nineteen centimeters

The magical aspect of all of this tonight: the ability to travel to a World Heritage Site in Africa without having to go any farther than the Tybee Post Theater.

The place really should have been packed.

I was there with the bfe for a film about a paleoanthropology site where an incredible depository of animal bones had been discovered.

I had no idea that it was a local fellow, Lee Berger of Sylvania, who has been in charge of that dig ever since its start in October of 2013.

That's him in the photo.

He looks like a modern-day Indiana Jones, doesn't he?

No doubt in my mind that he drew inspiration for his life's work from that first movie.

He would have been 15 years old that summer of 1981.

Now, he's a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, two years from being 60 years old.

What a life of adventure!

That was especially clear in "Unknown: Cave Of Bones", which documents some of the exploration - and hypotheses - of him and his team in the Rising Star Cave.

They have recovered more than 1500 - yes, that's right, more than one thousand five hundred - bones, all going back more than 250,000 years ago.

Incredible.

Moreover, the bones are of a previously unknown species, Homo naledi.

I had brought the issue of Smithsonian magazine that I've been reading of late.

It has an article titled "Invisible Evidence", in which the chemistry analytical tool mass spectrometry has been used to identify protein fragments on the surface of items as diverse as ancient manuscripts (including a letter penned by the real Vlad "the Impaler" Dracula) and paintings to those of stones and animal remains.

The date on that issue is November/December 2022.

Right place, right time.

I made sure to bring the article with me, to show Dr. Berger.

Not so surprisingly, he did know of the work by Pier Giorgio Righetti, along with Gleb and Svetlana Zilberstein.. which, coincidentally, began a decade ago, the same year when Berger's team first started exploring and excavating the cave.

Timing.

(smile!) 

About two feet shorter (just over four feet in height) than the average modern human, these fauna curiously used this cave as a cemetery, though its unknown what members of the group qualified for inclusion there.

More is to be forthcoming by year's end, so I will look forward to that.

We here at Tybee were the first to see this film on the silver screen.

Amazing, right?

Here's something else that was amazing.

To reach the burial chamber, deep within the cave, required very tight maneuvering through a 12-meter vertical chimney with a width of only 19 centimeters.

Let's put that into English units of measure, rather than scientific ones.

The chimney is the height of more than six men, stacked head to foot atop each other, much like acrobats in a complex formation.

That's quite a climb down to access the chamber, plus a grueling clamber back up.

But that isn't the worst of it.

It's that extremely narrow window between the two sides of the latticework dolomite walls.

It's only about 7.5 inches.

To picture that, take a piece of standard letter-sized paper from the printer, then cut off an inch along its length.

Now, hold that paper to your side and look in a mirror.

Would your body be able to squeeze through such a narrow space?

Would you be able to do that for 39 feet, going straight down?

Would you then be able to go back up those 39 feet, walls pressing on you the whole way?

Lee Berger did.

He had to see for himself... 

to breathe that air himself... 

to touch those surfaces himself...

just once. 

Just once almost ended in tragedy when he got stuck between those fragile lattices.

If they had collapsed, he could have lost not only his own life, but those of his team.

Amazing... but I understand the obsession with experiencing it for himself.

That's what the trip to Iowa had been for me.

Mind, that narrow, long passage would not have been the case when this cave was used for the burials.

The collapse of a large block of dolomite - now known by the cavers as 'the Dragon's back' - caused this limited access path at some distant time in the past.

Dr. Berger intimated that other caves used for burial by this species have been found, so perhaps they shed a light on normal rituals that may have been used.

Yes, I'll have to keep my ears open for "the rest of the story," as Paul Harvey would say.

(smile!)