In 2013, John Hawks was part of a team that made a major scientific discovery in a network of caves in South Africa. They found the remains of a new humanoid species, Homo naledi, that appeared to predate Homo sapiens. Last year, a documentary crew followed a team that included Hawks and paleoanthropologist Lee Berger into an unexplored part of the cave system, where they made some potentially surprising discoveries. Unknown: Cave of Bones was a hit, camping at number two on Netflix’s worldwide rankings list at its release this summer. We talked to the professor of anthropology about the experience and what it means for the way modern media covers scientific discovery.
How did this documentary come about?
JH: I consult on a lot of documentaries, and my job usually is to try to help producers identify stories that have some lasting sort of reality — like the science isn't going to be obsolete five years from now. Netflix approached me and said, ‘You know, we want to do this documentary series, and we'd like to have a human evolution story in it.’ I gave them a lot of suggestions of what I thought would be great stories, and they said, ‘Well, what about the Rising Star Cave, which is your site?’ And I said, ‘We're underground in a cave, we have adventures going on and we have new research that's happening.’ So, they started filming with us early in 2022.
What did filming involve?
JH: We decided that it was time to work in one of the chambers that we hadn't worked in before, a place called the Dragon's Back chamber, and that was super interesting to us. The chamber where we made our largest fossil discovery, the naledi chamber, is down a very narrow passageway, a vertical descent that's 18 centimeters wide — so it's super tight. To get there, you climb this ridge of rock called Dragon’s Back. We didn't know what might be in that chamber, and it was a logical thing to say, well, if the naledi are using this chamber, then they have to come through here, and we should dig here to see if there's any evidence of their passage.
It seems like being a national media expert on anthropological topics is a comfortable role for you. Do you see it that way?
JH: I grew up in a small town in Kansas. My contact with the world of science was through National Geographic and that role of scientists — communicating with people through mass media — was important to me. As a graduate student, I learned that what it took was being ready to answer questions in a way that sheds insight on them. So, there's a part of research which is pushing the boundaries of what we know beyond what anybody's seen before. And that part is something that's often hard to talk about because you don't understand it yourself yet. But when you have found something, putting it into a framework that other people can identify with is essential.
It's a little different today, though, isn’t it?
JH: The world of media has changed. When I was starting out, you had major science reporters at every newspaper in America. Now, so much more of the media is conversational — you'll be on the radio, you'll do a podcast. And so much more of the national media has scaled to the Internet where stories are much more superficial. And it's made it much more important, I think, for scientists to provide some depth in what you know and what we provide. What I write in a blog might be the main source that Wikipedia relies on for what is presented to everybody.
What were you hoping to find on this expedition?
JH: We're trying to understand if there's evidence of naledi lives, evidence of them having used fire, which we think was necessary to move in the dark spaces of the caves. Are there more bones that we might find? That's what the documentary followed us through. We did come to the point where we were quite confident that we were looking at graves, holes that were dug to put bodies in. Since the film, there have been a lot of archaeologists who are like, ‘Wait a minute, we need more evidence.’ I think there's always a calculated risk in doing anything on film, because this is science, and we can't guarantee the outcome. This isn't a drama, where we've written a plot. We did uncover evidence of charcoal while filming was happening. We identified what appeared to be engraved markings on the wall of the cave.
What was the experience like for you?
One of the exciting things about this documentary is that it tells the story of how we did it. It's not like documentaries from 15 years ago, where you have a narrator. It's like, no, we're there. And what you catch may not be the end of the story. The challenge of it is that we're in the middle of a story, and we don't know how all of it's going to end.
So, what’s next?
From the science side, we have more work to do to understand the relationship of the fire evidence to Homo naledi. We have biochemical work that's underway, and that work is starting to tell us interesting things about who these individuals were. What were they doing in the cave? What was their social system like that was using these underground spaces?
We would certainly like to continue filming and covering the work as it progresses. Hopefully we may see a second chapter in the next year or two.