The Rising Star Expedition is a joint project of the National Geographic Society and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Originally expected to be a brief expedition to recover a single partial hominid skeleton from a newly discovered site in one of the ancient limestone caves in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa, it quickly became apparent that this was a hominid fossil site of such breath-taking richness that it will keep paleontologists busy for decades to come.
After three weeks of deep-cave hominid fossil recovery, the Rising Star Expedition has wrapped on its final day of excavations.
The caver/scientists known as “underground astronauts” will return Wednesday [27 Nov 2013] to complete the 3D scans of the entire fossil chamber, walls and all. They will be aided by the caving support team as they remove the hi-tech equipment that has made this NASA-like mission possible.
There are 17 sleeping tents, plus the storage tent and the larger mess hall, Cavers tent, Science tent, and Command Center to disassemble, pack, and ship out.
There are also the more than 1200 cataloged hominid fossil elements to transfer to Wits University.
Plans are now being made for how to handle all these new fossils, not only in terms of how to move them, but also how to process and study them. Paleoanthropologists and students generally only have a few new hominid fossil elements to work with from any given site at any given time. Having dozens of elements is unusual. Totals in the hundreds have generally taken years or decades to reach. To come out of three weeks of excavation with more than a thousand hominid fossils is unheard of in Southern Africa.
Handling all this material will require the creation of new systems, new forms of collaboration, and new opportunities for young and up-and-coming scientists. Lee Berger and his team of senior scientists are developing such a plan now.
All that and they literally barely scratched the surface of the cave floor in the first chamber.