Hi, I'm Anne Strange Champs. You know how people dream about finding buried treasure and how every so often somebody actually does?

Well, this week, scientists revealed the discovery of a huge cache of early human-like fossils, a brand-new species of human ancestor, buried deep in a cave in South Africa.

And you and I read about this in the headlines,

but Alia Gertov first heard about it like this. I woke up one morning, checked my Facebook,

and there was a post requesting small-bodied excavators who could drop everything at a moment's notice, come to South Africa, and they needed to be able to fit in tiny spaces.

I was like, that describes me perfectly.

Anthropologist Alia Gertov's life changed with that post.

Today, onto the best of our knowledge from PRI, we'll find out about what this new discovery means and head inside that cave.

From the outside, the cave is not much to look at, honestly. It's just a hole in the ground.

But as you descend, it becomes darker and darker. You begin to have to squeeze between the walls.

And about four or five minutes into the cave, you come to the Superman crawl.

Essentially like a little tube that you have to get through, and that opens up into an area

where the only way to get where you're going is to crawl up a fallen ridge of stone called

Dragon's Back.

Dragonsback is an appropriate name for it.

It's narrow on both sides, so you have to place your feet very carefully, or you'll slide off one way or the other.

Once you get up Dragons Back, you enter a fissure that drops 12 feet.

Now, it's a very tight drop.

What we're talking about is the choke point

that required such small-bodied people.

The narrowest point in that shoot is about seven inches.

Wait, seven inches?

...