NPR shared the story of Lazarus Kgasi, who started as a laborer but fell in love with the science — and is now helping shape what we know of life’s origins:
This is the story of how Kgasi became a prominent junior curator at the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in a field dominated by white researchers.
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For months, Kgasi didn’t know why he was digging. He had never learned about human evolution or the role that his country had played in reconstructing the story of our ancestors. He just dug.
But after about two years, Kgasi began to wonder — what exactly were these things he was pulling out of the earth? So he asked the American and European researchers he was working for, and they started explaining things to him.
“I was one of the luckiest one to be taught why this is important and why are we doing this,” recalls Kgasi. “Because that’s where I believe everything started lifting off for me. I started having a lot of researchers sharing their knowledge with me and treating me as an equal.”
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“They saw a potential in me that you have an interest in these fossils,” he says. “And they start giving me more responsibilities.”
The researchers put Kgasi in charge of the field site. He began doing preliminary identifications of the fossils before handing them over. He got hired by the local university, first as a fossil excavator and then as a manager of the other excavators. And soon, he started doing his own research, which he continues to this day.
Kgasi makes his way down to one of the vertical surfaces of the pit and scrapes it gently.
He reveals a small chunk of something white. “It’s a bone,” he says with an air of reverence. “I would say it’s something of a clavicle around 3.5 million years old.” He believes that it’s from a non-human primate that once lived here.
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Inside the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria, in the room adjacent to the main entrance, sits a large display case. An array of 1.8 million-year-old fossilized bones is laid out on a red carpet. They belong to Panthera shawi, a giant prehistoric cat.
“This one is a male,” says Kgasi. “It’s twice the size of an African male lion. It’s huge.”
Kgasi could barely contain himself in 2015 when he discovered this specimen in one of the caves in the Cradle of Humankind. He was off the ground, suspended by a series of ropes, to chip away into what was once the cave wall.
“They have to beg me to come down from the ropes to come and have lunch cause I didn’t want to stop,” he says. “I was screaming, ‘I found this! I found a femur!'”
Much of Kgasi’s excitement came from the fact that for years, all that had been known about this species was derived from a single tooth found in the late 1940s by Robert Broom, a renowned white paleontologist. In other words, there wasn’t much to go on.
And here Kgasi was, pulling bone after bone out of the soft rock, ultimately extracting the entire skeleton and a chunk of the skull. Its sheer size revealed just how formidable a hunter this feline was.
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Everything that Kgasi knows he has learned by doing. He never went to college or graduate school.
Perhaps due to his lack of formal training, he recognizes the power of a solid education. This is one reason he spends a good chunk of his time speaking to young people in the field and at the museum — to encourage them to consider studying paleontology.
“It’s so magical, if I may put it that way, to bring them in here and they sit down,” he says. “You look like them. You are telling the story of these fossils in their own language, Setswana.”