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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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. ♦
