Meet Matt Berger: A 9-year-old who accidentally discovered a new species of human ancestor

It was one of those ordinary afternoons for Matthew Berger, aka Matt Berger. He was accompanying his dad, Lee Berger, a renowned paleoanthropologist. The 9-year-old boy was chasing his dog when he stumbled upon a rock with a bone protruding from it. The child didn’t know he was about to answer one of humanity’s greatest questions. He had tripped on the fossil of a previously unknown human ancestor. What began as a child’s curiosity soon led to one of the most significant paleoanthropological discoveries of the decade.

A field trip that changed humankind’s evolutionary history

The year was 2008. Matt was 9 years old. As a child, Matt was often taken along on his dad’s field trips. His father, Lee Berger, is a prominent paleoanthropologist, a scientist who studies the fossils of human ancestors. But during the early 2000s, his dad was struggling seriously.

On 15 August 2008, Matt travelled to South Africa with his dad. Lee was exploring the Malapa Cave area near Johannesburg. The cave was part of a World Heritage Site, popularly known as the ‘Cradle of Humankind’, as it contains key evidence of human evolution.

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Lee had planned to explore a particular location he had marked on Google Earth. “We got to the edge of this hole. Really just a hole in the ground, five metres by five metres, not a huge cave that most people would imagine. And my dad said, ‘OK Matt, go find fossils,’” Matt told the BBC, fifteen years after the discovery.

Matt also had his adorable pooch, and his dog did what dogs usually do – explore. The dog started running and, of course, Matt followed. “My dog started running away from the site. I started following him, and I tripped on a log, and as I was getting myself up and dusting myself off, I noticed a little fossil in a rock on the side of this path,” he recalled.

The moment of awe

Matt soon informed his dad. An expert, Lee immediately recognised the fossil – it was the collarbone of a hominid, a group of great apes that includes humans and their close ancestors.

“We were all kneeling around this rock, just in awe. I didn’t really know what was happening because I’d never found a hominid. I was just there for fun. But my dad was so excited, and so obviously that made me excited,” Matt said.

Soon, they found more remains in the rock. “As we’re admiring this rock and looking at it, we turn it over, and on the backside is a jaw with teeth of a hominid sticking out. And so that’s when we knew this was going to be a significant find, because finding a single piece is already a huge deal – finding two in the same block, knowing that they could be from the same individual, which would lead to a partial skeleton, was almost unheard of.”

What Matt accidentally discovered was a previously unknown ape-like species, Australopithecus sediba. This species lived almost 2 million years ago. It was a rare discovery. Two weeks later, Lee and his colleagues excavated the site, learning more about the find. Some scientists think this species could be a direct ancestor of modern humans.

The discovery surely ended up being a significant one in the history of human evolution. "We have the first articulated ankle that gives us information about walking that's totally surprising," Matt Berger's father, Lee said. He further elaborated about the discovery, "We have the first undistorted pelvis that's ever been discovered in the entire early hominid record. We have the most complete hand from one individual from any species of early human ancestor ever discovered – and it's a lot like ours."

A child’s curiosity turned out to be one of the biggest discoveries in the history of human evolution.