World Heritage in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind

It's really a great pleasure to introduce our speaker, Dr. George Leder. Dr. Leder is a clinical specialist in anthropology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the College of New Jersey, and an archaeologist who has been working in Southern Africa for 15 years. His wide range of interests include hominid behavior and cognitive abilities, as found in the stone tool record of South Africa. In addition to his research in the cradle of humankind, Dr. Leder has excavated at many important sites, which fall under various levels of local, provincial, national and international protections. His area of interest is in the technological changes through long sequences of time, which give insight as to how social traditions and cognitive abilities of hominins develop through time and space. His current research project takes place in another UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Namib Desert in Namibia. There he directs an international team of scientists as they seek to understand why and how early hominins occupied hyperarid landscapes. Dr. Leder also directs historic archaeology projects in the Mid-Atlantic, so very close to home. One such project is the William Green Plantation in New Jersey. He and his students discovered the first documented evidence of enslavement at the site, and are pairing the historical record with excavated artifacts to bring attention to the lives of indentured and enslaved persons in northern states. As you probably know, that's a big thing now in U.S. historic houses and plantations, exposing the realities of life for enslaved persons. When not in the field, Dr. Leder teaches archaeology at the College of New Jersey, and is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology here at Penn. My secret agenda. He is a fellow at the Explorers Club in New York, and an honorary researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His research has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, and the Discovery Channel. I know we're all looking forward to hearing from him about world heritage in South Africa's cradle of humankind, so please join me now in welcoming Dr. George Leder. Thank you, Steve. All right. This way. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that. You know, I'm quite honored to be here tonight. Thank you for all of you who came out this evening. And, you know, it's such a beautiful auditorium. I will do my best to capture your attention to the PowerPoint as opposed to the ceiling this evening. And for those of you at home, thank you for tuning in. There's only about 200 or so individuals here tonight in person, but we're looking forward to the rest of you coming out ultimately soon. So thank you very much. As an archaeologist who's been working in Southern Africa for, as Steve was saying it, I was thinking that, geez, it's almost been about 20 years now. I have been keenly aware of the many levels of protection that exist through the rural and provincial sites of archaeological interest all the way up to the well-known sites such as the Cradle of Humankind. And each one has its own levels of permitting and methodology and the layers of bureaucracies that must be peeled back to work there. Those are all put in place in order to essentially protect the site, both archaeologically, paleoanthropologically, and, of course, environmentally. And what I'm going to do tonight is highlight some case studies from the Cradle of Humankind that really illustrate the difficulties and the challenges of pairing many research teams, international research teams from around the world, and their agendas with protecting the sites. And additionally, we have the many considerations of individuals, local individuals, the local economy, local development to consider. So all of these things combine for a very challenging perspective. So let me see if that will go forward. It will not. Hmm. I'm going to get my IT professionals up here to try to advance this slide. Now I've pressed forward five or six times and all of a sudden it's going to jump five or six slides forward. That's okay. Perfect. Now what did you hit there? Oh, you had... Ah, okay, okay. It's activated now. Perfect. So here we are. Now, anybody in the audience, has anybody here been to the Cradle of Humankind? I usually get a few hands. I do see a few hands there. So sometimes a lot of tourists go to South Africa and they fly into Johannesburg and they go right up to Kruger National Park. And then they go down to Cape Town and Stellenbosch and drink wine and sit on the coast and that's wonderful. But you're missing a glorious piece of South African and world history if you miss the Cradle of Humankind. The Cradle of Humankind is about a 45-minute drive north of Johannesburg and close to Pretoria as well. About a 35, 40-minute drive from Pretoria. So it's right in the midst of an urban center of upwards of 20 million people living in that region. It is a protected area of about 116,000 acres. Now, I put that in acres for the rest of us who use acres as opposed to hectares. But this area is really an area that is worth preserving for really absolutely environmental reasons. But for the paleontological, the paleoanthropological, and the archaeological remains that are found all over the site. Now, it is a really protected, untouched rural area that is a conglomerate of farms and fields and hills. And importantly, it sits on a karst cave system. A dolomitic limestone cave system runs through the entire area. And because of the millions of years of hollowing out these caves, you get these large caverns underground in many areas of the Cradle of Humankind. And I'm just going to go back here and show you that these are just a handful of the more well-known sites in the Cradle of Humankind. Sturkfontein Caves, Swatcrones, Dreamoling, Plover's Wake, Cromdry, Coopers, Bolts Farms. These might not be familiar terms to you, but I can tell you that each one of these has produced scientific evidence for the deep time of human ancestors that has helped to build our understanding of human evolution over the past 150 years that scientists have been looking for those types of fossils. So, they are quite important in the grand scheme of the history of human evolutionary studies. And all of the caves are very different in their nature. Sometimes, such as Sturkfontein Cave, which I'll talk to you about right now, it's a massive cave system and literally many tourists, hundreds of tourists, every single day go on tours down through the cave systems, crawling around, pointing out, looking at the different features and the many beautiful chambers there. Some of them, that's a picture of Malapa, are just literally a tiny hole in the ground that you might mistake for somebody having dug something out 100 years ago. And that's actually exactly what happened at Malapa. But Malapa produced one of the most famous fossil finds ever discovered. I'm going to start with a sort of presentation of the ongoing research in the cradle of humankind. Because I want to build it up to demonstrate just how important this World Heritage Site is. The reason it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So, the first place we'll start is Sturkfontein Caves. Now, Sturkfontein Caves is really the flagship of the cradle of humankind. It has been investigated since the late 1800s. In the late 1800s, miners in Johannesburg were busy mining gold. The city of gold, built on gold. And as they expanded away from the known gold fields, they expanded up into the cradle of humankind, looking for more gold. They went down into these caves to look for the geologic deposits that might indicate there's gold there. And they didn't find any. But what they did find was calcium carbonate, or lime. So, those beautiful stalactites and stalagmites, all made of calcium carbonate. So, what the miners did in the late 1800s was they started taking boxes of dynamite. And they would pack dynamite into a particular chamber of the cave. They would ignite it, a big explosion. And then they would go back into that chamber and start shoveling out the rubble of calcium carbonate. And in doing that, not only did they, one, destroy any potential for life in that cave in any way. They saw, bringing that lime out, that there were also fossils coming out of that debris. So, they called up professors at the University of the Witswatersrand. And those professors came out and looked at these fossils. And thus started the important excavations at Sterkfontein. Now, fast forward 100 years into the future. And Sterkfontein has become not only a central focal point of human evolution research in Africa. But also a focal point for dignitaries and politicians and celebrities and school kids to visit and learn about human evolution every single day. When I was doing my graduate work in South Africa, I was actually a tour guide there on the weekends. To make a little bit of extra pocket cash. Not much, as my parents would tell you. Not enough. But, it was some. And I loved it. And I would have hundreds of school kids on any given day, any given weekend. Essentially, the cave system in there is now dead. And that is because the carbon dioxide that's emitted from our bodies at all times. When you bring that many hundreds of people on a daily basis into these cave sites. When you put artificial light in there with the heat of our bodies and the artificial light. Nothing wants to be down there anymore. That is from an environmental standpoint. Now, from an archaeological standpoint, of course, there are still more chambers to be discovered. It is the longest ongoing archaeological excavation in the world. And that comes with an asterisk. Of course, there are archaeology sites that have been investigated for 150, 200 years. This one is ongoing. So, most archaeologists will go for a field season somewhere. Excavate for a month or two. And then return to their respective institutions. Teach a little bit. Sit under a stack of grating that's this big. Try to get through it painfully. And then they return to the field the next summer and continue their excavations. Sterkfontein has a team of technicians that work there year-round. That are paid staff to continue archaeology year-round. So, that just shows you how much is there to be learned. They have found over 400 individual hominids. Not individual pieces of hominids. Individual hominids. Many of those skeletons, sure, are only small fragments of one particular hominid. But, 400 individuals and hundreds of stone tools. And as Dr. Tinney said, I'm very interested in stone tools. But, as you can see from this picture of a stone tool here. It's far less interesting than the fossil deposits for many people. So, Sterkfontein, however, takes... So, the first major find from Sterkfontein Caves is this individual here. This is Mrs. Plez. That is her nickname because she was originally classified as Plezanthropus Transvaalensis by Robert Broom. Mrs. Plez changed the game. If any of you are familiar with the early days of human evolution, you'll know that in the early 1900s, a man by the name of Raymond Dart announced that he had found the missing link. He had found an Australopithecus africanus, is what he called it. And it was the Taung child from Central South Africa. And he held it up and said, I have found an ancestor to modern man here in Southern Africa. And what did everybody do? They looked away. They wanted to have nothing to do with it. They didn't believe it for many different reasons, including systemic racism. Nobody wanted to believe that a human ancestor could come out of Southern Africa. All of a sudden, about 20 years later, Mrs. Plez is discovered. And Mrs. Plez is the first adult Australopithecus africanus. And now, all of a sudden, everybody is saying, oh, a second one that has more features on it? Let's take another look at Southern Africa as a possibility for holding clues about human origins. More recently, in 1994, Professor Ron Clark of the University of the Vitzwatersrand discovered a box of baboon fossils in a lab from old miner's rubble from those early days of mining and saw that two small foot bones in there were not part of a baboon. He said these are hominins. And he sent two technicians in Kwanimelefi and Steven Matsuomi down into the caves in the dark with flashlights to see, I kid you not, if they could find a place on the cave wall where these pieces had snapped off of the cave wall during the explosion from the dynamite. Two days later, they came back up and said, we have fit those pieces back onto fossils in the wall. They weren't down there for two straight days, of course. But two days later, they found that point, and that led to the discovery of STW573 Littlefoot, the most complete Australopithecus prometheus ever discovered. It is a complete, full skeleton, leading to our understanding of how humans evolved at that time, our human ancestors. What I want to highlight here is that cave systems take years of detailed study to understand. The processes that form caves are really complex, and they're slow-moving over millions of years. So fossil deposits don't just sit stationary in the cave system. They can get washed into different places by streams coming down into the caves. You can have cave systems' chambers collapsing at different places. You have all this tectonic movement that's going on under the ground that shifts things around over millions of years. They take many, many decades to understand. Hence, research can be very slow, and quite frankly, some of the academic papers, as you know, are very painfully slow to read through. So we all know the plight of research papers. I want to highlight a couple other sites outside of Sterkfontein that are just equally as important, but a little less well-known. The site of Dremelin is a site just north of Sterkfontein that has recently been found to be the oldest occurrence of Homo erectus. So when I say Australopithecus, maybe you're thinking, maybe I heard that as an undergrad at some point. You know, these two-and-a-half-million-year-old hominids. You might know Homo erectus. Everybody knows Homo erectus. So about two million years ago, the emergence of our genus Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo ergaster. This happens. They announced it as Homo erectus two million years ago and associated stone tools at Dremelin. This is a much less impressive site than Sterkfontein. So keep that in mind as we go on to levels of protection. Visually, people are much more excited about seeing the deep chambers and going into the deep chambers of a cave system rather than a surface exposure of what used to be deposits in a now-collapsed cave. It's just not as beautiful as the caves in Sterkfontein, but equally as important for the fossil record. Now we're going to move just across the street, literally 300 yards away or so from Sterkfontein, is a cave called Swacrans. And Swacrans, like Sterkfontein, has been investigated for almost 100 years as well. Here we have some of the earliest evidence for the controlled use of fire. Now, notice I use the word control. I haven't yet said making fire. All I've said is controlling fire, maybe upwards of a million to a million-and-a-half years ago. But that could mean that hominids, perhaps Paranthropus robustus, one of our hominid ancestors, or maybe not our hominid ancestor, depending on what you are taught, but maybe they're going to collect fire from natural sources, such as wildfires, bushfires, that type of thing, and bringing back the safe end of a burning branch to that cave system. And we know this because we can find localized deposits of ash and bone in certain layers that have been exposed to a certain level of heat. Now, fire can't happen deep in a cave without our assistance. The only known way that a fire can naturally happen deep in a cave is spontaneous combustion that can be associated with bat guano and big piles of bat guano and the methane gases and that type of thing. But if we find those ash deposits deep in a cave, we know that they have to have been brought there. So that's the oldest occurrence. So I hope what I'm painting is a picture of the importance of humankind as far as our understanding of all of human evolution. Maybe some of you are more familiar with the most recent discoveries from Rising Star Cave. Rising Star Cave was discovered by a man named Professor Lee Berger at University of the Vitzwater Springs. Now, Lee Berger in 2013 discovered Homo naledi. He found a huge amount, over 1,000 individual pieces of hominid fossils in a deep chamber. And I'm just going to show you this picture here. So deep in a cave system that you have to go through two different crawls that are about 18 centimeters wide. And he put out an international call on social media for researchers of a small stature to come join him at this cave system. And over the course of a month in 2013, they went down and they excavated over 1,000 hominid remains from Homo naledi. Now, here's where it gets tricky. They could not figure out immediately how those fossils got into the cave. They didn't know. Their first thought was maybe there was an opening somewhere that has now closed. As you know, cave openings, entrances can open and close over hundreds of thousands of years. They couldn't find one. They ended up with a theory that Homo naledi was deliberately disposing of their dead deep in that cave. Now, when the dates on those fossils came back, they came back at about 230,000 years ago. That means that while Homo naledi was around, modern humans were also around. Were they living in the same areas? Were they occupying different ecological niches? What was going on there 230,000 years ago? Now, I won't get into my personal thoughts on the deliberate disposal of Homo naledi's remains deep in a cave. I'm not entirely sure I agree with that interpretation. But, again, it is pushing our understanding of what our human ancestors were capable of. And I want to end with this. In addition, more recently, just this past December, Professor Berger announced that he thinks he has found why and how Homo naledi was occupying the deep caves. Because keep in mind, caves a million years ago or 200,000 years ago, those weren't places we want to go. Most of you probably don't want to go into a cave today, okay? What we have are caves are where predators live, long-legged hunting hyenas, wolf-like dogs, saber-toothed cats, all the things that ate us den in caves. So, without good weapons, without perhaps defensive spears, without fire to see, you don't want to go past the dark zone of a cave. He, in December, announces that he has found a certain number of hearths deep in the cave. And as you can see here, in the rising star system, he's got some ash deposits, some positioned rocks that maybe are round hearths. And he thinks that naledi was capable of controlling fire deep in the cave. Now, I have not yet seen the peer-reviewed paper on this. It has not come out yet. But we are all waiting very, very excitedly to see how he has managed to link this fire deposit to 230,000 years ago. And we wait eagerly to see those results. Now, the reason I went through all these sites is to demonstrate just how important this site is. The cradle of humankind. Human origins and our knowledge of human origins for so long has focused on South Africa and East Africa, as well as, of course, Neanderthals in many sites in Europe as well. But a recognition of this has, you know, over a hundred years, researchers have recognized the importance of the cradle of humankind. And the South African government recognized this in 1999. They began to place protections around the 100,000 acre site, designated it as a World Heritage Site in 1999. At the same time, in the same place, they signed it into the World Heritage Convention Act, which essentially adopts World Heritage UNESCO policies as South African law to protect the site. And then, of course, in addition to that, they have their National Heritage Laws as well, also enacted in 1999. And many of these focus on the heritage of those sites. Adding the Environmental Conservation Acts then helps preserve the environmental concerns for the site as well. Before I get to the issues with that, I just want to say that, keep in mind, 1999 is a time in South Africa when they have just been through some serious trauma. This is only, you know, five years out of the election of Nelson Mandela. They have just come out of apartheid government. And there are a lot of other kind of pressing issues in South Africa, both then and now. Making this type of protection seem to take a second tier to the many human rights concerns. And rightfully so, that are part of South Africans, you know, really their story now and their needs now. The problem that I will highlight here are the fact that it's very difficult to enforce this compliance. It's very difficult to actually have the private landowners on their farms that make up this huge area follow any of these guidelines. And that's essentially what they are. It's almost they become guidelines as opposed to law when you can't enforce them. And also there's a lack of understanding about the clarity of the law. So let's take a look at a few of the threats to the cradle of humankind. As I said in the beginning of the lecture, gold is what Johannesburg was built on. The gold mining, there's also uranium in the area. And that is a direct threat to the cradle. Now, why is that a threat? Well, in addition to the fact that mining permits in the cradle are still applied for on an annual basis and often very rightfully rejected, there are mining operations that go right up to the protective border of the cradle of humankind. Now, why is that an issue? Well, the water table. The water table is all connected in that area. If you go down into the caves and you see the cave lakes down there, they're beautiful. They're pristine. They're clear. You can see the tiny shrimp, the colorless, clear shrimp walking around in them that have never seen the light of day in their entire evolutionary history. But in mining operations, mines will drain the water table because they have to go deep, deep into the ground below it. And when you have operators down there, you need to keep the water table lower as you go. So you pump the water out. But also, much of the mining operations use water in processing what they're taking out of the ground. You need to wash sediments down. You need to keep drill bits cool by spraying water on them. So they're both using and draining the water. That then allows for the pollution of the water. You get the acid water drainage coming out of the mine. And when you have a system that is entirely connected, that goes from cave to cave to cave as that water table goes up and down throughout the entire region. So mining presents a major threat. The protection of the World Heritage Site, the Cradle of Humankind there in purple, there is a buffer zone that was adopted in 2007. This is taken in 2008. In 2007, the buffer zone was adopted that no mining could take place closer than that. And they thought that that would protect the water systems in the cradle from this acid drainage and the effects of mining. It was very quickly modified, very quickly. There immediately became areas that they removed that buffer zone and allowed mining to take place in certain pockets. And thus coming closer and closer to that protected zone. So I guess the question that we'll look at towards the end is, okay, well, where does that buffer zone stop? When do we ultimately say enough is enough? It's like when my students ask me if I can round their grade. At some point, you have to have a stopping point where I know you're so close to that A-, but it's a B+. I'm sorry, right? When is, where is that point? The other threats, which I must admit, when I'm working out there, I enjoy the benefits of. It's nice to have a small brick fire oven pizza place pop up at a farm near Sterkfontein Caves. After a long day spent down in the dark digging in the cave, there's nothing better than going five minutes down the road and grabbing a beer and a pizza. There is also, on the other side of Sterkfontein, a Greensleeves, a medieval restaurant where you can be served beer in a big old cask while watching jousters ride horses back and forth. Let's not pretend that this rural area is pristine. It is not. It is a developable area, and here's the kicker. It is very close to Joburg and Pretoria, meaning it is a development, a developer's dream, right? It is 20 million people living there, a rising middle class that wants leisure places, wants these activities. So what I'm going to do is highlight an example here. Now, if you saw this online, you saw this picture. You saw this picture of this grass-covered building up here. That is a place called Merropang. Merropang was built about 13, 14 years ago now, maybe 2009, somewhere in there. And it was built for a welcome center, museum, conference venue, and hotel. And it was built with the intention of limiting the amount of tourists that go down through the caves at Sterkfontein Caves. And the idea was if we reduced the number of tourists that came to the caves, the caves would actually heal themselves a little bit environmentally in those natural cave systems. Here's what happened. They built this, and it's got a great museum. On the back of it, which you can't really see, is a five-star hotel with a great restaurant. And the problem is people want to go into a cave. Caves are cool. So you get out there, and you see another similar museum to many of the other museums in Johannesburg and Pretoria. And you see the cast of fossils on display. But that's not the experience that they want in the cradle. They came out there to go down the cave. So now people aren't even visiting this. Unfortunately, it's bleeding money. It's out in the middle of nowhere. It's difficult to get to. It's about a 20-minute drive from Sterkfontein and some of the other famous cave sites. And nobody's really going there. Not even so much. I mean, they get some conferences and a few things each year. The other thing is, in following their own guidelines, upon starting the construction, the Heritage Impact Assessment missed an archaeological site right in the middle where they started bulldozing out the sediments to build this. And there are literally thousands of stone tools in that pile of dump from the sediments that they removed to build this. So I have been in that dump pile of sediments many times, and it is loaded with stone tools. Some of my colleagues and myself have actually excavated around the entrance to this museum trying to find small pockets of in-situ sediments where they didn't disturb. And sure enough, there are archaeological deposits right in it. Now, here's the thing. If a government project like this doesn't follow those particular guidelines, what hope do the private farmers have for any compliance with any of these laws? Additional threats. Public awareness is a problem. Human evolution. When you are trying to educate a youth population in a country that has such a long history of traumatic stress in their apartheid days, human evolution doesn't always receive the amount of attention that it might get elsewhere. As such, students, the community, the public are not as in tune with the intrinsic and important value of the fossils and the stone tools and the archaeological sites. The long-term potential of these sites is not as clear, I think, at the public level. Expanding informal settlements. The population of Johannesburg, the population of the suburbs around Johannesburg is growing. And those people continue to push away from the cities. Sometimes they push into the cities looking for jobs. And the urban centers continue to grow. And there are informal settlements on the cradle of humankind and continuing to infringe on the cradle of humankind. Now, I will never stand up here and tell you that I don't think that the people building informal homes shouldn't be allowed to do that. Because we all understand this really, really challenging human rights situation that South Africa finds itself in. But you wonder, what will it look like in many years as it continues to grow? And the government is doing lots and lots to build people proper houses and solve this housing crisis. Landowners frequently restrict access. I had a landowner offer me access to his cave. He said, you can have 10 years of access to this cave for a million dollars. I said, what? A million dollars? His understanding of living out there in the cradle on a farm, he sees foreigners, mostly white male foreigners, coming in there from our respective institutions. And digging and disappearing. And maybe sees things that we're somehow getting rich off of these fossils. Which I can tell you is not the case. So, one more case study that I'd like to demonstrate is some of the environmental law that has been put in place. And the Mogali City is the municipality that part of the cradle falls within. And their Department of Integrated Environmental Management has some guidelines for landowners in the cradle. And most of these landowners are old white farmers that gained that land during apartheid. And still have five cows out there and don't do much else. And that's not entirely fair to everybody out there. But the reality is it's a massive conglomerate of farms. And many of those are game farms where they have a few springbok or kudu running around. And some of the guidelines that are in place, if you are going to build and or develop your land, they restrict how you can go about that based on that water that I talked about. Now, South Africa is a very dry country. Like many southern African countries. They struggle with the amount of water. They have great water, but they struggle with their amounts. Constructing buildings over natural resources or watercourses. Subsurface water storage tanks. Disturbing the surface soil whenever feasible. All of these have been written into guidelines to be avoided. And maybe that's part of the problem. Is that when possible, they should be avoided. Now, it's very difficult to determine when something is unavoidable in a development project. And I wanted to highlight this because just a couple of years ago, a farm was being developed about three miles down the road from Serpentine Caves. And it was sort of this hipster concept where everybody comes out there to do yoga in a sculpture garden in a small restaurant. And I won't say the name of it in case they're listening. But what they did is there's a very small river. The Blaubank River. And it looks like a stream to us. What we would think of as a stream. But it's quite deep. That's probably four or five feet deep in places. And runs very quickly. And it's what carved out much of the Serpentine Valley in prehistory when it was a much bigger river. The farm, three, four miles down the road, entirely diverted this river to both build and supply a water source. To develop their land and also supply a water source that they were looking for in a garden. That might not seem like a big deal. But here's the thing. When you entirely divert a river, it has consequences for the entire ecosystem for miles and miles and miles downriver. Even outside of the Cradle of Mankind. Additionally, the informal settlements on the Cradle and which border the Cradle rely on those water sources for washing up, for cooking, even for drinking. It makes a huge difference. And this is just within the last couple of years. It is so difficult to enforce these laws. So I guess I kind of want to bring this all together and leave you thinking about this. In South Africa and many developing countries, economic opportunity is prioritized over heritage, particularly cultural heritage, often. And I cannot say that that's wrong. I have seen the injustices in South Africa. I have seen the pain of the growing lower class in South Africa. I have seen the control of the economies by still the white minority in South Africa. And that economic stratification needs to be ironed out and needs to be fixed. And as such, economic development, tourism, mining, often is argued to be job creating, to be capital building. And as such, the fossils are the ones that lose out and the research loses out. So what will have the most immediate and long-term effects on changing these situations? Perhaps it's grassroots efforts at the educational level. I'm keenly aware of my time, but I wanted to just look quickly at the process of archaeology from start to finish. And just show you that there are problems all along the way. If you're looking for a site and the landowners offer you a cave site for a million dollars, it's an issue. That knowledge of what is valued out of that cave and who's benefiting from it is something that's often unknown. Permits. You actually need a permit to go out and survey for a new site, which would require you going to every landowner that you want to go onto their property and go down into one of their caves. And you would have to go to them, get their permission, then go to the South African Heritage Association and get their permission, and get a permit to go into everything. That is such a gray area and it makes it so difficult that many archaeologists and paleoanthropologists will just kind of go out to the sites. And they'll go down into the caves. And I've done that too, believe it or not. And quite frankly, it's tough. It's challenging. Finding the site. What is the condition of the site when you arrive there? Some of these sites were discovered 150 years ago and haven't been touched since. And in that case, those sites are crumbling. Some of those sites are decaying. Some of those sites have cattle walking over them daily. Some of those sites are in no shape to continue study on. Methodologies. There's, of course, no standardization in all of the methodologies. Professional archaeologists and paleoanthropologists are doing their very best at all times. But here's the big one that I want to highlight. What happens to all of the artifacts when they come out of the ground? A lot of those will get studied quickly and then go to a museum. The museums themselves are underfunded. The personnel. There's not enough personnel. The access is often not restricted. In fact, recently somebody walked into one of the museums down in South Africa. I won't say which one. And requested access to a very, very important hominid fossil. And they gave it to that person. And that person left with it to go do some study that they didn't have a permit for. And you're going, oh my gosh. So, again, it comes down to all along the way there are issues of research. Now, I don't want you to think that research can't be done. It's just a lot of research time, as you know, is spent in permitting and preparing. So, I guess this begs the question. Is any protection of any environment anywhere in the world ever permanent? And sadly, I don't think it is. I think what it is, is that when the price of any resource on that environment gets to a point where it is highly profitable to move on that site, all of a sudden we start looking at those protections again. And we say, well, maybe if we move the border a little bit closer to the edges of the World Heritage Site. Or maybe if we just give them a mining permit for a corner. Or they haven't found a fossil at that site in 25 years. Or nobody's digging that site anymore. Nobody's dug there for 25 years. Let's just let them mine there. Or, we always do this. We reevaluate what at one point seemed like a protective priority. And, you know, the Amazon, right? Here in the United States. Alaska. What is protected in Alaska versus where we get with oil prices in the next 50 or 100 years if we're still in the need of oil at that time? What happens? Do we then reevaluate intrinsic versus economic value? So I leave you with this. These are my admittedly poor solutions to mitigate this situation in the cradle of humankind. Science is very secretive. Okay? As soon as I find an exciting site, I'm not going to tell anybody until that's published. And then I get all the attention and all the grant money and all the funding and that million dollars for that cave. But all of the projects in the cradle, if they could unite their voice, coordinate and cooperate their voice, that voice would be much stronger than dozens of individual voices shouting in different directions. In addition, actually enforcing the buffer zone and enforcing mining regulations outside that buffer zone would be really helpful. Management within the zone. Okay? There is not clear wording in these laws that says these are more than guidelines. They need to be managed. And finally, and quite frankly, I think this is the most important one. Further development of grassroots educational programs for South African youth, public, community members, all throughout. It will not pay off in the short term. I'm hoping that these other types of strategies can hold off in the short term. But if we are willing to go out and continue to lecture and talk and tell people about the importance of these sites, those individuals will grow up with a sense of value for what their country and their heritage has. Right now, it is still a lot of international researchers, often white male researchers, including myself, showing up in these countries, excavating, talking about it, and telling people their history. Right? Of course, it's all the entire world's history. But if you're unaware, it feels like some outsider coming in there. There's an element of this is somebody else's. There's an element of not feeling connected to their own heritage that we can help to change. By training more South African scholars, by reaching out to the community, and creating a situation that is inclusive for people. I think that that value, the site's value, will grow with that. So only two of these are really formal protections. Laws can only do so much, especially when they've been in place for so long and very little, and this is where we are. And I also want to point out, this is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And I've just highlighted a few, a small sample of the issues in this heritage site. Now think about the hundreds, the thousands of archaeological sites around South Africa, Southern Africa, Africa as a whole. Think about the provincial sites, the local sites that are really, frankly, just as important, but don't have the UNESCO label over them. They are in serious jeopardy of being damaged or mined out. I work at a site in the Northern Cape where a miner showed up in the middle of the night with a backhoe and dropped an Olympic-sized swimming pool hole in the middle of the site in about 10 hours. Until a museum worker was able to actually saw it happening and got involved. So there are a lot of problems and a lot of issues and a lot of things to fix. But I'm hoping that we are at not a starting point, but a continuing point for the many years of research to come in the cradle of humankind. And I want to thank you all. I know on an evening like tonight it's cold outside, but I hope you enjoyed it and being in this beautiful auditorium. Thanks to Tina and Steve and the Penn Museum for having me. And I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have. Thank you.