The two amateur cavers had to feel their way along the cave’s winding passages, crawl on their stomachs through an opening less than 10 inches high, ascend a jagged wall, cross a narrow ledge dubbed the “Dragon’s Back,” and make a 400-foot descent, sideways, through a vertical crack before finally arriving at the prize: a 30-foot-long chamber probably between 2 million and 3 million years old.
American paleoanthropologist Lee Berger had asked the men to keep their eyes open for fossils, though the well-explored cave at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa had given up most of its treasures decades ago.
What they found in September 2013 nearly took their breath away: fossil fragments of a relative of the human species, and a cache of bones and teeth buried in ancient clay that would eventually number more than 1,500 — the largest hominin fossil discovery of its kind in Africa.

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