Johannesburg - It’s 1 069 and counting. This is the growing treasure trove of hominin fossils exhumed from a cave 35km from Joburg.
It’s a lot.
To understand how much, at the nearby site of Swartkrans, more than 400 have been found in 65 years.
The latest cave fossils were collected in 16 days.
There has been nothing like it in the history of palaeo-anthropology in South Africa. And this expedition, in the Cradle of Humankind, was initially launched to recover one hominin skeleton.
“We have had a lot of the unexpected, it is crazy,” said palaeo-anthropologist Dr Peter Schmid as he placed tag No 1 069 on a fossil fragment.
Schmid was part of an assembly line of academics finding and processing fossils excavated by one of the dig teams three storeys underground.
They are then packaged, brought to the surface and to the tent marked “Science”, where the likes of Schmid begin the work of preservation and cataloguing.
On Tuesday, the media were allowed at the site of the Rising Star cave, on the last day of the expedition. There had been a media blackout of sorts, with the only information about the finds coming from National Geographic, a funder of the expedition; a stream of academic tweets; and the odd blog.
Now we could take a peek.
“We can confirm this site is the richest early hominin site in South Africa,” said the leader of the expedition, Professor Lee Berger, of Wits University. “The quality of preservation is unprecedented.”
But what exactly they have found, they are not saying.
“They appear to be early hominins,. We are not speculating on age. We don’t know what species they are and we don’t know how many individuals we are dealing with,” he said.
Back in the tent marked “Science”, Schmid said they had seen everything. “We’ve even found ankle bones.” Scientists like hominin ankle bones as they’re rare and assist in understanding the evolution of human locomotion.
Collecting the fossils has been dangerous work.
In October, Berger sent out a request on social media for scientists of slight build, with archaeological digging experience and caving skills. His call came after two members of South Africa’s Speleological Exploration Club found fossils during an excursion to the same cave.
Through a selection process, six women were chosen. Berger called them the “underground astronauts”.
Working in shifts of six to seven hours, each woman had to squeeze along a tunnel that at times was 18cm wide. They had to work barefoot so as to feel the fossils that lay on the floor of the cave.
Above ground in the command centre, eight cameras watch the “underground astronauts” at work. The cave is wired with 3km of cable.
There is more hi-tech equipment and activity. Scientists are also mapping the cave with scanners that provide an accuracy of 0.3mm.
The team plan to regroup to decide how they will tackle the cave in the future.
Security features have been put in place.
Ahead lies tens of thousands of man-hours to determine what was recovered and how the fossils got there. - The Star