The Excitement in the Excavation
Dr. Temperance Brennan could barely sit still in her first class seat. She felt like a little kid on Halloween (her favorite holiday). She was more excited to depart on this trip than she had been about her very first summer dig as a Northwestern University anthropology student. Her flight itinerary was booked from Washington DC to New York to Johannesburg, South Africa. This trip was all the more compelling because Parker was accompanying her. Their final destination was the Rising Star cave system in the Transvaal supergroup, one of only two remaining pristine fragments of earth's crust in the world. It lay in the Bloubank River valley a half mile southwest of Swartkrans near Johannesburg on the plains of South Africa in an area dubbed 'the Cradle of Humankind.'
She had been invited to participate in an expedition sponsored by the University of the Witwatersrand to continue the excavation of Homo naledi and Australopithecus sediba bone fragments from the the Dinaledi Chamber. This site showed evidence that the two species had interbred, advancing human evolution yet muddying the water as to which was our direct ancestor. Because Parker had completed his first year of graduate school, she received permission for him to participate in the project as an assistant. The South African government was happy to grant her this privilege after Brennan and Booth had investigated the violent death of one of their diplomats in Washington DC and apprehended his killer.
Brennan found it ironically pleasing that Dinaledi Chamber meant "chamber of stars" given her childhood fascination with constellations and astronomy. This Malapa expedition was a priceless opportunity to share with Parker her fascination with and love of ancient archaeology. Although they would miss Booth, Christine, and Hank for the month they were in South Africa, the pair was 'over the moon' about their adventure.
Due to her height, Brennan doubted she would be able to enter the cavern which could be reached only be crawling through some incredibly tight passageways. The six original paleo-anthropologists recruited by Lee Berger to extricate the bones were petite women because larger individuals couldn't navigate the cave's cramped access route; only 7 inches wide at one point.
She found it astounding that all but 20 of the 206 bones in the human body had been found in the cave. During two years of excavation, 12 individuals and over 1700 specimens were gently retrieved after hours of painstaking brushing and nudging the bones from their resting place 98 feet underground. Surprisingly, most were only partially fossilized. Assisting with this uniquely historic recovery of such significant hominid remains was the thrill of a lifetime experience for Bones and her beloved step-son.
A/N: I just finished watching a fascinating NOVA presentation "The Dawn of Humanity" about the discovery of hominid skeletal remains in a cave exposed by South African lime miners' dynamite blasting a century earlier. Female anthropologists were recruited to retrieve the bones because the passage way into the cave was so constricted. If Temperance Brennan was a real person, she would most certainly have participated in this excavation. Hence, my story. All credit for scientific information and details belongs to NOVA and Wikipedia. The characters don't belong to me either.