World renowned palaeontologist Prof Lee Berger will be addressing pupils at Crawford College La Lucia on Monday, August 30.
Berger, and his son Matthew are most often associated with the spectacular discovery on August 15, 2008 of the remains of early human ancestors in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage site outside of Johannesburg – a clavicle, or collarbone.
Berger and his colleagues had travelled to the site to undertake an ambitious project to place known fossil sites on to a map that would permanently record their location.
During 2008 Berger used Google Earth to plot the various caves and fossiliferous deposits, and to locate potential new deposits. Google Earth allowed him to share information with other scientists, and its 3-D capabilities allowed him to begin to identify what caves might look like from satellite images.
By July 2008, through using Google Earth, complemented by significant legwork on the ground, Berger had discovered almost 500 caves that scientists had not previously identified. Included in this were more than 25 fossil sites that had been unknown to science.
On August 15, 2008, Berger returned to the site with his post-doctoral student, Dr Job Kibii and his nine-year-old son Matthew. Within minutes, Matthew had discovered the clavicle, or collarbone. On the opposite side of the block, Berger discovered a jawbone with a canine tooth of a hominid. The find would soon be prepared and identified as part of a partial skeleton of a juvenile hominid, around 9-13 years of age.
In the months to follow, the site produced arguably the most remarkable assemblage of early human ancestors ever found, including what are probably the most complete skeletons of early hominids ever discovered and by far the most complete remains of any hominid dating to around two million years ago.
The fossils, one juvenile male, one adult female, occur together in near articulated state in the sedimentary remains of a deeply eroded cave system, where they were laid down by a single debris flow, indicating the timing of their death was closely related, and occurred shortly before the debris flow carried them to their place of burial.
Juvenile
A further important aspect of the find is that a male and female were found together, and are respectively a juvenile and an adult. The sex of the fossils can be determined from the morphology of the jaws and hips, while the age of the juvenile has been determined from its dentition making it about 11 to 13 years old in human terms. In contrast, the adult female has strongly worn teeth suggesting an age in her late 20s or perhaps even older. Both individuals are about 1.27cm tall.
Prof Lee R Berger is the current Reader in Human Evolution and the Public Understanding of Science in the Institute for Human Evolution, School of Geosciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He discovered the site of Malapa in 2008 and is the discoverer of the new species of early human ancestor Australopithecus sediba. He is the director and principle investigator of the Malapa Project and leads more than 70 scientists in what has been described as the largest palaeontological project in recent history.
Berger will speak to the primary school pupils in the morning at 10.30am sharp and high school students, parents and invited guests at the primary school in the afternoon. – Additional information supplied by the WWF