Bones leads the way: Remains of ‘strange creatures’ in cave near Johannesburg
Johannesburg - 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 Keneiloe 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 Keneiloe.
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. 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.
Keneiloe 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.
Others have recognised her as an explorer too.
The National Geographic Society named her among its 15 Emerging Explorers for 2021.
And Keneiloe has come into the science at a most exciting time.
Over the last 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 somewhere in the Cradle.
Earlier this year Keneiloe was made the principal investigator of the Gladysvale dig site in the Cradle of Humankind.
Here she had to manage a team of scientists.
Gladysvale doesn’t have the shine of some of the other palaeo sites in the Cradle. It hasn’t produced the scores of hominin fossils of the Sterkfontein Caves and it hasn’t revealed a new species of human ancestor like the Rising Star site.
Well, not yet.
It was in the Gladysvale cave 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 knew it was going to be sexy,” recalls Keneiloe. “We were used to seeing bovids, Equus (horses) then we started hitting something never seen before. It could be fauna, hominid or hominin.”
The Cradle is already a place of mystery.
Much of this mystery revolves around naledi, that lived possibly 200 000 years ago, and had a brain the size of an orange.
But what scientists have not been able to explain is how naledi made its way into the pitch darkness of the Rising Cave system. A journey of hundreds of metres.
There is a controversial theory that naledi might have been bringing its dead to the cave. The search is on to find evidence of this.
But there is a world away from the mysteries of Homo naledi, the boot-clinging highveld dust of the Cradle and the continual pondering of what lies inside clumps of breccia.
Besides yoga in the morning and gym in the evening, Bones admits to the odd glass of wine in the evening and chocolate.
The Benoni girl has a passion she discovered while completing her PhD.
Keneiloe is a foodie.
“I am usually in the kitchen, I love fine dining and really good food.”
She had a plan of starting a pop-up restaurant. She was going to call it Bones’ Eatery.
For a long time Keneiloe was the only black girl in the class, an experience that left a mark. She wants to make it easier for the next generation of black archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists.
“I think my next big focus will be to mentor or guide the next generation of palaeoanthropologists or archaeologists of colour,” she explains.
“I think they get lost in the cracks and it is due to financial constraints.”
In mid-October Keneiloe plans to go back underground at Rising Star. Other digs are also planned in the coming months. Already there have been discoveries, but Bones is keeping mum. Not just at Gladysvale, but also Rising Star. Our mystery relative Homo naledi might be revealing a little more about itself.
“I think this season is going to produce something that is going to break the internet,” she says, allowing herself just a little of a smile.