The Cradle of Humankind is a paleoanthropological site and is located about 50 km (31 mi) northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa, in the Gauteng province. Declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999, the site is home to the largest concentration of human ancestral remains anywhere in the world. The site currently occupies 47,000 hectares (180 sq mi) and contains a complex system of limestone caves. The registered name of the site in the list of World Heritage Sites is Fossil Hominid Sites of South Africa.
Sterkfontein is a set of limestone caves of special interest in paleoanthropology located in Gauteng province, about 40 kilometres (25 mi) northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa in the Muldersdrift area close to the town of Krugersdorp. The archaeological sites of Swartkrans and Kromdraai are in the same area. Sterkfontein is a South African National Heritage Site and was also declared a World Heritage Site in 2000. The area in which it is situated is known as the Cradle of Humankind. The Sterkfontein Caves are also home to numerous wild African species including Belonogaster petiolata, a wasp species of which there is a large nesting presence.
Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site (周口店北京人遗址), also romanized as Choukoutien, is a cave system in suburban Fangshan District, Beijing. It has yielded many archaeological discoveries, including one of the first specimens of Homo erectus, dubbed Peking Man, and a fine assemblage of bones of the gigantic hyena Pachycrocuta brevirostris.
Liang Bua is a limestone cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia, slightly north of the town of Ruteng in Manggarai Regency, East Nusa Tenggara. The cave demonstrated archaeological and paleontological potential in the 1950s and 1960s as described by the Dutch missionary and archaeologist Theodor L. Verhoeven.
Ronald John Clarke is a paleoanthropologist most notable for the discovery of "Little Foot", an extraordinarily complete skeleton of Australopithecus, in the Sterkfontein Caves. A more technical description of various aspects of his description of the Australopithecus skeleton was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science.
Es-Skhul or the Skhul Cave is a prehistoric cave site situated about 20 kilometres south of the city of Haifa, Israel, and about 3 km (1.9 mi) from the Mediterranean Sea.
Jebel Irhoud or Adrar n Ighoud, is an archaeological site located just north of the locality known as Tlet Ighoud, approximately 50 km (30 mi) south-east of the city of Safi in Morocco. It is noted for the hominin fossils that have been found there since the discovery of the site in 1960. Originally thought to be Neanderthals, the specimens have since been assigned to Homo sapiens and, as reported in 2017, have been dated to roughly 300,000 years ago.
Lee Rogers Berger is an American-born South African paleoanthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. He is best known for his discovery of the Australopithecus sediba type site, Malapa; his leadership of Rising Star Expedition in the excavation of Homo naledi at Rising Star Cave; and the Taung Bird of Prey Hypothesis.
Mugharet el-Zuttiyeh is a prehistoric archaeological site in Upper Galilee, Israel. It is situated 800 m (2,600 ft) from the Nahal Amud outlet, approximately 30 m (98 ft) above the wadi bed. It was found to house a fossil today known as the "Galilee skull" or "The Yabrudian Man".
The Rising Star cave system is located in the Malmani dolomites, in Bloubank River valley, about 800 meters southwest of Swartkrans, part of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa. Recreational caving has occurred there since the 1960s. Fossils found in the cave were, in 2015, proposed to represent a previously unknown extinct species of hominin named Homo naledi.
Homo naledi is an extinct hominin species discovered in 2013 in the Rising Star Cave system, Gauteng province, South Africa, dating to the Middle Pleistocene 335,000–236,000 years ago. The initial discovery comprises 1,550 specimens of bone, representing 737 different skeletal elements, and at least 15 different individuals. Despite this exceptionally high number of specimens, their classification with other Homo species remains unclear.
Dawn of Humanity is a 2015 American documentary film that was released online on September 10, 2015, and aired nationwide in the United States on September 16, 2015. The PBS NOVA National Geographic film, in one episode of two hours, was directed and produced by Graham Townsley. The film describes the 2013 discovery, and later excavation, of the fossil remains of Homo naledi, an extinct species of hominin assigned to the genus Homo, found within the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star Cave system, located in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. Additionally, the National Geographic Society has multiple videos on its website covering different phases of the discovery and excavation of the fossils during a two-year period. As of September 2015, fossils of at least fifteen individuals, amounting to 1550 specimens, have been excavated from the cave.
The Underground Astronauts is the name given to a group of six scientists, Hannah Morris, Marina Elliott, Becca Peixotto, Alia Gurtov, K. Lindsay Hunter, and Elen Feuerriegel, who excavated the bones of Homo naledi from the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star cave system in Gauteng, South Africa. The six women were selected by the expedition leader, Lee Rogers Berger, who posted a message on Facebook asking for scientists with experience in paleontological excavations and caving, and were slender enough for cramped spaces. Within ten days of the post, Berger had received sixty applicants and chose six scientists to make up his expedition team.
Elen Feuerriegel is an Australian palaeoanthropologist, known for being one of the "underground astronauts" of the Rising Star Expedition. She is also a clinical research scientist at the University of Colorado Denver where she specialises in COVID-19 AND HIV clincial trials.
Alia Gurtov is an American paleoanthropologist who is known for being one of the six Underground Astronauts of the Rising Star Expedition.
The Cave of Aroeira is an archaeological and paleoanthropological site in the Portuguese Estremadura Limestone Massif. The cave is located in the village of Almonda, in the civil parish of Zibreira, in the municipality of Torres Novas in the district of Santarém. The cave contained stones from the Paleolithic Acheulean culture, and the skull of Homo heidelbergensis, circa 400,000 years old. The discovery of Aroeira 3 was announced in spring 2017 - the earliest human trace in Portugal.
Hannah Morris is an American anthropologist, known for her contribution to the Rising Star Expedition as one of the six women Underground Astronauts. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia, studying "the implications of human actions on vegetative ecosystems".
Marina Elliott is a Canadian biological anthropologist, who is known for being one of the six Underground Astronauts of the Rising Star Expedition.
Misliya Cave, also known as the "Brotzen Cave" after Fritz Brotzen, who first described it in 1927, is a collapsed cave at Mount Carmel, Israel, containing archaeological layers from the Lower Paleolithic and Middle Paleolithic periods. The site is significant in paleoanthropology for the discovery of what were from 2018 to 2019 considered to be the earliest known remains attributed to Homo sapiens outside Africa, dated to 185,000 years ago. Since the time of its discovery in 2011, Jebel Faya, in the United Arab Emirates, had been considered to be the oldest settlement of anatomically-modern humans outside Africa, with its deepest assemblage being dated to 125,000 years ago.
The Nesher RamlaHomo group are an extinct population of archaic humans who lived during the Middle Pleistocene in what is now modern-day Israel. In 2010, evidence of a tool industry had been discovered during a year of archaeological excavations at the Nesher Ramla site. In 2021, the first Nesher Ramla Homo individual was identified from remains discovered during further excavations.
