[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today we're talking about ...

ROBERT: Things!

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: I don't think there'll ever be another specimen that'll be exactly like this one.

JAD: Actually, our next podcast is a full hour about stories that grow out of particular things, objects. But today we have a preview.

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: Sort of.

PATRICIA HUME: So that's the place, right?

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: This is the place.

JAD: It's a story about a thing.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: It's in this vault.

JAD: It lives inside a steel vault inside this huge laboratory at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. We asked a professor there, Dr. Bernhard Zipfel, to pull it out and show it to our reporter, Patricia Hume.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: And this is the original specimen. This is it. We have it right in front of us here. I mean, I handle this a lot, but I get gooseflesh every time I take this out.

JAD: And the reason it gives him gooseflesh, or goosebumps, is because this object seems to completely upend two basic questions about, you know, human history.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: Amazing.

JAD: Where did we begin? And when we began, who was trying to take us out?

ROBERT: Producer Andy Mills takes the story from here.

ANDY MILLS: Right.

JAD: With thunder and vigor.

ROBERT: And gusto.

JAD: With gusto.

ANDY: Ooh, yes. I'd like to with gusto please.

JAD: All right.

LEE BERGER: Well, it's one of those discoveries that almost didn't happen.

ANDY: And here to help me tell you the story ...

LEE BERGER: Okay. I'm professor Lee Berger.

ANDY: ... is Lee.

LEE BERGER: I am a research professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and an explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society.

ROBERT: An explorer in residence. That's a weird title. It seems like you should be one or the other.

LEE BERGER: [laughs] It's almost an oxymoron, isn't it?

ROBERT: Yeah!

ANDY: Lee says that our story begins back in the 1920s in South Africa at a place called ...

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: Taung.

ANDY: ... Taung.

LEE BERGER: It's T-A-U-N-G. Taung is the proper name.

ROBERT: Taung.

LEE BERGER: In Tswana. The western way of saying it is Taung. It's a desert area on the southern edge of the Kalahari escarpment.

ANDY: Kind of like your stereotypical picture of Africa: rocks, baobab trees, roaming gazelles.

LEE BERGER: And back in the 1920s ...

ANDY: The place was crawling with Europeans digging mines.

LEE BERGER: As they were blasting away with dynamite, drilling with big steam drills, and huge explosions would take place.

ANDY: And one day these miners, they're blowing their way through a bit of this hillside, and as the rock falls away and the smoke clears, they realized that they've opened up this cave.

LEE BERGER: An ancient cave. And inside of that cave ...

ANDY: They found dozens of these strange looking rocks, almost like animal bones. One of the miners, he takes those bones and gives them to a geologist.

LEE BERGER: Geologists box them up ...

ANDY: And sent them to this Australian guy who is living in Johannesburg named Raymond Dart.

LEE BERGER: And that's probably the first miracle in this story. Raymond Dart was a neuroanatomist, a comparative neuroanatomist, one of the only ones in the world.

ANDY: This was a guy who knew his fossils. And when this box arrived, he was actually wearing a three-piece suit.

LEE BERGER: He's going to be best man at a wedding, in fact, later that afternoon.

ANDY: But he's like, "That can wait." So he reached into the box, shuffled through some antelope skulls ...

LEE BERGER: It was full of baboon skulls.

ANDY: ... monkey skulls. Until he got to this one rock. Now to you or me, this would have just looked like a big chunk of limestone.

LEE BERGER: But Raymond Dart immediately realized that he had something special. And he started—he actually went and got his wife's knitting needles, and started scratching away at this rock, much to his wife's disgust. He then spent the next several months ...

ANDY: Delicately chipping away at the limestone until ...

LEE BERGER: The rock literally popped free. And there, he stared into a perfect little face.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: You can see here, the face is quite flat and humanlike.

ANDY: A lot like the face ...

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: Of a child.

ANDY: A human child.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: But humans have a larger brain.

ANDY: According to Dr. Zipfel, this child's brain was smaller than a human child. It was closer to the size ...

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: Of a chimpanzee.

ANDY: So it had features of a human, it had a brain more like a chimpanzee's. Stranger still, Dart, who remember studied this sort of thing, he looked at the foramen magnum.

LEE BERGER: That's the hole in the base of your skull where your spine goes in.

ANDY: He knew that for creatures that walk on four legs, that hole ...

LEE BERGER: Is generally towards the back of the skull, so they can look forward.

ANDY: But here, the hole's on the bottom. Which suggested to him that this creature walked upright.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: It was not a monkey. It wasn't an ape as we know apes today. It was certainly not a modern human being.

ANDY: This was something in between.

LEE BERGER: If you were walking across a broken woodland, where little Taung Child might have lived, you would have seen a person off in the distance. As you approached though, you'd begin to see that something was wrong with the proportions. Arms were probably a little longer, legs a little bit shorter. The head was too small.

ANDY: And as you stepped closer, you'd see ...

LEE BERGER: The little Taung Child's body would have been covered in ...

ANDY: This thick hair.

LEE BERGER: Potentially even fur, more like an ape than we have. But it'd be like no ape you've ever seen, because it would be standing there in very much the way you would be standing staring at it: on two legs.

JAD: So if this is a little bit human and a little bit ape, sort of kind of in the middle it seems, did he feel like this was the quote, "missing link?"

LEE BERGER: [laughs] Well, we don't use that term because evolution doesn't happen that way.

JAD: Sure.

LEE BERGER: But certainly Dart did. He, in fact, wrote a book called Adventures With The Missing Link.

ANDY: And right after he discovered the skull ...

LEE BERGER: He sent a paper off in amazing speed to the journal, Nature. It was published in February of 1925.

ANDY: He thought that this was gonna revolutionize everything.

LEE BERGER: But he was wholeheartedly rejected by the great scientific community of Europe for two reasons.

ANDY: First ...

LEE BERGER: We already knew that humans didn't evolve in Africa.

CHRIS STRINGER: Yeah. Africa was backward.

ANDY: That was the belief, says Chris Stringer.

CHRIS STRINGER: I'm a research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.

ANDY: And he explained that back in the early 20th century ...

CHRIS STRINGER: People of the time felt that if you look in Europe, you can see all this wonderful cave art painted many thousands of years ago. They preferred to think that Europe or Asia were more likely centers of our origins than Africa was.

ANDY: Second, scientists already found a skull that they believed belonged to the quote-unquote "missing link."

CHRIS STRINGER: It was something called Piltdown Man.

ANDY: It was this ancient man fossil thing that they found in a golf course in England. So in their minds it was the right place. And also ...

CHRIS STRINGER: In Piltdown Man, you've got this very large brain, and a brain case that looks really quite like a modern human one.

ANDY: Which made sense to them. You know, clearly European ancestors would have had big brains because they're European.

CHRIS STRINGER: Yeah. I mean, the Taung individual had a small brain.

ANDY: Way too small.

LEE BERGER: This thing was too primitive. It didn't look right.

ANDY: So Dart ...

LEE BERGER: He spent the next 20 plus years ...

ANDY: Arguing, "Look, people. This is our ancestor." And getting nowhere.

LEE BERGER: Until ...

CHRIS STRINGER: In the late 1920s ...

ANDY: Other fossils started showing up.

CHRIS STRINGER: In China, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia.

ANDY: And these other fossils, they were from roughly the same era as the Piltdown Man, but their brains, their teeth, their bone structures, they were all totally different.

CHRIS STRINGER: So this was very weird. I mean, you know, how do you explain that?

ANDY: For decades ...

CHRIS STRINGER: Nothing else like Piltdown Man turns up from anywhere in the world.

ANDY: So some forensic experts at the London Museum of Natural History, they decide maybe we ought to go take a closer look at Piltdown Man.

CHRIS STRINGER: They started looking at the material under microscopes.

ANDY: And right off the bat ...

CHRIS STRINGER: They found that one of the teeth clearly showed the marks of a metal file, that it had been filed down to look flat.

ANDY: No!

LEE BERGER: Piltdown was a fraud. It was a fake.

CHRIS STRINGER: A forgery, a hoax.

ANDY: And the hoaxers were never caught.

CHRIS STRINGER: There were questions in the Houses of Parliament about the competence of the Natural History Museum, that its experts had been fooled for all this time.

ANDY: Because this wasn't even a very good fake.

CHRIS STRINGER: They had taken the jawbone of an orangutan, they took some modern human skull pieces. They then stained that material dark brown so it looked the same color.

ANDY: No!

CHRIS STRINGER: They even faked stone tools.

ANDY: And all of this time, right there in front of them was the Taung Child.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: It is estimated—and it's purely an estimate—of being around 2 million, 2.2 million years old.

ANDY: Which still today is the oldest not-quite-yet-human fossil that we have.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: This would be probably the greatest, or one of the greatest discoveries ever.

ANDY: Been argued to be the most important single fossil ever discovered in the history of humankind's search for ancestry because ...

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: It brought to the fore that humanity originated in Africa, that every human on earth is an African. We are all of African origin.

ANDY: But—but more than just where we came from, which I think is totally cool.

JAD: Uh-huh. Super interesting.

ANDY: Mm-hmm. We can look at the skull, and we can see things about what life was like for this, like, little version of us that lived so long ago. We can look at the teeth, we can see what it was eating.

ROBERT: Was it eating like what we eat?

ANDY: Yeah. Its teeth are, like, surprisingly similar to our teeth. So yeah.

ROBERT: Wow.

ANDY: It wasn't, like, hugely different from what we eat. But I think the most exciting thing that it can tell us is, you know, not just about what our life was like, but what was lurking in the shadows waiting to take us out.

ROBERT: You can tell that from the skull?

ANDY: Yeah. I mean, this skull is—it's kind of at the center of this murder mystery.

LEE BERGER: Ie. Who killed the Taung Child? At the time when Raymond Dart made that discovery ...

ANDY: He had this sort of gut feeling that this Taung Child was killed by one of its own, you know, because this is, like, 1924.

LEE BERGER: We were between two wars. World War I had occurred with the horrible destruction.

ANDY: Dart was actually a medic in that war, and he walked away convinced ...

LEE BERGER: That humans were—were inherently evil creatures.

ANDY: That were inherently violent, and that we were probably a lot worse in the past.

LEE BERGER: And in fact, the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey ...

ANDY: Where you see the monkeys kind of like beating each other with the bones.

LEE BERGER: It was based on Raymond Dart's theories of the violent origins on the continent of Africa.

ANDY: So that was Dart's, like, pet theory, that maybe Taung got clubbed down by his brother or his neighbor. But that ignores one big thing: in that limestone mine where the Taung skull was found, there were also all these other skulls, baboon skulls, monkey skulls. There was this little, like, collection of bones. More like what you would expect to find in a predator's den. So not a Taung-like creature, but maybe a cat, big cat.

LEE BERGER: At least a large mammalian predator then, because that's perfectly acceptable. If we're tough, they're tough, it's okay to be killed by something mean and vicious.

ANDY: So that became the new theory.

LEE BERGER: Because what else do humans have to fear, right?

ROBERT: Well, what—now here's where, I think, maybe you come into this story. For some reason, when you arrive many, many, many years later, this idea that the cat did it seems to disturb you.

LEE BERGER: Well, I was addicted to that story as anyone else. I'd been brought up on it through my anthropology classes. Every book I ever read said that.

ANDY: But, one day ...

LEE BERGER: In 1994 ...

ANDY: ... he bumps into a completely new idea.

LEE BERGER: In an almost eureka moment. Because there I was at Gladysvale.

ANDY: An excavation site in South Africa. Lee and his team were doing what they do, digging for fossils.

LEE BERGER: I just finished excavation. All my team had left, and I was sitting there watching the sunset. And I looked up on the hillside, and there was a troupe of vervet monkeys. They're a small gray monkey, and they were coming down to forage down the hill. And all of a sudden, I heard an alarm call. And I looked up in the sky and there came a huge eagle. The monkeys scattered as this eagle swooped around the edge of the hill, and as it came down around the edge of the hill, I realized it was a trap because coming around the other edge of the hill was that eagle's mate. And it zoomed in and whacked one of those large monkeys right in front of me. And everything went silent. The other eagle landed, this eagle's sitting on top of a now-dead monkey. And the eagle's staring at me. I'm staring at it, probably with my mouth open.

ANDY: [laughs]

LEE BERGER: It looks at me for a moment, and then it leaps off the edge of this cliff with this dead monkey, and flies away with it down the valley. And I had an idea.

LEE BERGER: So I got into my car, I chased the direction it went. I knew where it was going, I knew where these black eagle nests were, they were up on a cliff face. I crawled up under—crossing a river, crawled up under the nest, and there was this pile of bones, huge pile of bones. Hyraxes, little antelopes, a baboon skull, a baby baboon skull. And almost every one of the bones there had these amazing marks on them. Keyhole-shaped cuts.

ANDY: Where the eagles have driven their talons into the skulls.

LEE BERGER: These big eagles can have killing talons that are five, six, seven inches long, if you can imagine that. I got in my car, back to the lab in Jo'burg.

ANDY: He whips open the drawer that contains those skulls and bones that were found with the Taung Child skull, and ...

LEE BERGER: The exact same marks. Couldn't believe it.

ANDY: There's even, like, a little mark on the Taung Child's skull itself. A year later, 1995, he and a colleague, they publish a paper ...

LEE BERGER: That blamed eagles for the death of the Taung Child. And it was received like a smelly, wet blanket by the field.

ROBERT: [laughs] Why? Why would they not say, "Oh, of course!"

LEE BERGER: Because it was an entrenched idea.

ANDY: You know, Lee says maybe subconsciously, they felt like our ancestors are being demoted again.

LEE BERGER: That is that, you know, we were not the masters of our universe.

ANDY: Because cats just feel tougher than birds? I don't know, but according to Lee, the big cat scientists were like ...

LEE BERGER: You know, it's been published. It's been published the leopard did it.

ANDY: For 40 years.

LEE BERGER: We even got into a debate in the hallowed pages of the journal Nature on the load-lifting capacity of birds of prey, on whether or not birds of prey could lift something as large as the Taung Child.

ANDY: And these debates, they went on for years. He couldn't convince people.

LEE BERGER: We needed something more.

ANDY: Until one night ...

LEE BERGER: It was about nine o'clock at night.

ANDY: ... years later ...

LEE BERGER: I was at home sitting in my little study.

ANDY: ... he was reading an academic paper about eagles, and how eagles sometimes when they kill little mammals, they'll reach into their eye sockets and pluck out their eyes.

LEE BERGER: To get at the nice juicy brain on the inside.

ANDY: And in the paper ...

LEE BERGER: There was this really beautiful image. Well, it's beautiful to people who study dead things, but a beautiful image of a skull of a primate with the interior sockets of his eyes with these jagged marks in it.

ANDY: These very particular scratch marks on the underside of the eye sockets.

LEE BERGER: And I was staring at these images and I went, "Oh my goodness!" Or something to that effect.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LEE BERGER: I got into my car, drove down to the lab, opened up the safe, pulled out the Taung Child, turned the face over and there they were. On the base of the inside of the eye socket were these jagged, rigid marks that you had to have done by reaching into the orbit. The exact same marks.

BERNHARD ZIPFEL: You can see little squiggle marks, almost like little exclamation marks, little commas. No one had noticed that before.

LEE BERGER: And imagine, I'm sitting in the middle of this anatomy department in the middle of the night, in a vault containing million-year-old fossils. It was a magic moment, it was fantastic.

JAD: All right. So now you know a little bit about how this creature lived and how it died. I mean, beyond solving the murder mystery, what does that tell you?

LEE BERGER: Well first to say solving the murder mystery is kind of cool. That's always a neat thing.

JAD: Totally.

LEE BERGER: And there's nothing wrong with just doing that. But have you ever thought why when you're standing out on a playground or standing out in an open field and a shadow passes over you, do you know that feeling that occurred, whether it be from an airplane or whatever? First, you get that tingly feel on the back of your neck, and then you yank your head up. You ever wondered why you do that?

JAD: Yeah.

LEE BERGER: You do that because the little Taung Child died two and a half million years ago because he didn't look up quick enough when that happened.

JAD: Producer Andy Mills. One thing we should say, one very important thing we should say is that actually we did an experiment with this story.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: We hooked up with some people at MakerBot, and some very nice folks at the Field Museum.

ROBERT: In Chicago.

JAD: And we had 3D scans made of the Taung Child's skull. I'm actually holding one right now.

ROBERT: Me too, yeah. Mine's purple.

JAD: Mine's pink.

ROBERT: [laughs] Why is yours pink?

JAD: I don't know. That was the color of the plastic they used.

ROBERT: Oh, okay.

JAD: But these are amazing replicas of the Taung Child's skull. I mean, you can see all the ridges, you can feel the scratches in the eyes.

ROBERT: Imagine if you could listen to the story you just heard while holding the Taung Child in your hand.

JAD: Well, that's exactly the reason we did this.

ROBERT: Ah.

JAD: We have partnered with a museum called Mmuseumm. That's spelled with four Ms, two in the front, two in the back, Mmuseumm. It's this tiny little elevator shaft-sized place here in Manhattan where they display all these sort of like oddities. You know, like little objects from Saddam Hussein's palace.

ANDY: They have pool toys that were banned from Saudi Arabia.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And they will also be displaying our 3D replica of the Taung skull. So if you go there you can actually hold the skull. You dial in a little number and you can hear part of the piece.

ROBERT: While you're standing there.

JAD: Yeah. And I gotta tell you, it's a very different experience to listen to the story while holding this thing. Not only that, if you have a 3D printer of your own and you go to Radiolab.org, you can download a scan, a 3D scan of the Taung skull, and you can print your own. Thanks again to MakerBot and to shootdigital for helping to make that happen. Props to Lynn Levy for conceiving of the whole idea. Go to our website, Radiolab.org. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Lisabet calling from Fort Worth, Texas. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

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