Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC and NPR. Hey, I'm Jad Abumran. I'm Robert Quill, this is Radio Lab, and today we're talking about things. I don't think there'll ever be another specimen that'll be exactly like this one.
Actually, our next podcast is a full hour about stories that grow out of particular things, projects, but today we have a preview. Yes, sort of. So that's the place, right? This is the place.
It's a story about a thing that lives inside a steel vault, inside this huge laboratory at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. We asked a professor there, Dr. Bernard Zepfel, to pull it out and show it to our reporter, Patricia Hume. And this is the original specimen.
This is it. We have it right in front of us here. I handle this a lot, but I get goose fish every time I take this out. The reason it gives him goose flesh, goose bumps, is because this object seems to completely upend two basic questions about human history.
Amazing. Where did we begin? And when we began, who was trying to take us out? Producer Andy Mills takes the story from here.
Right, with Thunder and Vigor and Gusto. Yes, I'd like to with Gusto, please. All right. It's one of those discoveries that almost didn't happen.
And here to help me tell you the story. Okay, I'm Professor Lee Berger is Lee. I am a research professor at the University of the Vaters, Ron and Johannesburg, and an explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society. An explorer in residence.
That's a weird title. It seems like you should be one or the other. It's almost an oxymoron, isn't it? Yeah.
Lee says that our story begins back in the 1920s in South Africa at a place called Tong. Tong. It's T-A-N-U-G. Tong is the proper one in Swana.
The Western way of saying is Tong. It's a desert area on the southern edge of the Calaharias scarptment. Kind of like your stereotypical picture of Africa. Rocks, Beobab trees, Romingasels.
And back in the 1920s, the place was crawling with Europeans, digging mines. You say we're blasting away with dynamite, drilling with big steam drills, and huge explosions would take place. 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 realize that they've opened up this cave.
An ancient cave. And inside of that cave, they found dozens of these strange looking rocks, almost like animal bones. One of the miners, he takes those bones, gives them to a geologist, geologist, box them up, and sent them to this Australian guy who was living in Johannesburg named Raymond Dart. 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. This was a guy who knew his fossils. And when this box arrived, he was actually wearing a three-piece suit. He's going to be best man at a wedding, in fact, later that afternoon.
But he's like, that can wait. So he reached into the box, shuffled through some antelope skulls. It was full of baboon skulls. Monkey skulls.
Until he got to this one rock. Now, to you and me, this would have just looked like a big chunk of limestone. But Raymond Dart immediately realized that he had something special. And he started, he actually went into his wife's knitting needles and started scratching away at this rock, much to his wife's disgust.
He'd then spent the next several months delicately chipping away at the limestone until the rock literally popped free. And there he stared into a perfect little face. You can see here, the face is quite flat and in human life. A lot like the face of a child.
A human child. But humans have a larger brain. According to Dr. Zephel, this child's brain was smaller than a human child.
It was closer to the size of a chimpanzee. So it had features of a human. It had a brain more like a chimpanzee. Strangers still.
Dart, who remember, studied this sort of thing. He looked at the foramen magnum. That's the hole in the base of your skull, where your spine goes in. He knew that for creatures that walk on four legs.
That hole is generally towards the back of the skull. So they can look forward. But here, the hole is on the bottom, which suggests to him that this creature walked upright. It was not a monkey.
It wasn't an ape as we know apes today. It was certainly not a modern human being. This was something in between. If you were walking across a broken woodland where little tongue jowl 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. And as you stepped closer, you'd see the little tongue child's body would have been covered in this thick hair, potentially even firm, 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. 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? We don't use that term because evolution doesn't happen that way. But certainly, Dark did.
He in fact wrote a book called Adventures with the Missing Link. And right after he discovered the skull, he sent a paper off an amazing speed to the journal nature. It was published in February of 1925. He thought that this was going to revolutionize everything.
But he was wholeheartedly rejected by the great scientific community of Europe. For two reasons. First, we already knew that humans didn't evolve in Africa. Yeah, Africa was backward.
That was the belief, says Kristringer. I'm a researcher in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. And he explained that back in the early 20th century, 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.
Second, scientists already found a skull that they believed belonged to the quote unquote missing link. It was something called Pilter Man. 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, in Pilter Man, you've got this very large brain and a brain case that looks really quite like a modern human one. Which made sense to them. You know, clearly European ancestors would have had big brains, but because they're European. Yeah.
I mean, the tongue individual had a small brain. Way too small. This thing was too primitive. It didn't look right.
So Dart, he spent the next 20 plus years arguing, look people, this is our ancestor and getting nowhere. Until in the late 1920s, other fossils started showing up in China, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, and these other fossils. They were from roughly the same era as the Pilter Man, but their brains, their teeth, their bone structures, they were all totally different. So this was very weird.
I mean, how do you explain that? For decades, nothing else like Pilter Man turns out from anywhere in the world. So some forensic experts at the London Museum of Natural History, they decide, maybe we ought to go take a closer look at Pilter Man. They started looking at material under microscopes.
And right off the bat, they found that one of the teeth clearly showed the marks of a metal file. That it had been filed down to look flat. No. Pilter was a fraud.
It was a fake. A forgery hoax. And the hoaxsters were never caught. There were questions in the houses of Parliament about the competence of the natural history museum that its experts had been formed for all this time.
Because this wasn't even a very good fake. They had taken the jawbone of an orangutan. They took some modern human skull pieces and they then stained that material, dark brown, so it looked the same colour. They even faked stone tools.
And all this time, right there in front of them, was the tongue child. It is estimated, and it's purely an estimate, of being around 2 million, 2.2 million years old. Which still today is the oldest, not quite yet human fossil that we have. This would be probably the greatest or one of the greatest discoveries ever.
Been argued to be the most important, single fossil ever discovered in the history of human kinds or trans history because it brought to the fore humanity originated in Africa. That every human on earth is an African. We are all of African origin. But more than just where we came from, which I think is totally cool.
Yeah. Super interesting. We can look at the skull and we can see things about what life was like for this little version of us that lived so long ago. We look at the teeth and see what it was eating.
Was it eating like where we eat? Yeah, its teeth are surprisingly similar to our teeth. So yeah, it wasn't hugely different from what we eat. But I think the most exciting thing that it can tell us is not just about what our life was like, but what was lurking in the shadows waiting to take us out.
You can tell that from this story. Yeah, I mean this skull is kind of at the center of this murder mystery. I.e. who killed the tongue child.
At the time when Raymond Dart made that discovery. He had this sort of gut feeling that this tongue child was killed by one of its own. You know, because this is like 1924. We were between two wars, war war war.
One had occurred with the horrible destruction. Dart was actually a medic in that war and he walked away convinced that humans were inherently evil creatures that were inherently violent and that we were probably a lot worse in the past. And in fact, the opening of 2001 is space honestly. Where you see the monkeys kind of like beating each other with the bones.
It was based on Raymond Dart's theories of the violent origins from the continent of Africa. So that was Dart's pet theory that maybe Tong got clubbed down by his brother or his neighbor. But that ignores one big thing. In that limestone mine where the Tong skull was found, there were also all these other skulls.
By the Boon skulls, monkey skulls, there was this like little collection of bones. More like what you would expect to find in a predator's den. So not a Tong like creature, but maybe a cat. Big cat.
At least a large mammalian predator, because that's perfectly acceptable. If we're tough, they're tough, it's okay to be killed by something mean and vicious. So that became the new theory, because what else do humans have to fear, right? Well what?
Now here's where I think maybe you come into the story. For some reason when you arrive many, many, many years later, this idea that the cat did it seems to disturb you. 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. But one day, in 1994, he bumps into a completely new idea. In an almost eureka moment. Because there I was at Gladysville.
In Excavation site in South Africa, Lee and his team were doing what they do. Digging for fossils. I'd just finished Excavation all my team had left, and I was saying they're watching the sunset. And I looked up on the hillside, and there was a troop of vervet monkeys, or 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 sitting on top of a now dead monkey, and the eagle staring at me. I'm staring at it probably with my mouth open.
It looks at me for a moment, and then it leaps off the edge of this cliff with his dead monkey, and flies away with it down the valley. And I had an idea. 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 the river, crawled up under the nest, and there was this pile of bones.
Huge pile of bones, high racks, 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 where the eagles have driven their talons into the skulls. These big eagles can have killing talons at five, six, seven inches long if you can imagine that. I got in my car back to the lab in Jobur.
He whips open the drawer that contains those skulls and bones that were found with the tongue child skull, and the exact same marks, I couldn't believe it. There's even like a little mark on the tongue child skull itself. A year later, 1995, he and a colleague published a paper that blamed eagles for the death of the tongue child, and it was received like a smelly blanket by the field. Why?
Why would they not say, oh, of course. Because it was entrenched idea. You know, Lisa says maybe subconsciously they felt like our ancestors were being demoted again. That is that, you know, we were not the masters of our universe because cats just feel tougher than birds, I don't know, but according to Lee, the big cat scientists were like, you know, it's been published, it's been published, delivered, did it?
For 40 years. We even got into a debate in the hallowed pages of the journal Nature, when the load lifting capacity of birds of prey, on whether or not birds of prey could lift something as large as the tongue child. And these debates, they went on for years. He couldn't convince people.
We needed something more. Until one night. It was about nine o'clock at night. Years later.
I was at home seeing in my little study. 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. To get at the nice juicy brain on the inside. And in the paper, it 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 its eyes, with these jagged marks in it. These very particular scratch marks on the underside of the eye sockets. And I was staring at these images and I went, oh my goodness, or something to that effect. I got into my car, drove down to the lab, opened up the safe, pulled out the tongue child, turned the face over, and there they were.
On the base of the inside of the eye socket were the jagged, rigid marks that you had to have done by reaching into the orbit. The exact same marks. You can see little squiggle marks, almost like little exclamation marks and little commas. No one had noticed that before.
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 fossil. It was a magic moment. It was fantastic. 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? Well, first to say, solving the murder mystery is kind of cool. And that's always a new thing. And there's nothing wrong with just doing that.
But I never 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?
Yeah. You do that because a little tongue child died two and a half million years ago, because he didn't look up quick enough when that happened. Producer Annie Meals. One thing we should say, one very important thing we should say is actually we didn't experiment with the story.
We hooked up with some people at MakerBot and some very nice folks at the Field Museum in Chicago. And we had 3D scans made of the tongue child skull. I'm actually holding one right now. Let me do it.
Mine's purple. Mine's pink. Mine's pink. Mine's pink.
I don't know, that was the color of the plastic I used. These are amazing replicas of the tongue child skull. You can see all the ridges, you can feel the scratches and the eyes. Imagine if you could listen to the story you just heard while holding the tongue child in your hand.
Well, that's exactly the reason we did this. We have partnered with a museum called Museum that's spelled with four M's, two in the front, two in the back, Museum. It's this tiny little elevator shaft size place here in Manhattan where they display all these oddities, little objects from Saddam Hussein's palace. They have pool toys that were banned from Saudi Arabia.
Right. And they will also be displaying our 3D replica of the tongue 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. While you're standing there.
Yeah, and I can 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 3 scan of the tongue skull, and you can print your own. Thanks again to MakerBot and to shoot digital for helping to make that happen. Props to Lin-Levi for conceiving of the whole idea.
Go to our website, RadioLab.org. I'm Jad Abumran. I'm Robert Provich. Thanks for listening.
Hi, this is Lisa Beck calling from Fort Worth, Texas. RadioLab is supported and part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alpha Peace Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.slone.org.