Lee Berger

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Lee Berger with the holotype (MH1) of Australopithecus sediba , which was scientifically described by him as the main author in 2010

Lee Rogers Berger (born December 22, 1965 in Shawnee Mission, Johnson County (Kansas) , USA ) is an American paleoanthropologist and archaeologist . Berger is a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and has his permanent residence there. He became internationally known for his studies of the body proportions of Australopithecus africanus . Berger also discovered that Taung's child - the first scientifically described individual of the genus Australopithecus - had been captured by a large bird of prey .

Career and research topics

Lee Berger was born in Shawnee Mission , Kansas , USA , in 1965 and grew up in Sylvania, Georgia . He studied at Vanderbilt University from 1985 , attended East Georgia College from 1987 and then Georgia Southern University , where he graduated in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in biological anthropology, archeology and geology . In the same year he moved to the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa for a palaeoanthropological doctoral thesis , where he has lived since then; under the guidance of Phillip Tobias he researched the shoulder girdle of early hominids .

As early as 1991, Berger began his long-term studies in the Gladysvale Cave , which is now part of the UNESCO World Heritage "Cradle of Humankind" (" Cradle of Humankind "). In the same year, hominin teeth were recovered there by his team, making Gladysvale the first new site of remains of early hominins in South Africa since 1948. In 1993 Berger became a research associate at the Paleo-Anthropology Research Unit (PARU) at the Witwatersrand University. In 1994 he obtained his doctorate in paleoanthropology with a thesis on The functional morphology of the hominoid shoulder girdle, past and present. This was followed by further studies as a post-doctoral student at the Witwatersrand University, in 1999 he was appointed head of the Paleo-Anthropology Research Unit and finally in 2004 he was appointed reader (comparable to the European professor) in the field of human evolution .

Berger with the partial skeleton of Australopithecus sediba
The Malapa site (looking north), where the fossils of Australopithecus sediba were discovered

In addition to the excavation in Gladysvale, Berger also managed projects in Sterkfontein and Swartkrans . At times he also teaches his subject in the USA: since 1997 at Duke University and since 1998 at the University of Arkansas . His research work will include a. supported by the National Geographic Society .

His hypothesis on the fate of the Taung skull , published in 1995 and confirmed in 2006, and his study of the limb length of Australopithecus africanus from 1998 were named among the top hundred scientific publications of the year Discover by the magazine . Berger argued, among other things, that the physique of Australopithecus africanus is closer to that of the earliest representatives of the genus Homo than that of Australopithecus afarensis .

Berger also caused a stir after he examined two thousand to three thousand year old remains of apparently very small people during his vacation in Palau ( Micronesia ) in 2006 and in 2008 a research dispute broke out over whether these people were a separate species of the homo genus was about a so-called island dwarfing or the short stature of modern humans ( Homo sapiens ). However, all three speculations were immediately rejected by Palau experts as a "unfortunate farce"; the height of the early inhabitants of Palau was within the normal range of Homo sapiens .

In 2010, Berger was the main author of the first description of Australopithecus sediba , the first remains of which his then nine-year-old son Matthew discovered in 2008 in the Malapa Cave in South Africa. Berger also classified this find as a possible transition form between Australopithecus and Homo , which Donald Johanson commented on the journal Science with the words that Berger was a "grandstander" who "often exaggerated" the meaning of his findings.

In 2015, together with numerous co-authors, he expanded the genus Homo to include the new species Homo naledi .

Fonts (selection)

  • Redrawing the family tree? In: National Geographic. Volume 194, No. 2, 1998, pp. 90-99
  • with M. Reed: Visions of the Past. In: Endangered Wildlife Trust (ed.): Vision. 1999
  • with Brett Hilton-Barber: In The Footsteps of Eve. The Mystery of Human Origins. National Geographic Society, Adventure Press Series, 2000, ISBN 978-0-7922-7682-1
  • with Brett Hilton-Barber: The Official Field Guide to the Cradle of Humankind. Struik Publishers, 2002, ISBN 978-1-86872-739-1
  • Working and Guiding in the Cradle of Humankind. Prime Origins Publishing, 2005 full text (PDF, 5.83 MB) ( Memento from April 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  • with Brett Hilton-Barber: A Guide to Sterkfontein & the Cradle of Humankind. Struik Publishers, 2006

Web links

Commons : Lee Berger  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical Sketch of Prof. Lee R. Berger. (PDF; 93 kB) ( Memento from September 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) On: profleeberger.com , accessed on July 17, 2015
  2. ^ Lee R. Berger, Ron J. Clarke: Eagle involvement in accumulation of the Taung child fauna. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 29, No. 3, 1995, pp. 275-299, doi: 10.1006 / jhev.1995.1060 ; Full text (PDF; 3.5 MB) ( Memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Lee R. Berger: Predatory bird damage to the Taung type-skull of Australopithecus africanus Dart 1925 . In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology . 131, No. 2, 2006, pp. 166-168. doi: 10.1002 / ajpa.20415 . and full text (PDF; 181 kB) ( Memento from July 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Henry McHenry, Lee R. Berger: Limb lengths in Australopithecus and the origin of the genus Homo. In: South African Journal of Science. Volume 94, 1998, pp. 447–450, full text (PDF; 3.0 MB) ( Memento from July 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
    Further data on the same research topic can be found in: Henry McHenry, Lee R. Berger: Body proportions in Australopithecus africanus and A. africanus and the origins of the genus Homo. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 35, No. 1, 1998, pp. 1-22, doi: 10.1006 / jhev.1997.0197
  5. ↑ Lee R. Berger et al .: Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia. In: PLoS ONE. 3 (3): e1780, 2008; doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0001780
    see also: Discovery Challenges Finding of a Separate Human Species. On: nytimes.com of March 11, 2008
    The Dwarves of Palau. On: handelsblatt.com of March 13, 2008.
  6. ↑ a b Michael Balter: Paleoanthropologist now rides high on a new fossil tide. In: Science . Volume 333, No. 6048, 2011, pp. 1373-1375, doi: 10.1126 / science.333.6048.1373
  7. ^ Scott M. Fitzpatrick, Greg C. Nelson, and Geoffrey Clark: Small Scattered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf Make: Biological and Archaeological Data Indicate that Prehistoric Inhabitants of Palau Were Normal Sized. In: PLoS ONE. 3 (8): e3015, 2008, doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0003015
  8. ↑ Berger LR, de Ruiter DJ, Churchill SE, Schmid P, Carlson KJ, Dirks PHGM, Kibii JM: Australopithecus sediba: A New Species of Homo-Like Australopith from South Africa . In: Science . 328, 2010, pp. 195-204. doi : 10.1126 / science.1184944 .
  9. ↑ Lee R. Berger et al .: Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa. In: eLife. 2015; 4: e09560, doi: 10.7554 / eLife.09560 .
personal data
SURNAME Berger, Lee
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Berger, Lee Rogers; Berger Lee R.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleoanthropologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 22, 1965
PLACE OF BIRTH Shawnee Mission, Johnson County, Kansas , USA