeontology. An acclaimed speaker, he has delivered invited lectures to hundreds of corporate, government and other prestigious organizations, including the World Summit for Sustainable Development, the Royal Geographic Society, the Time, Fortune, CNN Global Forum, the Young Presidents Organization and the National Geographic Society.

  He graduated from Georgia Southern University in 1989 and received his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1994, and his Doctorate of Science in 2014. Lee is an Eagle Scout, and Boy Scout Honor Medal winner and has been named a Distinguished Eagle Scout.

  He is an avid Diver and PADI Divemaster.

• New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/27/lee-berger-digs-for-bones-and-glory

  June 27, 2016 Issue
  Digging for Glory
  Lee Berger has announced one fossil find after another, and has proclaimed two new species of ancestral human. Do the bones live up to the hype?

  By Paige Williams

  “It’s a competitive sport,” Lee Berger says of paleoanthropology. The field is split between those who consider him a visionary for sharing his fossil data and those who worry that he places showmanship over rigor.Photograph by Ilan Godfrey for The New Yorker

  One evening in September, 2013, two amateur cavers, Steven Tucker and Rick Hunter, drove into a swath of semi-wilderness an hour northwest of Johannesburg and parked at the foot of a stony slope. Wearing jumpsuits and helmets with headlamps, they ducked into the mouth of a cave, descending into a maze of jagged limestone. After worming through a series of narrow passages, they climbed a rise of rock and squeezed through one last fissure, reaching what appeared to be the end of the path. But there was a hole in the floor: a “chimney” chute leading downward.
  Caving is a form of improvisation: you say yes to whatever door the earth opens. The vertical crevice measured barely seven inches wide, but Tucker, a human reed, was able to squirm down it. Forty feet below, he dropped into a chamber the size of a walk-in closet. He walked a little farther. The ceiling was spiked with stalactites. On the floor, everywhere, was bone.
  The cavers hadn’t been searching for fossils that day, but they knew someone who would be very eager to see them: a paleoanthropologist named Lee Berger. Fossils of hominins—ancestral humans and their relatives—have been discovered in South Africa since the nineteenth century, when prospectors started blasting for lime, which is used in refining gold. The area surrounding this cave is known as the Cradle of Humankind, because skeletal remains of our early ancestors have been found there. But Berger was the first paleoanthropologist to systematically search underground. He was paying a former student, Pedro Boshoff, an ex-diamond prospector who rode motorcycles and wore a skull-emblazoned do-rag, to scout for him. Boshoff couldn’t fit through some openings, so he had asked local cavers—among them Tucker and Hunter—to keep an eye out for bone.
  Soon after Tucker and Hunter made their discovery, they returned to the chamber and photographed the remains. When Boshoff saw the images, he and Tucker rushed them to Berger’s house, even though it was late at night. One scrap stood out: a partial jawbone, still wearing its teeth. Berger brought out a round of drinks.
  Berger, who presents himself as equal parts explorer and scientist, grew up near Savannah, Georgia, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of the Witwatersrand, or “Wits,” in Johannesburg. He’s now a research professor there. He hopes to surpass the groundbreaking finds of East Africa, including the iconic australopithecine, Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old fossil discovered by the paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, in Ethiopia, in 1974. For many years, Berger found so little that he considered abandoning exploration. Then, in August, 2008, his son, Matthew—a nine-year-old who sometimes joined his forays into the Cradle—came across a loose rock in an old limestone mine. Embedded in the rock was a clavicle and a jaw fragment. An excavation led by Berger revealed a profusion of bones nearby, including the partial skeleton of an adolescent boy and one of a woman of about thirty, both nearly two million years old. Berger named the site Malapa, a word that in the Sesotho language means “homestead.”
  All early human remains are scientifically valuable, but those dated in the vicinity of two million years old are especially prized, because they fall near a key point in the fossil record: the origin of Homo. There isn’t a paleoanthropologist alive who wouldn’t like to clarify what happened in the million-year evidentiary gap between the small-brained, long-armed australopithecines and our own, big-brained genus. The Malapa fossils showed an odd mixture of primitive and modern traits. In a series of papers published in Science between 2010 and 2013, Berger and more than a dozen co-authors described a new species: Australopithecus sediba.
  Berger aggressively promotes his scientific papers. He called a press conference at the Cradle of Humankind’s visitor center to announce the discovery of sediba, which means “spring.” He later told Science, “We’re not saying this is the direct ancestor, but, if you start weighing this all, it will end up as the most probable ancestor.”
  Paleoanthropologists were excited by the Malapa discovery, but many were skeptical about Berger’s bold evolutionary claims. To some, he had long seemed more interested in fame than in careful science, and his press conference struck them as theatrical and unscholarly. Yet any scientist who wanted to vet his sediba research could do so: Berger shared his data and declared the fossils available for outside study, something that paleoanthropologists traditionally had not done. Ian Tattersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, has said that the field often resembles “a swamp of ego, paranoia, possessiveness, and intellectual mercantilism.”
  Berger donated replicas of the Malapa bones to museums and schools, and started attending conferences with a sediba cast, allowing anyone to inspect it. Jeremy DeSilva, a Dartmouth paleoanthropologist who collaborates with Berger, recalls that when he visited Wits in 2009 Berger offered to open the fossil vault. “A lot of people in our business are petrified to be wrong,” DeSilva told me. “You have to be willing to be wrong. What Lee is doing takes that to another level.”
  As specialists debated whether the Malapa fossils truly represented a new species, sediba became a cultural icon. A female hand was bronzed, so that South African politicians could present it to foreign dignitaries. Gift shops sold sediba earrings. Berger arranged for a tourist platform and an open-air laboratory to be built at Malapa. (It opens this summer.) Then he returned to his explorations.
  South Africa’s cave openings can be hard to spot, but many have wild olive and white stinkwood trees growing near them. Berger used Google Earth to find these natural markers. Some of the emerald clusters that appeared on his computer screen might as well have been flashing arrows. The cave where Tucker and Hunter had found the chamber of bones was well known to spelunkers, but satellite images led Berger to locate an entire underground network that had not been combed for fossils. When he drove me into the Cradle, last December, he pointed out what looked like solid earth and said, “That’s a cave. And that’s a cave.” In his public appearances, Berger often shows a photograph of the golden high veldt and tells audiences, “When I look at that, I see Swiss cheese.”
  In the century and a half during which scientists have been formally studying humankind’s earliest ancestry, they’ve found fossil remains of only about six thousand individuals. Most have been fragments and isolated finds. Donald Johanson, who is now seventy-two, has said that before he found Lucy all of the hominid fossils older than three million years could “fit in the palm of your hand.” The skull is the anatomical key to identifying a species and deducing how its face looked, and how it thought and ate. But the merest scraps of a hominid—a rib, a toe bone—are so rare that they are deeply coveted.

  “When we play the footage backward, it’ll look like you’re repairing it.”

  Paleoanthropologists have pieced together fossil evidence showing that the ancestry of humankind and our relatives begins about six million years ago, moving from Sahelanthropus to Ardipithecus, and from Australopithecus to Homo, of which Homo sapiens is the last surviving species. The time line remains somewhat contested and fluid: new discoveries and interpretations have overturned old theories. Gone is the early metaphor of human evolution as a straightforward family tree. As more fossils surfaced and better research tools allowed for nuanced comparisons, the tree became a bush with many branches, depicting diverse species that overlapped in time. Genetic analysis revealed that some of our ancient relatives were surprisingly intimate with one another, encoding traces of their hookups in our DNA.
  Some paleoanthropologists believe that the evolutionary picture has become overcomplicated, and that certain creatures described as “new” are mere variations, leading to “species inflation.” There are experts who think that the sediba bones are just more examples of Australopithecus africanus. The key to settling such debates is finding more fossils. But paleoanthropology is a small discipline, and the number of paleoanthropologists who hunt bones is smaller still. “It’s a competitive sport,” Berger said in a recent lecture. “There are very few players. And once your head is above the parapet—” He didn’t finish the sentence.
  The chamber that Tucker and Hunter found was a hundred feet below the surface. Other scientists have said that, upon finding such a promising site, they would have moved with extreme deliberation, consulting experts in deep-cave excavation. William Kimbel, the paleoanthropologist who directs Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins, told me, “I’d have assembled the best, most experienced senior scientists in the world.”
  Berger’s first call was to the National Geographic Society: several hours after seeing the photographs of the bones, he got in touch with Terry Garcia, the society’s chief science and exploration officer. The organization, which is based in Washington, D.C., has funded exploration since the late nineteenth century, and had backed Berger for decades. He had been awarded an exploration prize in 1997, and after the 2008 Malapa discovery the society named him an “explorer in residence,” placing him in the company of Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the Titanic wreckage, and the Leakeys, the family of scientists who made seminal fossil discoveries in Kenya and Tanzania. Berger told Garcia, “If you’re ever going to believe in me, believe in me now.” National Geographic agreed to bankroll an excavation.
  Berger needed better images of the fossils, but he was too large to get into the chamber. Instead of dispatching a lithe paleoanthropologist with caving experience, he sent Matthew, his son, who was now fourteen. As Tucker and Hunter led Matthew down the chute, Berger turned off his headlamp and sat in the darkness, mentally designing an expedition. Ballard’s Titanic project came to mind, as did the director of “Titanic,” James Cameron, who had recently piloted a submersible to the Marianas Trench, the deepest point on Earth. Documentary footage had shown Ballard and Cameron using advanced technologies, and Berger pictured himself doing the same.
  The next day, after seeing the photographs Matthew had taken, Berger decided that history “wouldn’t forgive” him if he didn’t “act quickly.” On Facebook, he posted a call for experienced archeological or paleontological excavators. “The person must be skinny and preferably small,” he wrote. Successful candidates could not be claustrophobic; they had to be cavers; they had to hold a relevant master’s degree or doctorate; they had to come to Johannesburg immediately and accept a blind mission, for no pay. (Travel expenses would be covered.) Nearly sixty people applied. Berger chose six.
  The cave went by various names, including Empire and Rising Star. Berger, wanting to preëmpt “Empire Strikes Back” jokes, called the expedition Rising Star. He christened the fossil chamber Dinaledi—“stars”—and referred to his excavators as “underground astronauts.” With sizable grants from the National Geographic Society, he organized and outfitted a sixty-person team. In came tents, computers, microscopes, toilets, and a 3-D scanner. Infrared video cameras were installed throughout the cave; communications cables were run from the chamber to a “command center,” a tent where a documentary crew filming for “nova” and National Geographic captured Berger as he watched a live feed of the excavation.
  The dig, in November, 2013, lasted three weeks; a smaller dig followed in March, 2014. National Geographic live-blogged and tweeted the latest developments. Viewers watched the team recover bag after bag of remains—some fifteen hundred fossil elements, an unprecedented assemblage.
  A dig is less than half the job. Scholars say, “It’s not what you find—it’s what you find out.” To analyze the fossils, Berger again turned to Facebook, inviting “early career” scientists to apply for a six-week workshop, in May, 2014. He promised that, together, they would describe the fossils for “high-impact publications.” By the end of that August—an extraordinarily fast turnaround by traditional standards—Berger had submitted twelve papers to Nature. One of them asserted that the cave fossils represented another new species—Homo naledi, or Star Man. After an anonymous peer-review process, the papers were not accepted. The editors asked Berger to heavily revise them. After several back-and-forths, he withdrew them.
  Two papers about naledi found a home in eLife, a new online peer-reviewed journal started by the Wellcome Trust. The eLife model is intended to counter traditional journals, which some scientists criticize as too slow and expensive. eLife was “open access”: papers could be downloaded free. Two of its slogans are “Taking the pain out of peer review” and “Get your results out fast.”
  Berger is a fifty-year-old Eagle Scout with thinning, once blond hair and a ruddy, boyish face. After twenty-six years in South Africa, he says “shed-dule” for “schedule,” “pay-tent” for “patent.” Extremely comfortable onstage, he delivers lectures in a singsong voice made sibilant by a slight lisp. He usually wears a leather or linen jacket, and on camera he often adds a safari hat.
  On September 10, 2015, a National Geographic pin winked from his lapel as he took the stage at the Cradle’s visitor center, to announce the eLife papers. “It’s showtime, folks!” a Wits faculty member declared, as the event streamed live. Berger first noted that the Rising Star project was “not ‘The Lee Berger Show,’ ” and praised his team. Then he stated that the cave bones represented a beguiling new species. The orange-size brain (a third the size of ours) and the high shoulders were apelike; the feet were “Nike-ready,” as National Geographic put it. Adults stood about five feet tall. The hands had the sophisticated wrists of a recent relative but the well-curved fingers of an old species. Altogether, the fossils suggested a deft climber who also walked on two legs. Berger said, “I am pleased to introduce you to a new species of human ancestor.” On a large video screen loomed an artist’s rendering of a bearded creature with shrewd eyes and a furrowed brow.
  Fifteen individuals, from infant to elderly, had been found at the site, Berger went on—the demography of an entire population. Fossil deposits usually contain other organic matter, providing hints about ecosystems and geologic age, but, apart from a few mouse teeth and owl bones, excavators had found no signs of plants or other animals. Oddly, the bodies appeared to have been isolated in the cave. There was no evidence of predators or scavengers. There were no tools, or hints of fire or natural disaster. Some skeletons were intact. The bizarre configuration had led to the “rather remarkable conclusion that we have just met a new species of human relative that deliberately disposed of its dead,” Berger told his audience. He added, “Until this moment in history, we thought that the idea of ritualized behaviors directed toward the dead . . . was utterly unique to Homo sapiens.”

  A reconstruction of the skull of Homo naledi. Photograph by Themba Hadebe / AP Photograph by Themba Hadebe / AP
  Again, Berger was sharing his data. This time, he would also post digital shape files online: anyone could replicate naledi on a 3-D printer.
  Naledi fossils lay at the foot of the stage, in a display case covered with a blue cloth. As cameras flashed, the cloth was swept away, revealing bones and fragments placed in the rough form of a skeleton. The impression was that of a single individual, though the photogenic array was a composite.
  Berger held up a cast of a skull, its nasal cavity and eye sockets glowing white with filler, as if packed with snow. After the Deputy President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, kissed the skull, Berger kissed it, too. In the coming days, he delivered one provocative line after another to reporters and audiences: “My discovery turns science on its head”; “We have to start rewriting textbooks”; “A paragraph on Facebook may be as powerful as a paper in Nature.”
  Berger’s title at Wits is Research Professor in Human Evolution and the Public Understanding of Science. He gives hundreds of talks a year. The first time I met him, nine weeks after the naledi announcement, he had arrived in Manchester, New Hampshire, for a flurry of East Coast appearances. He accepts as many speaking invitations as possible, and encourages other scientists to do likewise. “I don’t care if it’s the little old ladies’ knitting club—go do it,” he once said. He presented his naledi story at Dartmouth, at a Vermont science museum, at a New Hampshire high school, at N.Y.U., and at NeueHouse, an office-sharing space in Manhattan. He gave the presentation again, in December, at a supper club in Johannesburg and, in April, at a sold-out National Geographic event, in Washington. In every talk, the narrative began with the challenges of his early career and ended with the triumph of the naledi discovery—one destined to have “profound destructive effects on the fields of archeology, paleoanthropology, and paleontology.”
  Berger’s storytelling is expertly paced, his details winsome. Boshoff, the fossil scout, resembled a pirate. The expedition was so dangerous that a doctor stood prepared to live underground with anyone who broke a femur or a rib. Rick Hunter, one of the discoverers of the naledi chamber, wasn’t just a caver; he got kicked out of high school for causing an explosion in a chemistry lab. (In fact, he graduated.) At Dartmouth, a woman attending Berger’s lecture whispered to a companion, “Isn’t he amazing?”
  The Rising Star documentary was released the same day that the naledi bones were unveiled. A teaser said that the discovery promised to “revolutionize our understanding of human origins.” Footage showed Berger composing a tweet as a narrator’s voice said, “It’s a way of doing science that earlier generations of paleoanthropologists could never have imagined.” On camera, Berger said of them, “There was a sense that people who made discoveries were somehow very special beings, and there was almost a club that you had to belong to, to actually see the things.”
  The documentary was titled “Dawn of Humanity,” but in fact nobody knew how old the bones were. Berger had omitted this fact from his press briefing—the fossils’ age didn’t come up until a reporter mentioned it. Berger explained that his team had not yet succeeded in dating the remains, because Cradle geology is especially complex and the bones had been found without any collateral clues. But he promised that, no matter the age, naledi would prove important.
  The media didn’t wait for clarity. A photograph of the composite skeleton appeared on the front page of the Times. A headline in the London Times declared, “african cave bones rewrite the history of mankind.”
  Paleoanthropologists agreed that it was stunning to find so many specimens, especially in such an unusual context. But the field was split, largely between those who consider Berger a visionary for sharing data and those who consider him a hype artist. “Intentional corpse disposal is a nice sound bite, but it’s more spin than substance,” the paleoanthropologist William Jungers, of Stony Brook University, told reporters. Naledi is “just another headline-grabber,” the anthropologist Christoph Zollikofer, of the University of Zurich, said.
  Donald Johanson, the Lucy discoverer and an early mentor of Berger’s, told me that Rising Star was a “glaring example of how not to do fieldwork.” An excavation that took twenty-one days should have taken “more like twenty-one months.” Johanson scoffed at Berger’s claim about moving quickly in order to protect the fossils, saying, “It was urgent only to him.”
  Berger often dismisses his critics as clubby “emeritus” thinkers, but his questioners include young scientists in his own department. In Johannesburg, a number of them expressed concern to me that his enthusiasm leads him to overstate his findings. A Wits postdoc, Aurore Val, had just submitted a critique to the Journal of Human Evolution, challenging the body-disposal claim. “Darwin took twenty years before writing his book on evolution theory,” she told me. “O.K., things have changed, and we have more people working and better techniques—but it still takes a lot of time to understand what is going on, especially if you’re putting forward a hypothesis of deliberate body disposal. That’s quite a big statement for human evolution.”
  At Wits, Berger works out of an office suite on the edge of campus. He keeps his blinds drawn and the fluorescent lights off. When I visited, “A Scrapbook of British Jazz” was playing on a turntable; a vanilla candle burned on the desk. He told me, “I’ve never seen any rule about a time stamp on how great science is produced.” On another occasion, he said, “When people attack me, that’s a way of trying to distract the media and other scientists. They’re trying to prevent people from noticing that the science is changing.”
  Kimbel, the Arizona paleoanthropologist, told me, “The only thing he’s doing that’s new is social media.” Johanson said, “Berger wants criticism, so that he can then say, ‘Look at me, I’m not an élitist—I’m just a Georgia boy, and you’re old school and jealous.’ ” He paused. “Well, no.”
  Berger grew up an hour northwest of Savannah, in the farming town of Sylvania. His parents, Art and Rose Mae, met at the University of Arkansas. Art was the son of a Texas wildcatter. In one National Geographic documentary, Berger says, “My father was a geologist—exploration, discovery. It’s probably in my blood.”
  Actually, his father was in real estate. He ran a business called the American Land Company, largely out of his Lincoln Continental. “If you want to buy a railroad, give me twenty-four hours and I’ll buy you one,” Art told the Savannah Morning News, in 1990. He added, “I am rather flamboyant. But I pay attention to all the people in my life. . . . I treat kings and paupers all the same. I can chew tobacco or eat caviar with the best of them.”
  For most of Berger’s childhood, his family lived on a farm of about five hundred acres. Rose, who is in her seventies, described the house as white, with columns, “like Tara.”

  Berger and his brother, Monty, who is two years older, divided the chores: Monty tended the cattle, and Lee raised the pigs. Rose told me that Monty was quieter, and worked hard; Lee was social and disliked feeding his animals. She said of Lee, “I get tickled—I kind of had to make him work. The last time he visited me, he said, ‘Mama, you taught me my work ethic, and I really appreciate it.’ ”
  Showing animals at the county fair, Berger found a love for public speaking. Rose helped him smooth his stage presence, and tutored him in math, his worst subject. Berger told me, “I was obviously bright in a very rural environment, so very early on I realized I could do the bare minimum and get by without having to do the studying.”
  He liked attention, and his exploits appeared frequently in the Sylvania Telephone: crafting Christmas ornaments with dough, entertaining children as a ventriloquist. He became statewide president of the 4-H Club. (“Lee loved being an officer,” Rose said.) He joined the debate team. (“They won all the time.”) He found arrowheads. (“We had them framed.”) He started a refuge for gopher tortoises. (“He won the state wildlife award for saving those turtles.”) Rose collected news clippings in a scrapbook, underlining her son’s name in red ink.
  Berger attended Vanderbilt, on a Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship, but after failing several classes he dropped out. Having enjoyed a course in videography, he got a job in Savannah as a TV-news cameraman. One night in September, 1986, he heard on the police scanner that someone had jumped into the Savannah River. He rushed over with his camera. Rescuers were throwing lines to a woman—psychiatric problems had led her to make the leap—but she didn’t seem to be grabbing hold. Berger plunged in and hauled her out, and was hailed as a hero. “I became very, very famous around the country,” he told me.
  Berger is such a facile storyteller that people have wondered if the river story is true. It is, though one fact gets lost in the retelling: the presence of a second rescuer. “Both men jumped into the river after reporting officers got the life preserver to the victim,” the Savannah Police Department’s incident report reads. “Both men swam out to the victim and put her ashore.” (Berger says that the other man only swam alongside him.)
  Berger decided to leave TV news. “Suddenly, I was more famous than the news anchor,” he told me. He eventually enrolled at Georgia Southern University, where his mother taught math. “I’d covered a couple of archeology stories, and I suddenly realized that I’d grown this passion for collecting things—I was really good at finding things,” he says. “And every time I met someone who was an archeologist I realized they were happy.”
  He told his mother that he’d found a career. “He said, ‘I know what I want to be, but I won’t make much money, and I know you won’t like that,’ ” Rose recalls. “I said, ‘Lee, if you’ll be the best in your field, the money’ll come.’ ”
  Rose arranged for a colleague to enlist him in a South Dakota dinosaur dig. After reading Johanson’s 1981 best-seller, “Lucy,” Berger decided instead to pursue paleoanthropology and search for what he likes to call the “rarest, most sought-after objects on earth.” He says, “I realized, There’s a field that if you made even one tiny discovery you could have this huge effect. And it was a young field—there was hardly anyone in it.”
  When Johanson came to Savannah, to deliver a lecture, Berger offered to drive him around and put him up at his parents’ beach house, on Tybee Island. He asked for help getting into the field, and wound up on an expedition in Kenya. He tells audiences that he got hooked his first day of fossil hunting, after he “looked down and there was a femur of a hominid, lying on the ground.”
  He decided to attend graduate school. East Africa was all “sewn up.” South Africa, though, was wide open.
  In November, 1924, lime quarrymen found a small skull embedded in breccia near the South African town of Taung. The skull and other fossils were sent to Raymond Dart, a comparative neuroanatomist at Wits. Using his wife’s knitting needles, Dart flaked away the rock matrix, and a tiny face was revealed.
  Dart initially thought that the skull belonged to an ape. But there were anomalies; the hole where the spine extends from the head was positioned too far forward to be simian. “The Taung child,” as the specimen came to be known, had walked upright. Less than three months after receiving the skull, Dart described it, in Nature, as an intermediate creature between apes and humans. It took more than a decade for the scientific community to accept the Taung child as the first evidence of human evolution in Africa.
  Scientists subsequently made significant fossil finds in South Africa, but by the late eighties the discoveries had largely dried up. Academics were boycotting the country, because of apartheid. Berger enrolled at Wits, anyway, having learned that the school’s fossil vault held specimens that had never been described.
  He studied with the head of the paleoanthropology department, Phillip Tobias, a respected anatomist and a strong opponent of apartheid. Tobias had expanded excavations at the Sterkfontein caves, a famous fossil site, and had appeared in TV documentaries; later, he received an award from Nelson Mandela. Tobias once told a journalist that Berger initially had impressed him with his “enormous enthusiasm.”
  Berger tells audiences that he made a find “very quickly” in South Africa, at a site called Gladysvale: “two hominid teeth—the first new early-hominid site discovered in South Africa in forty-eight years.” The find, he adds, “made National Geographic!” The moment is a key milepost in Berger’s narrative: his good fortune was followed by nearly two decades of fruitless searches.
  In fact, Berger found neither tooth. A student named Michelle Erasmus found the first one; someone else found the second. Following convention, Berger was named the discoverer because he led the dig. “I’m the one who recognized the teeth as important,” he says. At the time, he declared to the media, “Within ten years or so, we will be able to state the exact origins of man.”
  As Tobias later put it, Berger was proving himself to be a student whose “push and drive, bordering on the aggressive, tended toward rivalry with some of the other very bright students.” He was still pursuing his Ph.D. when, in the early nineties, Tobias announced his retirement, and it became clear that Wits would scale back the paleoanthropology program. By then, Berger had married Jacqueline Smilg, a South African radiologist. (In addition to Matthew, they have a daughter, Megan, a college student.) In 1994, Berger co-founded a nonprofit, the Palaeontological Scientific Trust, which raised enough money to preserve the Wits program—and showed that Berger had a talent for fund-raising.
  Berger characterized himself as Tobias’s chosen successor, though others thought that the position might go to his colleague Ronald Clarke, a British scientist whom Tobias had hired to direct excavations at Sterkfontein. Clarke and Berger had once collaborated, publishing a paper suggesting that an eagle had killed the Taung child. But with Tobias’s job in play they clashed.
  Berger won the position. The following year, dissatisfied with Clarke’s productivity, he decided not to renew his contract, later defending the decision by telling the press that Clarke had “no great record.”

  “If you’re ever granted three wishes, don’t blow them all on a giant potato body with tiny arms and legs.”

  Clarke had been secretly working on a new find: Australopithecus foot bones from Sterkfontein. As he completed the remaining months of his contract, he came across more Australopithecus material in the Wits vault. He sent assistants to search for related fossils at Sterkfontein, and they found matching leg bones. An excavation produced a stunning skeleton, one of the few ever found. Clarke decided not to tell Berger, worried that he would take the credit.
  Clarke made his discovery public in December, 1998, characterizing the skeleton, Little Foot, as the oldest hominin remains on record. The South Africa Sunday Times named Berger the Idiot of the Week. Clarke had accepted a position in Germany, but Thabo Mbeki, then South Africa’s Deputy President, was calling him a national hero, and Wits moved to keep him at Sterkfontein. In an internal review, the university credited Clarke for the discovery and Berger for raising “nearly 98%” of Sterkfontein’s recent operational funds. After that, Berger and Clarke worked separately; Berger no longer oversaw the Wits fossil collection.
  Soon after this embarrassment, Berger published a memoir, “In the Footsteps of Eve,” co-authored with a radio journalist, Brett Hilton-Barber. It was the inaugural title for Adventure Press, an imprint of National Geographic. The book’s tone was sometimes combative: Berger wrote that he’d been the victim of a “coup” at Wits, and suggested that such scientists as Tim White, a prominent scholar at U.C.-Berkeley who had made important finds in Ethiopia, had tried to thwart his attempts to show South Africa’s importance in the field. Berger sensed a “lingering bias” against South African fossils. He predicted that South Africa, not East Africa, would prove to be the true birthplace of humankind.
  In a review in the Journal of Human Evolution, Bernard Wood, a George Washington University paleobiologist, said that the book exceeded “by literally an order of magnitude the mistakes and errors I have ever encountered in a book”: readers learned about “Astralpithecus” and the “Scottish midwife” Robert Broom (a noted South African paleontologist). Moreover, Wood wrote, Berger took too much credit, misleadingly suggesting that he had single-handedly discovered the complexity of australopith limb proportions.
  Berger blames the errors on bad editing and says that his criticisms of other scientists were consistent with “the tenor of the field at the time.” He attributes any persistent complaints about him to his “policies of open access” and his willingness to challenge esteemed scientists. Clarke, upon hearing this, told me, “There may be territorial fights between people, and professional disagreements, but the thing about Berger is not to do with that. It’s to do with the fact that he just wants to be at the top. He’s like Kim Jong-un, in North Korea: he just wants to show off, with theme parks and photos of himself riding something. Or Donald Trump—full of his own ego and self-importance.”
  Berger’s second book, also written with Hilton-Barber, was a field guide to the Cradle of Humankind, intended for use in schools. When it appeared, in 2002, the South African Journal of Science commissioned two reviews. Judy Maguire, a Wits colleague, noted an abundance of errors. (For example, sunlight does not, in fact, contain Vitamin D.) “Rarely was a guide in such a position to lead innocents astray,” she concluded. The other review was by Tim White. He, too, listed mistakes: Olduvai Gorge, a famed fossil site, is in Tanzania, not Kenya. Calling the book “worse than useless,” he observed that Berger “presents himself as the saviour, rescuing a moribund South African paleoanthropology with his fund-raising skills and ushering in ‘A New Era.’ ” White noted, “It is true that Berger’s rise to prominence signals a new era: one of smoke and mirrors.”
  White is the director of Berkeley’s Human Evolution Research Center and a professor of integrative biology. His book “Human Osteology” is the standard text on skeletal anatomy. In 2000, his peers elected him to the National Academy of Sciences. White is “an extremely careful scientist,” Carol Ward, a University of Missouri paleoanthropologist, told me. “Tim doesn’t release information until he’s sure.”
  In Ethiopia in 1992, White discovered what was then the oldest known hominin fossil: Ardipithecus ramidus. “Ardi” was 4.4 million years old—roughly a million years older than Lucy. It took three field seasons to extract the partial skeleton, and fifteen years before White’s analysis and interpretation of the bones appeared in Science.
  Berger has cited both White and Clarke, who is still working on Little Foot, as examples of scientists who withhold data and take too long to publish findings. White considers Berger to be engaged in “selfie science.” When I first asked White about his feud with Berger, he declined to discuss it. He was wary of false binaries: old scholars versus new scholars, Luddites versus techies.
  Then he changed his mind. One morning in January, I found him at Berkeley, at the Free Speech Movement Café, sitting beneath a placarded quote by the political activist Mario Savio: “There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part . . . and you’ve got to make it stop.”
  White, a wiry man in his sixties, wears Woolrich sweaters and speaks in a resonant bass. He expressed concern about the future of paleoanthropology and the public’s understanding of science. The “C.E.O. types” who increasingly run universities mistake media attention for scholarship, he said: “It’s the arm-wavers who can command attention.”
  Shortly after the naledi announcement, White wrote, in the Guardian, that society is “witnessing portions of science collapsing into the entertainment industry.” He told me, “I have issues with narrative, as a scientist. If you don’t recognize the boundary between fact and fiction, you should not be talking about science to a public that has to navigate that boundary.”
  In June, 2006, Berger vacationed with his family in the Pacific archipelago of Palau. During a guided tour, he learned of a cave that contained old bones. Palau protects its burial grounds, but tourists had been known to venture inside caves that contain human remains. Berger followed a guide to a small pile of fossils, and immediately identified them as hominin.
  Two years earlier, some fifteen hundred miles to the southwest, on the Indonesian island of Flores, scientists had made headlines with the discovery of a population of tiny humans. Scholars were still debating whether the “hobbit” fossils represented a separate species, Homo floresiensis, or modern humans living with dwarfism or disease. Berger thought that the Palau bones might elucidate the Flores mystery. Upon returning home, he got the Palau government’s permission to excavate, accompanied by National Geographic filmmakers. Weeks later, he returned with several colleagues and a film crew.
  “The Lost Tribe of Palau” opens with Berger paddling around in a kayak. “Lee Berger is a renowned paleoanthropologist responsible for many groundbreaking discoveries about early man,” a narrator says. Berger, sitting amid dense foliage, says, “It really is one of the last places on earth you’d expect to make a major paleontological find.”

  “Oh, he’s cute, all right, but he’s got the temperament of a car alarm.”

  A plot twist comes early: the cave contains far more bones than Berger had expected. Viewers learn that “the find, combined with the range of ages and sheer number of bones here, suggests this cave could have been home to an entire community.” By the eighth day, the team has collected more than twelve hundred fossil fragments—the cave appears “less like a dwelling and more like a mausoleum.” The bones may be more than ten thousand years old, the scientists decide; a prominent brow ridge on one skull compounds the sense that the creature had an “almost freakish” appearance.
  The brow bone, however, turns out to be a calcrete deposit often found in caves. Geologic dating soon shows the skull to be younger than expected—between fifteen hundred and three thousand years old. But the documentary doesn’t linger on disappointment: Berger’s team decides that the bones may represent a “tribe of previously unknown tiny humans.” This leads to an enticing new mystery: why were the people so small? The scientists conclude that perhaps they weren’t getting enough food.
  On camera, Berger ponders whether cannibals—a “warrior tribe,” as the narrator puts it—killed the islanders. Then he sets out to explore a sunken cave. The show winds down with him in scuba gear, having made what the narrator calls “the discovery of a lifetime.” Publicizing the show, National Geographic declared that Berger’s discovery “could challenge rules of human evolution.”
  Berger served as the lead author on a paper on the Palau bones, and in 2008 it appeared in PLoS ONE, an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal. An archeologist named Scott Fitzpatrick, now at the University of Oregon, read the paper. He has been conducting excavations on Palau since 1999. In a rejoinder titled “Small Scattered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf Make,” he and two co-authors wrote that the bones were consistent with those of juveniles, and that the idea of nutrition-based dwarfism was preposterous, given the archipelago’s “virtual cornucopia” of seafood.
  Berger recently told me, “Our paper is solid.” As for the Palau documentary, he said, “It’s a film,” and added that he had had no editorial control over it. Fitzpatrick told me, “To Lee’s credit, he gets people excited about things, and with naledi he’s found what are probably some amazing fossils. He’s going against the grain of established paleoanthropology and doing it in a way that brings in young scholars and social media. And he’s a reasonably smart guy and knows the literature. But he gets excited and wants to publish something on the data he has, without going through those careful steps.”
  The Palau documentary isn’t among the DVDs that National Geographic sells in its gift shop or online, but the film can be found on YouTube and, occasionally, on television. When it appeared on Australian TV, in 2010, Fitzpatrick publicly expressed dismay that “this pseudo-documentary is still being distributed.”
  Berger’s career path has coincided with the National Geographic Society’s expanding interests. In the late nineties, a hundred years after its founding, as a “society for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge,” the organization began extending its brand with film, television, and Web projects. A speakers’ bureau was launched, as was a furniture collection. The National Geographic Channel is now available in nearly five hundred million homes. Its programming is scattershot: “Chasing U.F.O.s,” a 2012 series on paranormal claims that included tales of alien abductions, was widely derided.
  Last September, in a deal valued at seven hundred and twenty-five million dollars, the National Geographic Society and 21st Century Fox, a Rupert Murdoch company, announced plans to create a for-profit enterprise, National Geographic Partners. The society’s endowment stands to grow to about a billion dollars, the Times reported, which will allow it to “double its investment in science, research, and education work.” The new venture consists of cable, magazine, multimedia, e-commerce, and travel services. In January, Berger led tourists on a three-week around-the-world adventure, on a private jet, organized by National Geographic.
  Last year in Johannesburg, Berger founded a nonprofit, the Lee R. Berger Foundation for Exploration. His past efforts have been supported not only by National Geographic but also by “senior captains of industry,” he told me, including Richard Branson. “This type of science attracts people like that.”
  Berger has amassed a small fleet of vehicles whose side panels are emblazoned with decals advertising his foundation and National Geographic. One morning last December, in Johannesburg, he picked me up in a silver Jeep Rubicon, and we drove into the Cradle of Humankind. His son, who had just turned sixteen, joined us, as did John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Hawks, who supervised the peer review of the Palau paper, had flown in to work on the naledi project. More fossils had been discovered, not far from the first location, but this hadn’t been announced publicly yet. Berger said, “We’re both into game strategy, and we like to talk about timing.”
  About thirty miles northwest of the city, we entered the Cradle, which is a hundred and eighty miles square. The high veldt rolled away, in shades of coffee and wheat. We passed blesbok, oryx, wildebeest. At Maggie’s Farm, a roadside restaurant, we ordered breakfast on the patio. A weaverbird, yellow as police tape, flitted about, building a nest.
  Berger said to Hawks, “You see ranting and raving about a ‘nova’ show and the ‘contamination of science,’ and how one should never have television cameras related to major discoveries, or coördinate the output or outcome.”
  “It’s interesting to think of the ways people exercise control,” Hawks said. “So much of the process of science is in knowing who the peer reviewers are, and in the reviewers calling each other and talking about things.”
  Hawks, who is forty-three, has a short beard and often wears a fedora. He has appeared in TV segments for National Geographic, PBS, and the Discovery Channel, and recently launched an online class. He blogs, and has written, “Blogs are not research, but in some fields they have become an important part of the process of networking and critical commentary.” Berger has chastised his opponents for criticizing him in the media, but his most steadfast defense takes place on Hawks’s blog. Last Thanksgiving weekend, just after Tim White published the Guardian article lamenting that pop storytelling was “skewing the science,” Hawks wrote, “Let’s face it, the paleoanthropology family has a few cranky uncles who fart at the dinner table just to get a rise out of people.”
  After breakfast, Berger drove to a field office and swapped the Rubicon for a game-reserve vehicle. Going off-road, he took a jolting path through acacia trees toward Malapa, the sediba site. The place was deserted. Matthew disengaged an alarm that deters baboons, and we entered the graceful open-air shelter that had been built above the excavation pit. Berger pointed out the platform’s architectural features, including legs angled to harmonize with the landscape. “There’s a lot of tricks in perception,” he said.
  Berger next drove toward Rising Star, the naledi site. Upon seeing a herd of blesbok, he stopped the vehicle and said, “Pffttt,” in the animals’ direction. A bull snorted in response. Berger, louder, went, “Pfffffttt!” The bull ran off, and Berger said, “Ha! I won.”
  At Rising Star, the cave’s mouth was now blocked by a padlocked gate. He walked upland, pointing out where he hoped to build a high-end visitor center, possibly in the shape of a skull.

  “I suppose you’re all wondering why your mother and I brought you into the world.”

  The Cradle of Humankind is a government designation, but the land is privately owned. Berger’s nonprofit had bought fifty-two acres, and was thinking of buying seventy-seven more. He said, “If we do this right, in twenty or thirty years we could insure that the caves benefit the economy of the region and conserve it in perpetuity.” He had shown me blueprints of the visitor center in his office, where he’d also let me sit in on a meeting about making interactive naledi holograms available to schools, museums, and South African tourism officials. Gauteng province was talking about installing a hologram at the airport. “It would be standing there as you pick up your bags,” Berger had told two philanthropists on his foundation’s board. At Rising Star, tourists would use smartphones and virtual reality to “experience” the journey to the fossil chamber; in a theatre, they might ponder how we had thought that our treatment of the dead separates us from other animals, only to realize that naledi “takes that from us.”
  Berger pointed toward the new fossil location, and hinted that the find would support the body-disposal theory. Hawks said, “I have to say, I’m pretty shocked that there hasn’t been more criticism.”
  Three months later, the Journal of Human Evolution published the critique by Val, the Wits postdoc who had questioned the body-disposal claim. Val wondered how the team could have made its radical conclusion without having established the bones’ geological age or having excavated beyond a small fraction of the chamber. Only a third of the fossils had been “microscopically analysed,” and the bone surface was intact on only six of five hundred and fifty-nine pieces, she noted. As a result, tooth marks, or cuts, or signs of trampling by predators “might not be preserved.” Val added that the team had used an “unknown” method of analysis, making it hard for future researchers to check the findings. She urged a broader excavation and an “extensive geological assessment,” using “established methods.”
  The journal then published Berger’s response to Val, in a paper whose lead author was Paul Dirks, an Australian geologist who led part of the naledi analysis. The researchers noted that Val had neither examined the naledi materials directly nor visited the fossil chamber before offering a “reinterpretation” of the data. Responding to her doubt that hominins with small brains could establish and maintain a complex funerary tradition, they said, “The closest living relative of H. naledi is our own species, which exhibits elaborate mortuary behavior in every culture.”
  Another Wits colleague, Francis Thackeray, did examine the fossils, and he recently joined Val in disputing the disposal theory. Thackeray found what he calls evidence of lichen on the bones, and this suggested to him that the remains had been exposed to extensive daylight; this is hard to reconcile with the idea that the creatures lugged carcasses through narrow, pitch-black passageways and then left them to rot in a remote chamber. Thackeray thinks that maybe the creatures got trapped by rockfall. Berger has discounted this possibility; to him, the evidence suggests that the bodies came into the cave over time. In the press, he called Thackeray’s hypothesis “flimsy” and said, “I am sticking with my theory.”
  On December 2, 2015, Discover chose Homo naledi as the second-best science story of the year—after the flyby of Pluto. That evening, in Johannesburg, Berger gathered with thirteen young entrepreneurs at a restaurant called the Codfather. The group meets regularly to discuss social issues. Berger had brought a cast of the naledi skull. On a private table in the restaurant’s wine vault, it sat among the stemware like a wayward Halloween prop.
  Berger stood to speak, describing the 2008 sediba discovery as the period when “all my dreams came true.” To be published in Science was “like, if you’re a rock star, being on the cover of Rolling Stone.” Naledi, he suggested, was a lottery won twice.
  One guest said that people with good ideas often find it challenging to convince investors that “they’re the risk” worth taking. Berger told him, “Every time I tell the story of sediba, and my son, Matthew—‘Dad, I found a fossil’—it sounds like a eureka story of kid, dog, fossil, hero. That’s because it’s a good story. And people like to hear good stories.” (He caps the story with a reminder that the find came after years of persistent fieldwork.)
  In 2000, four months after Berger’s “Footsteps of Eve” was published, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology published a piece, by Tim White, about the state of paleoanthropology. White drew a distinction between “the scientist versus the careerist,” warning that “irresponsible proclamations momentarily seize the public’s attention in popular news and go straight into textbooks. The retractions rarely do.”
  Berger often references this paper in his talks, but that isn’t the part he cites. He mentions a passage in which White predicted, “The best of the African fossil fields have probably already been found and exploited.” White says that he was referring to open-air fossil beds—the kind East Africa is known for—and that he never intended to sound so pessimistic. Berger, in public addresses, deploys the line like a narrative shiv: it’s the moment when a lion of the science announces the death of discovery, and the field desperately needs salvation. Then, describing naledi and sediba as evidence of treasure waiting to be found, Berger leaves audiences energized by the idea that anyone can make important discoveries. He tells them that we’re living in the “greatest age of exploration.”
  In April, Berger proclaimed on social media that he had “big news.” Given the many questions surrounding Homo naledi, some assumed that his team had finally dated the fossils, and could now say with more authority how the discovery fit into the evolutionary picture.
  But that wasn’t it. Berger announced that he had made Time’s annual roundup of the world’s hundred “most influential” people. He was soon disseminating photographs of himself in a tuxedo, at a Manhattan gala, walking a red carpet. ♦

• Wikipedia -

  Lee Rogers Berger
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  Lee R. Berger

  Lee R. Berger with reconstruction of Au. sediba
  Born
  December 22, 1965 (age 51)
  Shawnee Mission, Kansas, US
  Alma mater
  Georgia Southern University
  University of the Witwatersrand
  Spouse(s)
  Jacqueline Berger
  Children
  Megan, Matthew
  Awards
  Time 100, 2016 - most influential people in the American world
  Website
  www.profleeberger.com
  Scientific career
  Fields
  Paleoanthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence
  Institutions
  University of the Witwatersrand
  Thesis
  Functional morphology of the hominoid shoulder, past and present. (1994)
  Doctoral advisor
  Phillip V. Tobias
  Lee Rogers Berger (born December 22, 1965) is an American-born South African paleoanthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence.[1][2][3] He is best known for his discovery of the Australopithecus sediba type site, Malapa;[4] his leadership of Rising Star Expedition in the excavation of Homo naledi at Rising Star Cave;[5] and the Taung Bird of Prey Hypothesis.[6][7]
  Berger is known not only for his discoveries, but also for his unusually public persona in paleoanthropology, and for making his most notable discoveries open-access projects. He makes hundreds of talks per year, and has had a close relationship with National Geographic for many years, appearing in several of their shows and documentaries.[8]

  Contents  [hide] 
  1
  Early life and education
  2
  Research career
  3
  Research and other activities
  3.1
  Organizational offices
  3.2
  Specific study results
  3.2.1
  Palau fossils
  3.2.2
  Discovery of Australopithecus sediba
  3.2.3
  Discovery of Homo naledi
  4
  Awards
  5
  Personal life
  6
  Selected publications
  6.1
  Articles
  6.2
  Books
  7
  See also
  8
  References
  9
  Further reading
  10
  External links

  Early life and education[edit]
  Berger was born in Shawnee Mission, Kansas in 1965, but was raised outside of Sylvania, Georgia in the United States.[9][10] As a youth, Berger was active in the Boy Scouts, Future Farmers of America, and president of Georgia 4-H. In 1984, Berger was named Georgia's Youth Conservationist of the Year for his work in conserving the threatened gopher tortoise. He is a Distinguished Eagle Scout, and received the Boy Scouts of America Honor Medal for saving a life in 1987.[11][12]
  He graduated from Georgia Southern University in 1989 with a degree in anthropology/archaeology and a minor in geology.
  He undertook doctoral studies in palaeoanthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa under Professor Phillip Tobias, focusing his research on the shoulder girdle of early hominins; he graduated in 1994. In 1991, he began his long term work at the Gladysvale site. This marked the same year that his team discovered the first early hominin remains from the site, making Gladysvale the first new early hominin site to be discovered in South Africa since 1948.[13] In 1993, he was appointed to the position of research officer in the Paleo-Anthropology Research Unit (PARU) (now the Evolutionary Sciences Institute; ESI) at Wits.
  Research career[edit]
  He became a postdoctoral research fellow and research officer at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1995. He has been the leader of the Palaeoanthropology Research Group and has taken charge of fossil hominin excavations, including Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, and Gladysvale. In 2004, he was promoted to Reader in Human Evolution and the Public Understanding of Science. He is presently a research professor in the same topic at the Evolutionary Studies Institute (ESI) and the Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences (CoE Pal) at Wits.
  Research and other activities[edit]
  Organizational offices[edit]
  Berger served as Executive Officer of the Palaeo-Anthropological Scientific Trust (PAST) (now the Palaeontological Scientific Trust; PAST) from 1994 to 2001.[14][15] Berger served on the committee for successful application for World Heritage Site Status for the UNESCO Sterkfontein, Swartkans, Kromdraai, and Environs site. He also served on the Makapansgat site development committee, as well as the committee for both Makapansgat and Taung's application for World Heritage site status.[16] He was also a founding Trustee of the Jane Goodall Trust South Africa.[17]
  Berger served with the Royal Society of South Africa, Northern Branch, between 1996 and 1998, and served as Secretary in 1996 and 1997. He also served on the Fulbright Commission, South Africa, chairing it in 2005, and chairing its Program Review Committee from 2002 to 2004.[17]
  Berger is a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and serves on the Senior Advisory Board of the Global Young Academy. In 1997 he was appointed to an adjunct professorial position in the Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy at Duke University in Durham North Carolina and the following year as an honorary assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas.
  Specific study results[edit]
  Palau fossils[edit]
  Berger was lead author of a controversial report of the discovery of what he and colleagues claimed were small-bodied humans in Palau, Micronesia in 2006.[18][19][20] Scholars have disputed the argument that these individuals are pygmoid in stature, or that they were the result of insular dwarfism;[19][21] in an article titled "Small Scattered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf Make", anthropologists Scott M. Fitzpatrick (NC State), Greg C. Nelson (University of Oregon), and Geoffrey Clark (Australian National University) conclude that "[p]rehistoric Palauan populations were normal-sized and exhibit traits that fall within the normal variation for Homo sapiens," hence, concluding that their evidence did "not support the claims by Berger et al. (2008) that there were smaller-bodied populations living in Palau or that insular dwarfism took place…"[22] Berger and co-authors Churchill and De Klerk replied to the study, saying "the logical flaws and misrepresentations in Fitzpatrick and coworker's paper are too numerous to discuss in detail" and that their restudy report "amounts to a vacuous argument from authority... and ad hominem assault, and brings little new data to bear on the question of body size and skeletal morphology in early Palauans".[23] John Hawks, the paleoanthropologist who edited the original Palau article for PLoS ONE, has replied in part to some of the dissenting researchers' claims (in his personal web blog).[24]
  Discovery of Australopithecus sediba[edit]
  Main article: Australopithecus sediba

  Berger displays the fossilized bones of Australopithecus sediba he discovered at the Malapa Fossil Site
  In August 2008, 9-year-old Matthew Berger, the son of Lee Rogers Berger, found a clavicle and a jawbone embedded in a rock near Malapa Cave in South Africa.[25] Subsequent excavation, headed by Berger, led to the discovery of numerous bones nearby that dated back nearly two million years. Along with various co-authors, Berger published a series of articles between 2010 and 2013 in the journal Science that describe what they call a new species, Australopithecus sediba, which had a mixture of primitive and modern characteristics. The finding was particularly promising because it potentially revealed a previously unknown transitional species between the more ape-like australopithecines and the more human-like Homo habilis.[26][27] Berger claimed that this new finding represented "the most probable ancestor" of modern-day Homo sapiens.[8]
  Berger's work at the Malapa site was significant not only because of the discovery itself, but also because of the way he and his collaborators shared information about their findings. While most paleoanthropological investigations are known for a high level of secrecy, Berger worked to make the sediba site an open access project. In addition to sharing digital data, he made the fossils found available on request to researchers wanting to study them themselves.[28]
  Discovery of Homo naledi[edit]
  Main article: Homo naledi
  On September 13, 2013, two recreational cavers, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, discovered a previously unknown, remote chamber within the well known Rising Star cave system. Discovering the floor of this chamber (now known as the Dinaledi Chamber or UW-101) littered with human-like bones, the pair reported their finds to a colleague, who in turn brought them to the attention of Berger. Recognizing their importance, and unable to access the chamber himself due to his size, Berger organized an expedition over social media that brought six qualified researchers in from around the world to commence an excavation of the remains in November 2013.[29] An early career workshop was organized in May 2014 that brought together 54 local and international scientists to describe and study the more than 1550 fossils recovered. In September 2015, the team announced Homo naledi as a new hominin species, citing its unique mosaic of more ancestral and human-like traits.[30] Other fossil bearing localities in the system were given the site numbers 102 to 104, though research regarding them has not yet been published.[31]
  Awards[edit]

  Lee Berger receiving the 1st National Geographic Prize for Research and Exploration in Washington, D.C. in 1997. Pictured Left to Right: Vernita Berger (mother in law), Arthur B. Berger (grandfather), Lee Berger, Arthur L. Berger (father), Jacqueline Berger (wife)
  Collaborative research papers by Berger have been recognized four times as being among the top 100 Science stories of the year by Discover Magazine,[citation needed] an international periodical focusing on popular scientific issues. The first recognition came in 1995 for his co-authored work with Ron Clarke of Wits on the taphonomy of the Taung site and in 1998 for his co-authored work with Henry McHenry of the University of California, Davis on limb lengths in Australopithecus africanus.
  He is a National Press Photographers Association Humanitarian Award winner in 1987 for throwing his camera down while working as a news photographer for television station WTOC and jumping into the Savannah River to save a drowning woman.[26] He is a Golden Plate Awardee of the Academy of Achievement. In 1997, the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. awarded him the first National Geographic Society Prize for Research and Exploration given for his research into human evolution.[27] In April 2016, Berger was selected by Time as one of its "100 most influential people".[32]
  Personal life[edit]
  Berger has resided in South Africa since 1989. His wife Jacqueline is a radiologist in the medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand, the same university where he works.[33] They have a son, Matthew,[33] and a daughter, Megan.
  Selected publications[edit]
  Over one hundred scientific and popular articles including several books:
  Articles[edit]
  Berger, Lee R.; et al. (2015). "Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa". eLife. 4. PMC 4559886 . PMID 26354291. doi:10.7554/eLife.09560. Lay summary.
  Berger, L. R.; de Ruiter, D. J.; Churchill, S. E.; Schmid, P.; Carlson, K. J.; Dirks, P. H. G. M.; Kibii, J. M. (2010). "Australopithecus sediba: a new species of Homo-like australopith from South Africa". Science. 328 (5975): 195–204. PMID 20378811. doi:10.1126/science.1184944.
  Books[edit]
  Redrawing the family tree? (National Geographic Press, 1998)
  Visions of the Past (Vision. End. Wild. Trust, 1999)
  Towards Gondwana Alive: promoting biodiversity and stemming the sixth extinction (Gondwana Alive Soc. Press, 1999)
  In The Footsteps of Eve[10] (with Brett Hilton-Barber) (National Geographic, 2001)
  The Official Field Guide to the Cradle of Humankind, with Brett Hilton-Barber (Struik, 2002). For a review, visit [1]
  Change Starts in Africa (in South Africa the Good News) (S.A. Good News Publishing, 2002)
  Working and Guiding in the Cradle of Humankind (Prime Origins Publishing and The South African National Lottery, 2005)
  Berger, Lee; Hilton-Barber, Brett (2002). The Official Field Guide to the Cradle of Humankind: Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai and Environs World Heritage Site. Cape Town: Struik Publishers. ISBN 1868727394.
  The Concise Guide to Kruger (Struik, 2007)
  Berger, Lee; Aronson, Marc Aronson (2012). The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins. National Geographic Society. ISBN 1426310536.
  Berger, Lee; Hawks, John (2017). Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story. Washington: National Geographic Society. ISBN 978-1-4262-1811-8.

• Boys Life - https://headsup.boyslife.org/this-eagle-scout-discovered-one-of-the-worlds-most-important-fossils/

  QUOTED: "Paleoanthropology is the study of ancient humans and their beginnings. ... I am always searching for incredible fossils, especially those of early humans and primates that can help us with the story of our origins."

  Read BL’s Interview With Eagle Scout Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger

  Eagle Scout Lee Berger has been scouring the caves and savannas of Africa for decades, finding hundreds of cool fossils and ancient artifacts along the way. Thanks to his many successes, he’s also among the most respected scientists in the world. In fact, he was recently named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. It’s an honor usually held for presidents, rock stars, actors and other world-famous figures, but Berger deserves it just as much as any of the bigger names. I had the pleasure of sitting down with the Eagle Scout paleoanthropologist to talk exploration, investigation and the great outdoors.
  _______________________________________________________
  BL: What first interested you in science?
  L.B.: Like many boys I spent a significant amount of time in the woods, and this bred in me a tremendous appreciation for nature. I also was always collecting something. I started with collecting rocks, and in my early teens moved on to a passion for finding and collecting Native American artifacts.
  BL: What was your Eagle project?
  L.B.: My Eagle project was the gopher tortoise conservation project, which not only gained me my Eagle, but also resulted in my being awarded the Georgia Youth Conservationist of the Year in 1984.
  BL: What does a paleoanthropologist do?
  L.B.: Paleoanthropology is the study of ancient humans and their beginnings. So I’m constantly on the hunt to discover, research and explore. I am always searching for incredible fossils, especially those of early humans and primates that can help us with the story of our origins.
  BL: How can Scouts better connect with the outdoors?
  L.B.: Technological advances have offered tremendous opportunity for discovery and exploration. But there is a great, unexplored planet out there, and it takes not only the desire to travel to remote places to make discoveries, but the skills to interact with the real world. Through its mission and programs, Scouting can re-engage us with the real world.
  BL: How do you encourage young people interested in pursing a career in science?
  L.B.: Find an area of science that you love and follow it. We need more explorers, people willing to go out and take risk and find things, knowing they might not. We need more young people with the recognition that there are still plenty of cool things to be found right in front of us. We just need to keep looking.

QUOTED: "Berger's finds are certainly interesting, and the H. naledi discovery is potentially groundbreaking, but the book leaves much to be desired."

Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery that Changed Our Human Story

264.5 (Jan. 30, 2017): p191.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery that Changed Our Human Story
Lee Berger and John Hawks. National
Geographic, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-4262-1811-8
Berger, a paleoanthropologist at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand, reports on his nearly three decades of work in South Africa--with an excursion to the Micronesian island of Palau--and the surprising discoveries he and colleagues have made about early hominins. In short chapters that feature reconstructed dialogue and somewhat tiresome prose, Berger relates how he used Google Earth as a geological aid to scour the South Africa and uncover natural chambers and new fossil sites. In 2008, his team began excavating one of these sites, a cave outside of Johannesburg, and found two partial skeletons of a woman and child who represented a new species, Australopithecus sediba. Five years later, two cavers discovered another cache of bones. Berger led another team there to find some 1,300 human fossils, including those of a new hominin species, Homo naledi. Berger may have a sharp eye for spotting hominin remains in ancient breccia, but he's less skilled as a writer and often interrupts his main story with human-interest anecdotes and asides on the history of paleoanthropology. Furthermore, the book's crucial final chapter remains embargoed until publication. Berger's finds are certainly interesting, and the H. naledi discovery is potentially groundbreaking, but the book leaves much to be desired. (Mar.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery that Changed Our Human Story." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 191. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195227&it=r&asid=b2c517a71a4946e9b348230ce6dbf855. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A480195227

The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins

Danielle J. Ford
88.6 (November-December 2012): p117.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins by Lee R. Berger and Marc Aronson Intermediate National Geographic 64 pp. 9/12 978-1-4263-1010-2 $18.95 Library ed. 978-1-4263-1053-9 $27.90
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Paleontologist Berger, working in the fossil-rich hills near Johannesburg, South Africa (often accompanied by his young son, Matthew), has made some key contributions to the field. His and Matthew's most recent find, referred to in the title, gave scientists a nearly intact skeleton from a new species, Australopithecus sediba. Detailed accounts of advances in the field and the technology used to support paleontology research, including satellite imagery that gave new perspective to old sites, are intertwined with the story of Berger's not-always-straightforward path to a scientific career. Additional information about the period in natural history to which Australopithecus sediba belonged, the fossil-dating key to establishing the relative ages of the fossils, and the uncertainties Berger still has about this very recent find show readers science almost as it is happening, bringing us ever closer to the missing links in the "braided stream" of hominin evolution. The story is greatly enhanced by illustrative material, which includes photographs of Berger; the research site from which the fossils were extracted; the fossils themselves, both in situ in the rocks and later reconstructed in skeletal form; and striking facial reconstructions of these ancient ancestors. Suggestions for further reading, a glossary, and an index are appended. (It's a good month for paleoanthropology; see also books by Deem and by Walker and Owsley in this section.)
Ford, Danielle J.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Ford, Danielle J. "The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins." The Horn Book Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 2012, p. 117+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA306859532&it=r&asid=b2ff537ce29da580744c8aaf02e82f2e. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A306859532

The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins

Randall Enos
109.2 (Sept. 15, 2012): p62.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins. By Lee R. Berger and Marc Aronson. Nov. 2012.64p. illus. National Geographic, $18.95 (9781426310102); lib. ed., $27.90 (9781426310539). 569.9096822. Gr. 5-7.
In August 2008, in an area near Johannesburg, South Africa, called the Cradle of Humankind, nine-year-old Matthew Berger summoned his father, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, with the words "Dad, I've found a fossil." Thus begins the fascinating tale of the discovery of a nearly complete skeleton of an entirely new species of early man. Aronson narrates the story of the gregarious Indiana Jones-like Berger, who grew up in rural Georgia with a penchant for exploring nature and went on to build a career around that passion. Part inspirational biography and part evolutionary science primer, this is written as if the participants are on an exciting treasure hunt, with the acknowledgment that the story continues to evolve and all findings should be shared. Aronson is a master at making almost any topic interesting, understandable, and entertaining, and here he tackles one with intrinsic mass appeal. The vividly designed and wonderfully photographed book includes helpful back matter featuring a unique model of human evolution and a well-organized combined glossary and index.--Randall Enos
Enos, Randall
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Enos, Randall. "The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2012, p. 62. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA304307097&it=r&asid=715b37576a73394e9c0f53edf02d6ce1. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A304307097

QUOTED: "a fascinating account of an Indiana Jones-style fossil hunter and how his discoveries have changed the way we see human evolution."

Berger, Lee R.: THE SKULL IN THE ROCK

(Sept. 15, 2012):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Berger, Lee R. THE SKULL IN THE ROCK National Geographic (Children's Nonfiction) $18.95 11, 1 ISBN: 978-1-4263-1010-2
When 9-year-old Matthew Berger found a fossil, he "opened a door two million years back in time." "Dad, I've found a fossil." His father, noted paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, figured it was just the remains of ancient antelopes. But when he got closer, he knew this "was a gift from the past so precious almost nothing like it had ever been found," part of a nearly complete skeleton of a new species, Australopithecus sediba, that has led to a new way of viewing human evolution. Aronson weaves the story of sediba's discovery around a brief biography of Lee Berger, plaiting in enough background about paleoanthropology to provide context. He writes the story with vigor, but he's not just writing about science, he's urging young readers to learn from Dr. Berger: "to train your eyes, to walk the land, to learn to see the anomaly--to make the next key discovery." Aronson emphasizes that the science is ever evolving and that more than the specific discovery, it's the vision and the debate that are so important and fascinating. Matthew's discovery was important in itself, but it also opened the door for new discoveries, and it's the spirit of scientific inquiry that Aronson imparts here. A fascinating account of an Indiana Jones-style fossil hunter and how his discoveries have changed the way we see human evolution. ("A New View of Evolution," further reading, glossary/index, author's note) (Nonfiction. 10 & up)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Berger, Lee R.: THE SKULL IN THE ROCK." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2012. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA302274351&it=r&asid=1ddf4c6cdc0ed5b81a53ac0b20b3328f. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A302274351

Skull in the Rock

Cary Seidman
36.5 (Jan. 1, 2013): p92.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 National Science Teachers Association
http://www.nsta.org/
By Lee R. Berger and Marc Aronson. 2012. 64 pp. $18.95. National Geographic Society. Washington, D.C. ISBN: 9781426310102. (Grades 6-12)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The narrative opens with an unlikely event that will surely act as a hook for readers of all ages. A nine-year-old boy, Matthew Berger, is accompanying his father, paleontologist and professor Lee Berger, on a fossil dig near the family's home in Johannesburg, South Africa. Matthew calls his father's attention to what appears to be a fossil. Lee Berger is astonished to see that it is a human clavicle, and further discovery of a nearly complete skeleton from this two-million-year-old individual leads to the identification of a significant and unexpected human ancestor. The new prehuman find, named Australopithecus sediba, displays an apelike brain size and arm bones, but humanlike hands and front teeth.
This book succeeds on many levels. A student researcher looking for a concise history of discoveries in human evolution will find a time line with clear explanations. The notion that a child could be an important member of a scientific discovery team becomes quite plausible when one learns how young Matthew has a trained eye for spotting fossils.
The authors explain the traditional methods of determining a fossil's age and proceed to more modern techniques, including a fascinating description of the French synchrotron, an x-ray generating particle accelerator that Berger used to learn many details about sediba.
Lee Berger and co-author Marc Aronson convey a sense of joy in the open-ended nature of cutting edge science. Berger notes with approval that the discovery itself, while significant, will serve primarily to open new pathways in the study of human origins. This book conveys the excitement of science without inundating the reader with obscure terms and references. There is a detailed index/glossary for what may be unfamiliar terms and concepts.
Perhaps because Lee Berger and his family live and work outside the United States, there is not even a hint of defensiveness in his advocacy for studying human evolution, a sensitive topic in some school districts. Free from the need to defend genuine science against the many forms of nonscientific dogma that too many science educators in the U.S. face, Berger and Aronson bring to life the reasons someone would choose to enter a careerin scientific research in this well-illustrated and readable account.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Seidman, Cary. "Skull in the Rock." Science Scope, 1 Jan. 2013, p. 92+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA497944049&it=r&asid=c9c1f50a5fd86a4295dcc42db3228cc1. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A497944049

QUOTED: "This book offers plenty of information about possible human ancestors. But, more important, it conveys the excitement of science."

Skull in the Rock

Cary Seidman
80.1 (Jan. 1, 2013): p71.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 National Science Teachers Association
http://www.nsta.org/
Skull in the Rock By Lee R. Berger and Marc Aronson. $19. 64 pp. National Geographic Society.< Washington, DC. 2012. ISBN: 9781426310102. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The opener hooks readers of all ages: A nine-year-old boy, Matthew Berger, is accompanying his father, paleontologist and professor Lee Berger, on a fossil dig near the family's home in Johannesburg, South Africa. Matthew calls his father's attention to what appears to be a fossil. The elder Berger is astonished to see that it looks like a human clavicle, and further discovery of a nearly complete skeleton from this two-million-year-old individual leads to the identification of a significant and unexpected human ancestor. The new pre-human find, named Australopithecus sediba, has an ape-size brain and arm bones but humanlike hands and front teeth. This book succeeds on many levels. A student researcher looking for a concise history of discoveries in human evolution will find a timeline with clear explanations. The notion that a child could be an important member of a scientific discovery team becomes plausible when we read that young Matthew has a trained eye for spotting fossils. The authors explain the traditional methods of determining a fossil's age and proceed to more modern techniques, including a fascinating description of the French synchrotron, an x-ray generating particle accelerator that Berger used to learn many details about sediba. This book offers plenty of information about possible human ancestors. But, more important, it conveys the excitement of science. NSTA Recommends is your best source for thoughtful, objective reviews of science-teaching materials. These include books, DVDs, kits, and other materials that are reviewed by your peers. Our volunteer review panel is made up of top-fight teachers and other outstanding science educators who classroom-test these resources to let you know what's really useful. To see more product reviews, please log on to www.nsta.org/recommends, where you can search our database of nearly 4,000 teaching resources. Seidman, Cary Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition) Seidman, Cary. "Skull in the Rock." The Science Teacher, 1 Jan. 2013, p. 71+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495940161&it=r&asid=c43d51d2dac6561c9c9b337af6c0780a. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017. Gale Document Number: GALE|A495940161 QUOTED: "This slender work ... is a fine pairing of an impassioned personality and scientific achievement." Berger, Lee R. & Marc Aronson. The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins Patricia Manning 58.11 (Nov. 2012): p121. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/ Berger, Lee R. & Marc Aronson. The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins. 64p. charts. diags. further reading. glossary. index. maps. photos, websites. CIP. National Geographic. Nov. 2012. Tr $18.95. ISBN 978-1-4263-1010-2; PLB $27.90. ISBN 978-1-4263-1053-9. LC 2012012943. Gr 5-8--In this slim, readable volume, Berger and Aronson braid a history of past researches and discoveries into an exposition of the long saga of human evolution. Berger's decision to use Google Earth to search long-explored ground for previously unrecognized fossil sites is a brilliant revelation, as is his use of other cutting-edge methods. Fine color photos record his methods and results, with perhaps the most poignant picture being that of the tiny fossil bones of Australopithecus sediba's hand nestled in the seemingly giant paw of a modern Homo sapiens. This enthusiastic narrative opens with Berger's son Matthew's now-famous words, "Dad, I've found a fossil," spoken when he was nine years old. It ends with assurances that readers will be able to follow further field discoveries and lab research by logging on to a special website to participate in forensic anthropology in real time. For earnest fans, some stellar books will reinforce their interest. For some, Catherine Thimmesh's Lucy Long Ago: Uncovering the Mystery off Where We Come From (Houghton, 2009) and/or Katherine Kirkpatrick's Mysterious Bones: The Story of Kennewick Man (Holiday House, 2011) will fill the bill. Older readers wanting a deeper look into the evolution of research should consult Sally M. Walker's Their Skeletons Speak (Carolrhoda, 2012) or Jill Rubacalba's Every Bone Tells a Story (Charlesbridge, 2010). All in all, this slender work, with the gold-toned skull of Australopithecus sediba staring blindly out of the gray rock matrix, is a fine pairing of an impassioned personality and scientific achievement.--Patricia Manning, formerly at Eastchester Public Library, NY Manning, Patricia Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition) Manning, Patricia. "Berger, Lee R. & Marc Aronson. The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins." School Library Journal, Nov. 2012, p. 121+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA308003894&it=r&asid=613281bf4df7e1176031078d70f8edfe. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017. Gale Document Number: GALE|A308003894

"Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery that Changed Our Human Story." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 191. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA480195227&asid=b2c517a71a4946e9b348230ce6dbf855. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017. Ford, Danielle J. "The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins." The Horn Book Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 2012, p. 117+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA306859532&asid=b2ff537ce29da580744c8aaf02e82f2e. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017. Enos, Randall. "The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2012, p. 62. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA304307097&asid=715b37576a73394e9c0f53edf02d6ce1. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017. "Berger, Lee R.: THE SKULL IN THE ROCK." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2012. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA302274351&asid=1ddf4c6cdc0ed5b81a53ac0b20b3328f. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017. Seidman, Cary. "Skull in the Rock." Science Scope, 1 Jan. 2013, p. 92+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA497944049&asid=c9c1f50a5fd86a4295dcc42db3228cc1. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017. Seidman, Cary. "Skull in the Rock." The Science Teacher, 1 Jan. 2013, p. 71+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA495940161&asid=c43d51d2dac6561c9c9b337af6c0780a. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017. Manning, Patricia. "Berger, Lee R. & Marc Aronson. The Skull in the Rock: How a Scientist, a Boy, and Google Earth Opened a New Window on Human Origins." School Library Journal, Nov. 2012, p. 121+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA308003894&asid=613281bf4df7e1176031078d70f8edfe. Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.

• Answers in Genesis
  https://answersingenesis.org/reviews/books/almost-human-homo-naledi/
  Word count: 6114

  QUOTED: "The book is very readable, and the end of each chapter sparks interest as to what will happen in the next one."

  Book Review of Almost Human, the Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery that Changed our Human Story, by Lee Berger and John Hawks
  by Jean O’Micks and Dr. Timothy L. Clarey on August 30, 2017
  PDF Download
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  Abstract

  Lee Berger’s 2017 book Almost Human is a recount of his lifetime quest to find human ancestors. We review the four main sections of this book starting with his first trip to Tanzania at age 24, his involvement in the H. floresiensis controversy, then his finding of Australopithecus sediba and his latest discovery in South Africa of Homo naledi. It is interesting to read how Berger and his colleagues debated their decision to put A. sediba into the genus Australopithecus and did not succumb to evolutionary biases and claim the fossils belong to the genus Homo.
  The main thrust of this book seems to culminate in in the final two sections where Berger describes in detail the discovery process and the difficulties involved in excavation of H. naledi from a near inaccessible cave, dubbed the Dinaledi Chamber. His initial reactions to seeing the first bones from the site are most telling, describing in several passages how similar the anatomy of the fossils was to an australopith, and unlike a human. And yet, he eventually concludes that these fossils represented a hominin that was “almost human,” classifying it as a member of the genus Homo.
  Berger also reveals a few facts that were left out of the many papers published on H. naledi. First, he relates how he knew about the nearby second cave (Lesedi Chamber) containing similar fossils even while they were excavating the Dinaledi Chamber. He also mentions that neither he nor his primary geologist (P. H. G. M. Dirks) could fit in the Dinaledi Chamber, so all field work had to be accomplished by thin, small statured scientists who could actually fit into the tight crevices of the cave. He also reveals that Dragon’s Back Chamber, the immediate preceding chamber in the system, contained countless bones of macrofauna.
  Berger also tries to justify his interpretation that living H. naledi deliberately disposed of the now randomly oriented, disarticulated bones in the Dinaledi Chamber. Yet, he readily admits that there is an unexplainable lack of grave “goods” and artifacts so commonly associated with human burial sites. Berger also reported that they found no evidence of fire or smoke on the ceilings or any sign of habitability of the caves, making a deliberate disposal interpretation all the more mysterious. Finally, Berger muddles through the convoluted dating of H. naledi that took place after the bones were initially described. However, his reported age of between 450,000 and 250,000 years ago is not exactly what was published in a subsequent paper.
  We conclude with a review of the biological relevance of H. naledi and a brief summary of some of the latest creationist studies. Our final analysis is that H. naledi was most likely not a member of the human kind, was not deliberately disposed of, and was merely an extinct ape.

  Keywords: Homo naledi, Australopithicus sediba, Rising Star, Dinaledi Chamber, Dragon’s Back Chamber, Lesedi Chamber, hominin, human ancestors, deliberate disposal, South Africa, U-Th dating
  Book Reference: Berger, L. R., and J. Hawks. 2017. Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story. National Geographic: Washington, DC.
  Introduction
  Almost Human is an autobiographical tale that describes the discovery of not only the recently discovered hominin fossil Homo naledi, which has appeared in the headlines for the past few years, but also about the discovery of his earlier named hominin species, Australopithecus sediba, both discovered in South Africa. Although co-authored by John Hawks, it appears he wrote only the epilogue. The basic outline of the book is made up of four parts: how Lee Berger got to South Africa, how he and his team discovered first A. sediba, and then afterwards how they discovered H. naledi, and finally, how H. naledi is interpreted from an evolutionary viewpoint.
  The book is very readable, and the end of each chapter sparks interest as to what will happen in the next one. The book also contains a couple dozen or so color images showing the scenery of South Africa as well as the fossils that were discovered of A. sediba and H. naledi, as well as the parts of the intricate Rising Star cave system where H. naledi was actually unearthed.
  Going to South Africa
  The first section of the book deals with Lee Berger’s youth, growing up on a farm in Sylvania, Georgia. His favorite activities included outdoor activities, such as swimming, tennis, as well as digging up Native American artifacts, and later, what would dominate his career—fossils. During his college years he received a naval scholarship, but didn’t do well enough academically. After leaving the naval academy, he found the love of his life at college in paleoanthropology. Berger describes how he could talk about different fossils for hours with his professors. In a stroke of seeming serendipity, Donald Johanson, the discoverer of Australopithecus afarensis (a.k.a. “Lucy”), and also one of Berger’s greatest heroes in modern paleoanthropology was giving a lecture in Savannah at the Georgia Science Teachers Association. At 24 years of age, Johanson invited Berger to become his geology assistant at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. However, due to a work permit, Berger could not make it to Tanzania, but instead was able to enroll in a summer program at the Koobi Fora Field School in Kenya to join Richard Leakey’s “hominid gang,” in the search of fossils.
  This was to be the start of Berger’s noteworthy career. He arrived in 1990 in South Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand (“white water’s edge” in Afrikaans), which would become his permanent base for many years, also known as “Wits” in downtown Johannesburg. There he started a Ph.D. program; his thesis was about the supposed development of the clavicle and shoulder girdle in early hominids.
  Berger describes one of his basic views on human evolution, stating that supposed human ancestor’s brains, posture, and teeth all evolved in tandem with each other. A change to a more protein-rich diet allowed hominin’s brains to enlarge, allowing for an increase in intelligence, which made free hands necessary, followed by a shift towards upright walking. In addition, what is of central importance to the discovery of H. naledi is that according to Berger, the place of any fossil in this line of development should reflect its geological age. The older it is, the more like an ape the fossil would be (p. 34). Later we shall see that evolutionary ages caused great problems for Berger in where exactly he could place H. naledi on the evolutionary time line in relation to other hominin species.
  What is remarkable and quite praiseworthy in Berger’s approach to anthropological science is his openness to collaborate with others, and in making his fossil specimens available for inspection by other researchers. This actually got him into conflict with his senior colleagues at Witwatersrand. In general, anthropologists jealously guard their fossil trophies, so as to be able to fully examine and describe their finds before making them public—a process which usually takes many years. Not so with Berger, who made all of his H. naledi fossils quasi-public by having them scanned and entered into the online MorphoSource database. This was opposed by many who stated that nothing could substitute the examination of the actual fossil itself. He also made the discovery of H. naledi deep in the Rising Star Cave public via social media.
  During the early years Berger worked at a site rich with fossils called Sterkfontein, also in South Africa, which had quite a number of hominin fossils, including a fossil called “Little Foot,” which became a press sensation. Little Foot was a fossil hominin whose large toe stuck out from all of the other toes, indicating a greater capability of climbing than found in living humans.
  Berger also was “accidentally” drawn in to an exciting find of the remains of what seemed to be small-sized humans, discovered in 2003. This was Homo floresiensis, whimsically called “the hobbit” by the press. These remains were discovered on the island of Flores, isolated from the Asian mainland. They had a tiny brain, around 420 cm3, and shared characteristics with both Australopithecus species as well as species from the genus Homo, based on characteristics of the skull, jaw, and teeth. Naturally, a bitter struggle ensued amongst anthropologists to get hold of these remains. Berger had planned a vacation to the island of Palau, not knowing that he had actually come close to a site full of bones resembling those of small-sized humans. Berger immediately wanted to take a look at the fossils, and discovered that they were also diminutive in stature. These remains, though they resembled those of H. floresiensis, were not identical. Berger’s hypothesis was that this was a case of what he called “island dwarfing,” which was also found to be true of several animals living on islands, in that some evolutionary pressure led to smaller body size—presumably because of the limited resources of their island habitat. Berger published these findings in PLoS One (Berger et al. 2008).
  Berger believed that the remains of the Palau hominins were primitive for the genus Homo, possibly near the transition point between humans and their ancestors. This was to become a focus of research for Berger in the years to come, and the discovery of another fossil hominin was just on the horizon.
  Finding sediba
  The second section of the book describes the discovery of A. sediba at the site of Malapa in South Africa in a pit dug by miners long ago. Chapter nine quickly cuts to the chase, describing how Berger’s son first discovered a part of clavicle, or collarbone sticking out from some rocks. Besides the collarbone, a mandible was also present with a pearly white tooth, indicating that it came from a juvenile individual. Soon after having received a permit to search the area closer, Berger and his team descended on the mining pit to find even more fossils. Berger himself found a shoulder blade and a humerus from another specimen. Later on, he and his team were to find and describe two specimens of A. sediba called MH1 and MH2 (MH standing for Malapa Hominid) consisting of many more fossils found at that site (Berger et al. 2010).
  In the next chapters of the book, Berger describes the slow process of preparing the fossils from the matrix that surrounded them. Gradually his team tried to make out whether this new species was from the genus Homo, or belonged to the supposed ancestors of humans, the genus Australopithecus. To them, A. sediba seemed to have characteristics from both the genus Australopithecus but also Homo. The small teeth and flat face suggested that sediba was human, as opposed to robust australopiths, yet the small skull size suggested otherwise.
  Berger’s team got access to the East African hominin fossil material housed in Kenya’s Nairobi National Museums. For long days, the team debated back and forth which genus the remains belonged to. What is of note is that the team decided to focus on physical characteristics and abilities, and not common ancestors (p. 96), meaning that in practice, evolutionary relationships aren’t relevant in describing living species, but rather design elements. After comparing their material with the fossil record, and after qualifying each physical character from head to foot as either Australopithecus or Homo, Berger decided that they had discovered another species of australopith. Even though both lists were equal in length, Berger decided on the fossils belonging to the genus Australopithecus because based on its limb morphology, it did not seem to be a long-distance walker, but because of its long forelimbs, it was much more adapted to climbing.
  Even though Berger would have wanted these fossils to be an early form of Homo, it can be credited to him that he didn’t fall for this temptation. Yet several years later he was presented with yet another set of fossils from another fossil hominin, rather close to the site where he had discovered A. sediba.
  Finding naledi
  The second half of the book begins in August 2013, where Berger is again searching South Africa for more potential fossil sites. As Berger tells the story, his former student Pedro Boshoff randomly appears and asks for funding to search caves in the area for hominin fossils. Pedro even convinces Berger to allow two amateurs, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, to tag along.
  On September 14, 2013, Berger related how he took a call that Rick and Steven had found something. Berger requested pictures and on October 1, Pedro and Steven delivered. They showed up with pictures of a new, unmapped cave chamber, covered with fossils. Berger’s first reaction to seeing a hominin mandible in the pictures was that “It wasn’t human; that much was clear” (p. 110).
  The discovery narration continued four days later when Berger entered the cave system to see for himself and to get good photographs of the cave floor. He related how he was barely able to fit through the 7 m long Superman’s Crawl. (Figure 1, from Kruger, Randolph-Quinney, and Elliott 2016) and what he observed when he came out and looked around the Dragon’s Back Chamber (Figure 1). He immediately saw the walls were covered in fossils, noting “This chamber alone deserved further investigation, but we were here to see fossils farther on” (p. 116). This is a significant revelation that was not included in the scientific papers of the site. And to this day, apparently no further excavation has been done on this chamber and how, if at all, the bones here relate to the bones in the Dinaledi Chamber.
  Berger’s narration continued as he described how he physically could not fit into the entrance shaft to the Dinaledi Chamber at the back of Dragon’s Back. He had to send in his more slender son Matt and cavers Steven and Rick, while he waited for them to take more photographs inside the soon-to-be named, Dinaledi Chamber (Fig. 1). Berger also rather casually mentions that he had secured funding from National Geographic to support the work.

  Fig. 1. Map of the Dinaldi Chamber in Rising Star Cave system. Source: Figure 9, Kruger, Randolph-Quinney, and Elliott 2016.
  On October 6, Berger put out a call for knowledgeable and trained archaeological/palaeontological graduate students or experienced Ph.D.s. They also had to be “skinny and preferably small” (p. 124). He describes how he winnowed the applicants down to six young women, assembling his team of “underground astronauts.” On November 7, he had his team in place, along with other colleagues and National Geographic representatives assembled in a community of 20 large canvas tents at the cave entrance. Berger then described the technology they utilized in the operation, the communication and video systems, the safety systems and the command center set up outside the cave entrance to collect all the electronic data and serve as the communication hub.
  In the next section, Berger describes their excavation efforts in the Dinaledi Chamber, starting on November 10 and continuing for three weeks. One of the first bones brought out of the cave chamber, a jawbone fragment, shocked Berger as it was smaller than expected. Berger also noted that “The third molars were the largest teeth, as in australopiths and different from humans. But the teeth were tiny, really no larger than those of modern humans” (p. 153). He continued describing various bones as they were brought out, including the femur, stating “The femur was similar to those found in australopiths like africanus and afarensis, with a long neck and small head . . . This one, oval in cross section, didn’t look very human” (p. 155).
  On page 157, an interesting detail is revealed. According to Berger, this is when Steven and Rick first described a nearby second chamber that also contained a femur similar to the one found in the Dinaledi Chamber (site 101). Berger decided to keep this information secret as “I don’t want them distracted.” He agreed to pursue the second site only after finishing at the first site. To me, this information is fascinating. Why did Berger keep this a secret for so long? There was no mention of a second site even in the National Geographic article. Ultimately, they called this second chamber site 102 (now known as Lesedi Chamber). Berger then describes how this chamber was reached by coming in the same main entrance and turning right instead of left toward Dragon’s Back.
  Berger then reported how he obtained funding from the South African National Research Foundation to invite 30 young scientists to study the 1300 fossil hominin fragments brought out of the cave in the first 21 days. The five-week workshop began in May 2014. Finally, Berger mentions that he sent two of his underground astronauts back into the Dinaledi Chamber in March 2014 to get out more skull and jaw fragments. Ultimately, they brought up another 300 specimens in two weeks.
  Understanding naledi
  Berger began this section by trying to explain away the lack of an age for the fossils at this point in the investigation. He lamented that they had no other fauna to test other than limited rodent enamel and a few bird bones from the surface of the cave floor. He eventually concluded that they would study the fossils first, without a date, and avoid damaging any fossils in the process. Berger concluded that the “Dates didn’t necessarily help us to understand the relationships of fossils. In the case of sediba, the dates were getting in the way” (p. 184).
  Berger summarized the findings of the various working groups at the end of the workshop (prior to their first round of publications in 2015) on pages 189–192.
  The Rising Star hand was humanlike in its wrist and fingertips, but the fingers seemed to be made for climbing. The shoulder was built for climbing, too. As another team worked to understand the upper body—the shoulder blade, the collarbone, the upper part of the rib cage, and the bone of the upper arm—they found that the shoulders had been canted upward, the arms oriented for climbing. The feet and parts of the hands seemed humanlike, but the fingers and shoulders were as primitive in appearance as the earliest known hominins—apelike species like Ardipithecus ramidus.
  The legs, hips, and trunk told their own stories. As we had observed in the field, the neck and head of the femur were very much like those of australopith species—similar to sediba and afarensis—yet there were two ridges on the femur necks that we had never seen before in any other species. The pelvis would prove to match these long femur necks with a wide, flaring hip very much like Lucy’s, and the lower part of the rib cage seemed well suited for such a flaring pelvis. (p. 192)
  Much to Berger’s credit, he describes how he had all the fossils laser scanned and released them to the public, allowing anyone to use a 3-D printer to create copies of the fossils. Berger then explained how they used these data to estimate the brain capacity of the fossils, finding one about 560 cc and one about 450 cc, noting they were about the size of many australopith skulls.
  Berger then discusses on page 195 why he believes there is only one species represented in the Dinaledi Chamber, explaining that it had to do with the consistency and similarities in the bones that were found, including seven similarly, odd-shaped first metacarpals. He concluded that the fossil assemblage represented one hominin species that weighed between 90 and 120 lb (40 and 55 kg), and was 4.5–5 ft (140–150 cm) tall.
  In spite of all the fossil evidence indicating a non-human looking assemblage that seems to be more in line with an australopith species (O’Micks 2017), Berger oddly finishes chapter 27 by claiming this was the genus Homo. It was as if he wanted this species to be closer to humans than A. sediba and named it as such regardless of the substantial anatomical evidence to the contrary.
  In chapter 28, p. 197, Berger changes gears and describes the geological investigation of Dinaledi Chamber. He also reveals that the main geologist on staff and senior author of the geology papers of the site, Paul Dirks, did not fit in the Dinaledi Chamber, so all of his geological data were collected by a younger colleague by the name of Eric Roberts. Because the book was not written by the geologists, there is a lack of consistency between the descriptions of the cave geology in Berger’s book and in the geological papers that were published. For example, Berger described soft chunks of reddish orange clay interspersed in the sediments with the fossils, but doesn’t explain if he is referring to sedimentary units 1, 2, or 3 as described by Dirks et al. (2015).
  Berger’s geologic description makes a big deal about the different mineralogy found in the Dinaledi Chamber vs the Dragon’s Back Chamber. And yet, he seems to make a mistake on page 200, claiming that dolomite weathering produces potassium and aluminum oxides, which are common weathering components of clays, but not dolomite. Dolomite is composed of magnesium and calcium carbonate minerals.
  On page 201, Berger reveals that there was a significant amount of sediment that had filled in part of the Superman’s Crawl and spilled into the Dragon’s Back Chamber, containing “fossils of other animals.” Berger further elaborates on this observation by suggesting that the Superman’s Crawl may have been larger in the past, allowing easier access to the Dragon’s Back Chamber. He then tries to build the case that rapid-moving water could not have reached the Dinaledi Chamber as the coarser sediments and mineralogy of the sediment in the Dragon’s Back Chamber was much different. However, Berger never seems to entertain the possibility of a lower energy, temporary flooding of the Dinaledi Chamber as suggested by Clarey (2017), where suspended sediment and floating remains may have spilled over and dropped down into the Dinaledi Chamber as the Dragon’s Back Chamber filled under higher energy conditions (Fig. 1). A brief flood event in the Dinaledi Chamber likely would not have had the energy to fully dissolve the orange clay chunks found in the sediment with the H. naledi bones. Neither does Berger try to explain the source of the other animal fossils in the Dragon’s Back Chamber and the Superman’s Crawl.
  Next, Berger ponders why they found no signs of “grave goods with bodies—special objects to accompany the dead” and mentions no evidence of fire or habitation of the cave system. Although, he does note that some human burials are found without grave goods. But, one has to wonder why no signs of fire and why no stone tools have been found in the cave system to date. If H. naledi were using this site to dispose of their dead, there should have been some smoke marks on the ceilings or soot in the passageways. They would have needed a light source to make it through the long tortuous pathway to the Dinaledi Chamber.
  In chapter 30, Berger finally discusses the findings in chamber 102, the second chamber containing H. naledi bones in the cave system (Lesedi Chamber). In this nearby location, Berger’s team found over 100 bones, including pieces of skull, jawbone, and other bones from two adults and possibly three juveniles. They concluded “These bones looked like they all came from the same biological population” (p. 215). And again, no stone tools or artifacts or signs of fire were found anywhere. The origin of the bones in this chamber have to be explained also (Clarey 2017), but no disposal method was suggested for this second site.
  Finally, on page 217, Berger discusses the age-dating of the fossils from the Dinaledi Chamber. He mentions how the flowstones above and in contact with the fossil bone-bearing unit were dated at “less than 250,000 years old,” but failed to mention the method that was used in the determination. In their recent scientific paper, they reported it was a U-Th dating method (Dirks et al. 2017). Next, Berger laments that they had to destroy small amounts of three H. naledi teeth in order to conduct electron spin resonance (ESR) testing on the enamel. Their assessment indicated all three teeth “are less than 450,000 years old” (p. 217). Berger attempts to use these dates to bracket the age of the fossils between “450,000 and 250,000 years ago” (p. 217). However, two “less than” statements do not bracket a fossil’s age. It appears he meant to say the flowstones were dated at least 250,000 years old, not less than.
  In any case, Berger never mentions the other techniques used in an attempt to date the fossils, such as the U-Th ages determined for the three H. naledi teeth and the two 14C dates from H. naledi bone fragments, discussed by Dirks et al. (2017). Nearly all of the U-Th dates of the teeth and the carbon dates of the bones indicated an age less than 100,000 years old (Clarey 2017; Dirks et al. 2017). Why Berger and his team chose the older dates is not explained in his book or even adequately explained in their paper (Dirks et al. 2017).
  Berger finishes his book by waxing philosophically about the meaning of H. naledi in the evolution of humans. As one who categorically rejects the history recorded in the Bible, he resorts to speculation and questions on human ancestry and how his discoveries “force us to ask new questions and to question old assumptions” (p. 221). And yet, after reading this book, he never arrives at a satisfactory answer to any of his questions.
  Fortunately, God has provided us with the history book of the ages. God clearly explains that there was no evolution linking His created kinds, and therefore no evolution from H. naledi or A. sediba to mankind. God answers all of Berger’s questions by telling us how He created each land animal to reproduce after their kind on Day 6 of Creation Week in the book of Genesis. How much more plain can He make it?
  The Biological Relevance of H. naledi for Creation
  All things considered, H. naledi does not appear to be human as some even in the creationist community may think (Wood 2016a). Anatomically, H. naledi’s cranial capacity is much smaller than that of humans, between 465 and 610 cc, even outside the range of australopiths. Wood (2016b) studied encephalization, that is, the perceived increase in endocranial volume (or ECV) during supposed human evolution in fossil and extant primates. Encephalization is influenced by body mass, with a linear relation between the two. By using data from extant primates, the significance of encephalization can be estimated for fossil taxa, using the encephalization residual, which reflects the difference in the predicted and observed ECV (ER, see Wood 2016b). Out of eight species of Homo in Table 1 of Wood (2016b), only H. naledi displayed a non-significant ER.
  Table 1. Brain volume listed for several hominid species, taken from Wood 2016b. The value for H. naledi was updated with the 610 cc ECV of the LES1 specimen.
  Species
  Mean Endocranial Volume (cc)
  Aridipithecus ramidus
  300
  Paranthropus aethipicus
  410
  Australopithecus afarensis
  419.5
  Australopithecus sediba
  420
  Australopithecus africanus
  441.7
  Paranthropus boisei
  503.3
  Homo naledi
  545
  Homo habilis
  609.3
  Homo rudolfensis
  788.5
  Homo ergaster
  800.7
  Homo erectus
  960.1
  Homo heidelbergensis
  1231.6
  Homo neanderthalensis
  1391.4
  Homo sapiens
  1463.8
  It has also been suggested that H. naledi buried its dead in a ritualistic manner, just like Neanderthals and modern humans. This notion can be refuted by the way that humans generally bury their dead, either in extended posture, or on their side in the case of archaic humans (Byers 2002). Though these modes of burial may not be entirely exhaustive, it is still speculative as to suggest that possible H. naledi cave dwellers simply disposed of the remains of their own species by depositing them into the Dinaledi chamber. Furthermore, human artifacts, such as stone tools or jewelry and also of megafauna are found at human burial sites, such as Qafzeh in Israel (Bar-Yosef Mayer, Vandermeersch, and Bar-Yosef 2009), no such objects were found at the Rising Star Cave. Also, human remains are usually complete and articulated, such as the remains of Neanderthals at Sima de los Huesos in Spain (Carretero et al. 2012). This was not the case in the Rising Star Cave.
  Furthermore, the fact that multiple individuals were buried together in two separate parts of the cave system suggests burial due to a catastrophic event. Berger himself admits that this could be due to a flood:
  Beyond that, fossil groupings of a single species of animals—what we call a monospecific assemblage—are extraordinarily rare in the fossil record. Usually, when a monospecific assemblage is found, it is the scene of some easily identifiable catastrophic event, like a flood or mass kill site. But even these situations usually include some other species of animals. When a natural catchment traps animals, it usually traps other things too. If a herd of wildebeests drowned in a river, for example, a paleontologist will also find fish fossils, crocodile teeth, and bits of bone that would normally be in the gravel of a river. Maybe even some zebras amid the herd. (pp. 162–163)
  Another issue is the difficulty in accessing the Dinaledi Chamber of Rising Star Cave. Overall, it took about 45 minutes to an hour to get to the chamber. There are two constricting points in the cave system which would have made it difficult to get to the remote Dinaledi Chamber, one called “Superman’s Crawl,” named so because someone could only get through by pushing their arms forward so as to pull themselves through. People on Berger’s team had their clothes torn off while squeezing through. Berger himself could hardly get through. The second constricting point was known as “the chute,” which was a narrow opening, which led from the Dragon’s Back into Dinaledi Chamber, 39 ft (12 m), downwards (Fig. 1). It would have been difficult for H. naledi to get in, but even more difficult to get out. At some points the cave system was only 8 in (20 cm) in diameter. The big question is, if the Dinaledi Chamber was simply so difficult to access, how could H. naledi have done it, while dragging a corpse with them, and holding artificial fire? Why not bury the body in the upper part of the cave, which was much more accessible and less dangerous? Berger’s team was concerned about CO2 levels in the Dinaledi Chamber; live H. naledi could not have known about this without modern technology, and could thus have suffocated while depositing their dead, had the situation been the same in the cave system thousands of years ago. Berger suggests that Superman’s Crawl was more accessible in the past, although he maintains that it still would have been difficult and even dangerous to get to Dinaledi Chamber. Berger had several medical personnel around the cave in case of accidents. Some members of the team initially thought that the presence of survey pegs suggested that the remains, which had only been partially fossilized, were the remains of a caver who had recently made it into the cave and never came out.
  Originally, H. naledi had been dated to be 912,000 years old, based on phylogenetic trees (Dembo et al. 2016). Yet, dating of rocks and sediments in the Dinaledi Chamber showed that it was a “mere” 235,000–335,000 years old. This is remarkable, since H. naledi was held to be basal to the genus Homo, yet H. erectus, a species of archaic human, comes later on in the supposed evolutionary transition from ape to man (Zaim et al. 2011). This, in contrast with Berger’s ideas about the place of any fossil on the line of development reflecting its geological age. Let it be said to Berger’s credit, that instead of trying to reinterpret results to fit his theory, in the hope of finding a transitional fossil between australopiths and humans, he thus concluded that H. naledi must have been in competition with modern humans during their parallel existence next to each other. Whereas, he believes H. floresienses may have been sheltered from the expansion of modern humans for thousands of years on an isolated island. It is a stretch of the imagination to think that H. naledi, with its more “primitive” characteristics, would have been able to survive on the open plains of South Africa. Only those members of the genus Homo could truly be considered to be members of the human kind which have a sub-global, multi-continental distribution, such as H. erectus, Neanderthals, and modern humans. These are the only species of primates found on all six habitable continents.
  Based on cranial and postcranial characteristics, the disparity between the predicted and measured evolutionary ages of H. naledi, and the near impossible manner in which H. naledi would have been able to access the Dinaledi Chamber, it is most likely that H. naledi was not a member of the human kind, did not exhibit burial practices, but instead was only a species of ape.
  Acknowledgments
  The authors wish to thank Dr. Jeffrey P. Tomkins for reviewing the manuscript.
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  Berger L. R., S. E. Churchill, B. De Klerk, and R. L. Quinn. 2008. “Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia.” PLoS One 3 (3): e1780.
  Berger L. R., D. J. de Ruiter, S. E. Churchill, P. Schmid, K. J. Carlson, P. H. G. M. Dirks, and J. M. Kibii. 2010. “Australopithecus sediba: A New Species of Homo-Like Australopith from South Africa.” Science 328 (5975): 195–204.
  Byers, S. N. 2002. Introduction to Forensic Anthropology. Pearson Education, Inc. University of New Mexico-Valencia.
  Carretero, J.-M., L. Rodríguez, R. García-González, J.-L. Arsuaga, A. Gómez-Olivencia, C. Lorenzo, A. Bonmati, A. Gracia, I. Martinez, and R. Quarm. 2012. “Stature Estimation From Complete Long Bones in the Middle Pleistocene Humans From the Sima de los Huesos, Sierra de Atapuerca (Spain).” Journal of Human Evolution 62 (2): 242–255.
  Clarey, T. L. 2017. “Disposal of Homo naledi in a possible deathtrap or mass mortality scenario.” Journal of Creation 31(2): 61-70.
  Dembo, M., D. Radovčić, H. M. Garvin, M. F. Laird, L. Schroeder, J. E. Scott, J. Brophy, et al. 2016. “The Evolutionary Relationships and Age of Homo naledi: An Assessment Using Dated Bayesian Phylogenetic Methods.” Journal of Human Evolution 97: 17–26.
  Dirks, P. H. G. M., L. R. Berger, E. M. Roberts, J. D. Kramers, J. Hawks, P. S. Randolph-Quinney, M. Elliott, et al. 2015. “Geological and Taphonomic Context for the New Hominin Species Homo naledi from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa.” eLife 4: e09561:1-37. Doi:10.7554/eLife.09561.
  Dirks, P. H. G. M., E. M. Roberts, H. Hilbert-Wolf, J D. Kramers, J. Hawks, A. Dosseto, M. Duval, et al. 2017. “The Age of Homo naledi and Associated Sediments in the Rising Star cave, South Africa.” eLife 6: e24231. Doi:10.7554/eLife.24231.
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  O’Micks, J. 2017. “Rebuttal to ‘Reply to O’Micks Concerning the Geology and Taphonomy of the Homo naledi Site” and “Identifying Humans in the Fossil Record: A Further Response to O’Micks’.” Answers Research Journal 10: 63–70. https://answersingenesis.org/human-evolution/rebuttal-geology-taphonomy-of-homo-naledi-and-humans-in-fossil-record/.
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  Wood, T. C. 2016b. “Estimating the Statistical Significance of Hominin Encephalization” Journal of Creation Theology and Science Series B: Life Sciences 6: 40–45.
  Zaim, Y., R. L. Ciochon, J. M. Polanski, F. E. Grine, E. A. Bettis III, Y. Rizal, R. G. Franciscus, et al. 2011. “New 1.5 Million-Year-Old Homo erectus Maxilla from Sangiran (Central Java, Indonesia).” Journal of Human Evolution 61 (4): 363–376.

• Washington Post Book World
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/controversy-dogging-him-site-to-site-fossil-hunter-makes-dramatic-claims-on-finds/2017/06/09/c965357e-3fd1-11e7-9869-bac8b446820a_story.html?utm_term=.1a9dc8b420a7
  Word count: 1191

  QUOTED: "In “Almost Human,” the search for hominin fossils reads like an extreme sport. Written by Lee Berger with fellow paleoanthropologist John Hawks, the book documents with riveting intensity Berger’s lifelong fascination with fossil hunting and the contributions he has made to our understanding of human origins."
  "While many in the paleoanthropological community dispute Berger’s theories and methods, there is no doubt that his book’s lively prose will win new fans for paleoanthropology."

  Controversy dogging him site to site, fossil hunter makes dramatic claims on finds

  A replica of a skull of Homo naledi, a hominin species found in a South African cave in 2013. (Gulshan Khan/AFP/Getty Images)
  By Rachel Newcomb June 9
  Rachel Newcomb is an anthropologist and the Diane and Michael Maher Distinguished Professor of Teaching and Learning at Rollins College. She is the author of “Everyday Life in Global Morocco,” due out in October.
  A 9-year-old boy stumbles upon a 2 million-year-old hominin clavicle while exploring in a field in South Africa. A paleoanthropologist, kayaking with his family on the Pacific island of Palau, finds a burial chamber full of ancient remains that he suspects might be a previously undocumented race of tiny people. A swashbuckling former diamond hunter discovers a treasure trove of humanlike fossils in a network of caves accessible only to people small enough to slither through an 18-centimeter opening.
  In “Almost Human,” the search for hominin fossils reads like an extreme sport. Written by Lee Berger with fellow paleoanthropologist John Hawks, the book documents with riveting intensity Berger’s lifelong fascination with fossil hunting and the contributions he has made to our understanding of human origins.
  [Lucy, our hominid cousin, may have died in a tragic fall from a tree]

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  In contemporary paleoanthropological circles, Berger, who grew up in the United States and is based in South Africa, is considered something of a maverick. He invites National Geographic to document his expeditions for social media, puts out calls on Facebook to invite scientists to join his teams and, rather than hoarding his finds so he alone can analyze them, makes replicas and photos of fossils available for other scientists to study. Traditionally, the journey from fossil discovery to publication has been a slow and laborious one, but Berger is known for speeding everything up. Critical of establishment paleoanthropologists, he views them as “an exclusive club” that refuses to share with others. “I represented a generation that didn’t just want the keys to the club,” Berger writes, “we wanted to open the doors to everyone. We were impatient for a faster pace of discovery and science, and sought collaborations with larger and larger groups of experts outside the traditional schools of thought.”
  "Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story," by Lee Berger and John Hawks (National Geographic)
  Other scientists have sharply criticized Berger for being a relentless self-promoter, too quick to announce to the world that his fossils are rewriting human history. Paleoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley has accused Berger of engaging in “selfie science” and suggested that he is more interested in telling a good story than in sharing scientifically validated facts.

  Criticisms of Berger aside, “Almost Human” is a fascinating and dramatically paced book that translates for a lay audience the excitement of paleoanthropology, its debates and its scandals. Berger provides a crash course in the field’s often rocky history, shares his own tales of discovery and offers his version of feuds he has had with other paleoanthropologists. The hominin clavicle, found by Berger’s son, who was only 9 at the time, turned out to be part of several skeletons that were later dated as 2 million years old, representing a previously undiscovered variant of a hominin species that Berger named Australopithecus sediba. Australopiths, first discovered in 1925 in South Africa, lived roughly between 4.2 million and 1.5 million years ago and are believed to be an intermediate species between apes and humans, sharing a bone structure similar to modern humans’ but a brain that was one-third the size of ours. Although Berger asserted that sediba may have been a direct ancestor to modern humans, other anthropologists have disputed this, suggesting that sediba lived contemporaneously with the earliest species of Homo or perhaps was a variant of Homo. Nonetheless, there is little doubt in the paleoanthropological community that sediba was highly significant. Finding skeletons this old yet this complete in itself is astonishing, and Berger has consistently been open about allowing others to study sediba and draw their own conclusions.
  [Book review: ‘TThe Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal,’ by Jared Diamond]
  Sediba alone would have been a sufficiently exciting discovery for one career, but more was to come. In 2013, Pedro Boshoff, a former student of Berger’s who had gone off to hunt for diamonds and never finished his degree, showed up at Berger’s office looking for work. Knowing that Boshoff was a skilled caver, Berger hired him to explore some promising fossil sites in the area. After several weeks of working with a team of cavers, Boshoff came to Berger’s home late one evening with photos of a mandible and a tiny skull that appeared humanlike but did not resemble anything Berger had seen before. The bones came from a nearly inaccessible chamber in a network of caves known locally as Rising Star, and Berger immediately contacted National Geographic about funding an expedition. He then put out a call on Facebook recruiting paleoanthropologists small enough to slip through the 18-centimeter-wide hole leading into the fossil chamber to come to South Africa. National Geographic covered the entire expedition on social media. After collecting more than 1,300 fossil fragments in 21 days, Berger assembled another team of scholars to collectively analyze them and quickly write papers publicizing their finds.

  Here the story grows more controversial. Dating the fossils proved challenging, because they were not found with surrounding geological evidence to help determine their age. What, then, were they? A previously undiscovered form of human, or a type of australopith? Why was it so urgent for Berger to publish his findings so quickly? And how had these ancient hominins ended up in such an out-of-the-way cave? Berger had his theories, but as usual, not everyone would agree with him. To say more would be to give away much of the suspense of this entertaining read. While many in the paleoanthropological community dispute Berger’s theories and methods, there is no doubt that his book’s lively prose will win new fans for paleoanthropology. And in an era when funding for scientific research is constantly under threat, could more advocates in the general public be such a bad thing?
  Almost Human
  The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story
  By Lee Berger and John Hawks
  National Geographic. 240 pp. $26

• Regarp Book Blog
  https://regarp.com/2017/09/12/almost-human-the-astonishing-tale-of-homo-naledi-and-the-discovery-that-changed-our-human-story-by-lee-berger-and-john-hawks/
  Word count: 1589

  QUOTED: "The search for human origins is a complex one, and new discoveries and interpretations ever alter the contours of the twigs on that bush.  It is a fascinating story, but much of it is often given to the secrecy and arcane jargon of science and academia, and thus lost to a wider audience.  Almost Human is a welcome respite from that, and I highly recommend joining Berger and Hawks and their Underground Astronauts on this fascinating journey to resurrect a piece of our past and proudly show it off to the world."

  Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery that Changed Our Human Story, by Lee Berger and John Hawks
  12
  Tuesday
  Sep 2017
  Posted by stanprager in Reviews
  ≈ 2 Comments

  Back in 2014, I took a challenging but rewarding MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), “Human Evolution: Past and Future,” a free online course taught by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of anthropology Dr. John Hawks. Hawks, who might be described as both genial and genius, seems equally devoted to both advancing studies in paleoanthropology, and sharing data cross-discipline for the greater good of scientists, students, and the wider public audience—a heresy that cuts against the grain in scientific as well as academic circles among those who jealously guard their discoveries in order to be the first in line for credit and publication. The course introduced via video clips a leading paleontologist in the field, Lee Berger, whose two remarkable and vastly dissimilar hominin finds in South Africa have each literally shifted the landscape in studies of human evolution.
  Berger, who frequently partners with National Geographic, has in common with Hawks an absolute devotion to open access, which has made him unpopular among some of his more traditional peers.  Berger and Hawks passionately believe that—especially given today’s technology and speeds of communication, as well as tendencies towards ever increasing specialization—that such free and open access is essential to fostering advances in all of the related fields. This passion also extends to the general audience, as evidenced in Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery that Changed Our Human Story, by Lee Berger and John Hawks, a well-written, fast-paced narrative that puts a focus to the latest finds and the cutting-edge technology and techniques of paleoanthropology.
  My training is as a historian rather than a paleontologist, but I have been fascinated by fossil finds ever since I was a boy, when I followed the adventures of the Leakey’s in National Geographic, and later bought books by Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson that sit on my shelves to this day. The discovery of the magnificent 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis nicknamed “Lucy” was a big deal for this teenager! So, I have to confess to some delight when Berger reveals in the opening chapters that as a youth, on his somewhat circuitous route to paleoanthropology, he thrilled to these very same volumes. Back in those days, it was once remarked that our entire collection of hominin fossils could be displayed on a single large table. As Berger and Hawks remind us in Almost Human, those days are long past!
  This is a very exciting time for studies in human evolution, both because of a plethora of new fossil discoveries, as well as stunning advances in technology that permit a far more detailed knowledge of the lifeways of our early hominin antecedents. For instance, we can now determine with some certainty, based upon carbon isotopes retrieved from fossil teeth, what the owners of those teeth once dined upon. And rather than the familiar “tree of evolution” found in early textbooks, we now know that the model is far “bushier,” with many descendants of a distant common ancestor that turned into dead ends.  Modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, are the only surviving species of the genus Homo, but paleoanthropology has revealed that we have many extinct relatives, and we will likely stumble upon many more.  In addition to Lucy, there were several other australopithecines, which are not in our direct line of descent, as well as a number of Homo varieties, including the recent surprising and controversial discovery of Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the “Hobbit,” a kind of dwarf hominin that inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores. Far less ancient Denisovans have been found in Asia that are, like Neanderthals, archaic humans. Clearly there is no straight line from our ancestors to us.
  Perhaps nothing underscores that more than the two astonishing discoveries directed by Lee Berger.  The first, the nearly two-million-year-old fossils of Australopithecus sediba, was actually found not by Berger but by his nine-year-old son in 2008. What is remarkable about sediba is that despite its antiquity, it sports surprisingly modern hands and quite humanlike ankles, yet also—significantly—retains the more ape-like attributes often characteristic to an australopithecine.  Such a weird amalgam of features both ancient and more recent are termed “mosaics” by paleontologists, and there was probably no greater example of this than sediba.
  At least, that is, until Berger had a look at the fossils of what was later to be called Homo naledi, first discovered in 2013 by recreational cavers exploring the Rising Star cave system, in the vicinity of Johannesburg.  Homo naledi, a mere 300,000 years old, nevertheless demonstrated mosaic features far more archaic than would be expected from a hominin significantly younger than other specimens of Homo known for larger brains and more modern characteristics. At the same time, there were also distinct anatomical features that clearly identified it as part of the Homo lineage. What those cavers had stumbled upon, at the end of a narrow chute, was the long-isolated Dinaledi Chamber, littered with fossils that turned out to represent more than a dozen naledi individuals. This extraordinary discovery was the foundation of Berger’s Rising Star Cave Expedition that is the central focus of Almost Human.
  The Rising Star Cave Expedition, which included Hawks and a truly remarkable team, was presented with a unique set of excavation challenges. The 650 foot (200 meter) labyrinthine route to the Dinaledi Chamber included a particularly claustrophobic segment tagged as “Superman’s Crawl,” a short tunnel less than 10 inches (25 centimeters) wide, so-called because traversing it requires a bodily contortion with one arm stretched above your head and the other held tight against your body, like Superman flying. This was followed by a vertical climb of some 65 feet (20 meters) up an underground ridge called Dragon’s Back, and then a perilous descent through a 39 foot (12 meter) vertical chute that narrows at one point to only some 7 inches (18 centimeters) wide! Berger brilliantly overcame this daunting hurdle by recruiting the most qualified paleoanthropologists, with climbing and caving experience, who were also physically of the smallest stature, and therefore best suited to probing the narrowest passages. The six who were selected, all women as it turned out, were nicknamed the “Underground Astronauts.”

  The story of these intrepid explorers makes for an exciting tale that is sometimes related breathlessly, yet never sinks to pulp. While it is eminently clear that this expedition is underway in the first part of the twenty-first century—replete with state-of-the-art technology and communication—there remains an ever-present palpable element of old-fashioned danger as flesh-and-blood scientists slowly and painstakingly navigate Superman’s Crawl, and then later descend that very narrow chute, to retrieve those precious bones that have lain undisturbed for several hundred thousand years. The narrative is so well-written that the reader can almost hear Berger’s heart thumping in his chest as he monitors the steady progress of his Underground Astronauts, ever alert that there are indeed things that can go very wrong in this extreme environment that could mean injury or death for them.
  I must admit just a hint of disappointment with Almost Human at first, for while it is hardly dumbed-down, I had hoped for a bit more emphasis on the fossil morphology, and perhaps a more technical examination of how naledi fit with the rest of the evolutionary bush. But that quickly passed.  This is not that kind of book. Instead, Almost Human is an adventure story of discovery in a field that these days is all about breaking news, told by two men with the talent to articulate it. And Berger’s commitment to open access means that the news of such discoveries is actually getting out, at least in his arena, rather than remaining squirreled away for years as had long been standard practice. Homo naledi and the progress of the Rising Star Expedition has been the stuff of social media for several years now; I learned of the publication of Almost Human on Twitter.
  Race, we now know, is a meaningless construct: all living humans today are more closely related to each other genetically than the two chimpanzee populations of west and east Africa are to one another. But it was not always that way.  The search for human origins is a complex one, and new discoveries and interpretations ever alter the contours of the twigs on that bush.  It is a fascinating story, but much of it is often given to the secrecy and arcane jargon of science and academia, and thus lost to a wider audience.  Almost Human is a welcome respite from that, and I highly recommend joining Berger and Hawks and their Underground Astronauts on this fascinating journey to resurrect a piece of our past and proudly show it off to the world.

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