Episode 26: Rising Star
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 14 September 2017
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's not every day you see a Facebook post that changes your life, but that's exactly what happened to Leakey Foundation grantee Alia Gurtov. Gurtov was checking her Facebook feed one morning and saw a post from paleoanthropologist Lee Berger. He was looking for archaeologists who were "...skinny and preferably small. They must not be claustrophobic, they must be fit, they should have some caving experience, climbing experience would be a bonus. They must be willing to work in cramped quarters, have a good attitude and be a team player." Gurtov had never seen a job description that fit her more perfectly.
A few weeks later she was in South Africa, inside a cave chamber strewn with ancient bones. The fossils she helped recover have changed the story of human evolution and added a strange new relative to our family tree.
Thanks to Leakey Foundation grantees Alia Gurtov and Will Harcourt-Smith for sharing their stories.
You can learn more at leakeyfoundation.org.
The Leakey Foundation
Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach. The Leakey Foundation had 12 grantees who participated in the Homo naledi research. Support this show and the science we talk about with a tax-deductible donation. Thanks to a generous supporter, your donation will automatically be doubled!
Links
-
Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa
- 3D models of the Homo naledi fossils
- "This Face Changes the Human Story. But, How?" National Geographic.
- "The Dawn of Humanity." NOVA/National Geographic.
Credits
Editor: Julia Barton
Host and Series Producer: Meredith Johnson
Associate Producer: Shuka Kalantari
Sound Design: Katie McMurran
Theme Music: Henry Nagle
Intern: Yuka Oiwa
Additional Music: Tech Toys by Lee Rosevere
Sponsors
This season of Origin Stories is made possible by support from Dixon Long.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson. I squeeze between a crevice that |
| 0:14.8 | lasts probably about five feet. And then as I exit that, I'm in that final chamber. And there are just bones everywhere. |
| 0:24.2 | There are teeth glinting like little pearls in the dirt and identifiable bones just lying |
| 0:33.2 | all over the place. This is paleoanthropologist Alia Gertov, and in today's episode, she's going |
| 0:39.6 | to take us behind the scenes of one of the most exciting fossil discoveries of the past 50 years. |
| 0:45.1 | It happened in 2013, the discovery of a new member of our family tree. That discovery couldn't |
| 0:51.8 | have happened without the work of women like Gertav. |
| 0:55.8 | The story of human evolution is a long and winding one, stretching over millions of years. |
| 1:02.2 | Each new discovery adds more to the story, or even changes our understanding of how we became who we are. |
| 1:08.8 | This part of our story starts in a cave called Rising Star. |
| 1:12.6 | It's in an area of South Africa known as the cradle of humankind. |
| 1:17.6 | It's a nearly 200-square-mile region of rolling grasslands, |
| 1:21.6 | peppered with limestone caves, just outside of Johannesburg. |
| 1:26.6 | It's actually a UNESCO designated world heritage |
| 1:29.8 | site, since so many fossils of our extinct relatives have been found there, mostly in a few |
| 1:35.4 | well-known caves. In the dry, stony hills beyond Putgiatus rust, is a treasure trove of fossilized bones |
| 1:41.7 | in which experts can read the exciting adventures of prehistoric |
| 1:44.9 | man. The famous Tong child skull was found there by miners in the early 1920s. In the 1930s, |
| 1:52.3 | Raymond Dart and Robert Broome began excavating a limestone cave called Sturkfontein, where in 1947, |
| 1:58.8 | where in 1947, Broome found another famous fossil called Mrs. Pless. |
| 2:02.6 | And later, in the 1990s, paleoanthropologist Ron Clark found a spectacular skeleton called Littlefoot, |
| 2:10.6 | completely encased in a hard stone matrix. |
... |
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