Almost Human Quotes

“EVERY ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY IS an act of destruction.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“In 2003, a small skeleton was discovered by a team of Indonesian and Australian archaeologists on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The find surprised the world when Peter Brown, Michael Morwood, and their co-workers described the skeleton as a new hominin species, Homo floresiensis.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“Africa remained the center of our evolution, home to the greatest diversity of these archaic humans and ultimately the place where modern humans arose.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“The discoveries of the Leakeys, Don Johanson, and others constituted a second golden age of paleoanthropology.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“Meanwhile, in the early 1970s Donald Johanson, a brash young scientist from the United States, joined a field expedition at a site in Ethiopia called Hadar. The team found hominin fossils, including a partial skeleton soon to become the most famous in the world, nicknamed “Lucy.” Geological work dated Lucy and associated fossils back more than three million years.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“The early discoveries from Lake Turkana included remarkable fossils, including a skull then thought to be the earliest specimen of Homo from anywhere in the world. Scientists today identify it as the best example of the species Homo rudolfensis, a contemporary of habilis. In 1984, the hominid gang’s most accomplished fossil hunter, Kamoya Kimeu, found the first pieces of a skeleton that would eventually become the most complete Homo erectus yet discovered. Known as Turkana Boy, it is a young male, aged at approximately 1.5 million years old, with many humanlike body structures but key differences in the brain, skull, and teeth.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“For Dart, Australopithecus represented an unknown branch from the human stem, and one that offered evidence about the earliest period of human evolution.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“more humanlike than any of the living apes, yet it was not human. He called it a man-ape, and gave it the name Australopithecus africanus, meaning “southern ape from Africa.” Charles Darwin had predicted that humans had originated in Africa. Now, with this African fossil much closer to humans than any living ape, Dart could show Darwin’s hunch to be right. In a matter of months, with the fossil that came to be known as the Taung Child, Raymond Dart had rewritten the story of human origins.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“Sometimes people who have been in a car crash describe their memory of the event as being like a black-and-white silent movie. That’s the way I remember that moment now. A bone stuck out of the rock. I knew instantly what it was: the clavicle, or collarbone, of a hominin. I knew that fossil shape—I had done my Ph.D. research on this bone. Still, I doubted myself. But as I took the rock from Matt and stared at the little S-shaped piece of bone, I thought, “What else could it be?” I turned the rock over to get a better angle. There was a hominin canine tooth and part of the jaw, as well as other bones. This was not just any hominin. And, at the very least, there were several parts of the skeleton embedded in this chunk of rock. Matt says I cursed. I don’t remember. Whatever I said or did, I knew for sure that both his life and mine were about to change forever.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“Paleoanthropology—the search for human origins—is a tough, competitive, and unforgiving field. A colleague of mine once joked that we are probably the only branch of science that has more scientists than objects to study. That wasn’t too far from the truth. In a field of such scarcity, even a small find—a jawbone, even a single leg bone—could make a career.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“Scientific debates may, in the long run, be decided by careful scientific work, but in the short run, many scientists pay more attention to the media and the rumor mill.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“Researchers wanted to carve out “rights” to exclusivity over fossil discoveries, and they would fight hard to make sure that potential competitors were kept out. In this environment, the idea of open collaboration was a pipe dream.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“And when there are sensational headlines in paleoanthropology, I had come to learn the hard way, there is usually a big fight.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“We were on the edge of the “publish or perish” cliff, still judged by individual output, even though our productivity was higher when we collaborated.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“In 2015, evidence of early stone tools was found near Lake Turkana in an ancient layer more than 3.2 million years old, nearly double the age of the Olduvai Gorge discoveries.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“Humans today owe the vast majority of our heritage to the first modern human populations in Africa, which lived only 200,000 years ago.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“Wits [Witwatersrand University] was semi-independent, but the government held the purse strings for the vast majority of research. Human evolution research could not be a priority, because it challenged the premise of apartheid by showing the common origin of all humankind. By the late 1980s, the science was clearly showing that our evolutionary roots began in Africa. The work of many scientists, in South Africa and elsewhere, defied the racial logic of the National Party. Research showed that there was no “natural” separation of the races—but that didn’t mean the apartheid government had to like it.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“My whole life had been planned with just a limited number of options. Bright kids from rural Georgia had three or four pathways: Doctor, lawyer, engineer, maybe accountant—those were the tickets out.”
― Lee Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“Branches formed and flowed separately for some distance before they merged again with the growing river as it flowed on to today. Which”
― Lee R Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story

“If populations can interbreed with each other in their natural habitat, they belong to the same species. Of course, with fossil animals, that’s not possible—if we wait for two fossils to interbreed, we’ll be waiting a very long time.”
― Lee R Berger, Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo Naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story