Strange creatures in the cave
IN A CAVE not far from Johannesburg lie the remains of strange creatures.
Their identities are hidden by a cloak of hard rock like breccia and it is a discovery that might change a lot of what we know.
It is a mystery that had Dr Keneiloe Moyopane on the phone to the Wits University preparatory labs almost daily. They were slowly working their way through the breccia and each day Moyopane hoped enough had been removed to provide a clue as to what they had found.
Then last week, the woman who everyone knows as Bones went silent.
“I’m like, what is happening, what is happening? And then I think the lab was surprised last week when I didn’t contact them at all. And they are like, are you alive, and I am like, I am trying to heal,” laughs Moyopane.
The heavy work schedule had finally caught up with the Wits University palaeoanthropologist.
A digging season that included back-to-back excavations at two different sites had taken its toll.
“I felt like, that if I didn’t go, I was going to literally just burst into tears because I was so exhausted.”
The most energy-sapping of them all was the recent excavation at the Rising Star Cave at the Cradle of Humankind, north-west of Johannesburg. It was here where the human ancestor Homo naledi was discovered in 2013.
The fossils were found deep in the cave, and to get to them specially selected underground astronauts were recruited. They had to be small enough to squeeze through tight passages, strong enough to rock climb and still be able to do some serious science once they arrived at the chamber where the naledi fossils lay scattered.
Moyopane joined the team in 2018. This time going down she felt she wasn’t ready. “I think I was mostly relying on the fact that I’m small, but it is not entirely about being small. It is about being strong.”
Bones is a part of a new breed of scientist who is multidisciplinary, hard to pigeonhole and willing to go to places others can’t.
She had to once learn to scuba dive so she could help excavate an 18th-century slave ship at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean that had run aground off what is now Clifton beach, in the Western Cape.
She is an archaeologist, palaeoanthropologist and anatomist, too. “I guess what I am is an explorer,” is how she sums it up. The National Geographic Society named her among its 15 Emerging Explorers for 2021.
And Moyopane has come into the science at a most exciting time.
Over the past two decades newly discovered hominids have been populating our family tree. Scientists have been trying to work out just where they sit on that tree and how closely they relate to us.
Just in the Cradle two new hominid species have been found. Australopithecus sediba was discovered at Malapa in 2008 and naledi five years later. And there could be more out there. Some geneticists claim to have found traces of ghost hominin species in our DNA, the product of perhaps interbreeding with humans hundreds of thousands, maybe a million years ago. Those ghosts might just lie in the Cradle.
Earlier this year, Moyopane was made principal investigator of the Gladysvale dig site at the Cradle of Humankind, and it was here that Bones and her team found those mystery creatures. Most of their work at Gladysvale was mapping above ground. Later they turned their attention to the cave.
“Underground, we were used to bovids, equus (horses) then we started hitting something never seen before. It could be fauna, hominid or hominin.”
For a long time Moyopane was the only black woman in the class, an experience that left a mark. She now wants to make it easier for the next generation of black archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists.