Marina Elliott Biological anthropologist

Marina Elliott descends into a cave where archaeologists unearthed Homo naledi, a previously unknown cousin of humans. The route’s “pinch point” was less than eight inches wide. 

In October 2013 Marina Elliott answered a mysterious Facebook ad seeking experienced archaeologists and paleontologists with a specific physique: “The person must be skinny and preferably small,” it read.

The next month, Elliott was squeezing through an eight-inch-wide passage into a South African cave filled with fossils of a previously undiscovered human relation: Homo naledi.

Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger had posted the request for diminutive team members to excavate a cave in the Cradle of Humankind, a World Heritage site outside Johannesburg where many important human fossils had been discovered. Elliott, then a biological anthropology Ph.D. student in Canada, was a sport climber and had done fieldwork in the inhospitable terrains of Siberia and northern Alaska.

She was the first of the six chosen scientists to slide into the chamber where climbers had initially spotted fossils. The passage was so narrow that there wasn’t room to wear a safety harness. “We thought, There’s just one skeleton. We’ll dig it out and then all go out and live our lives,” she recalls. “But the first time I went in it really hit me what we were dealing with. I shone my headlamp around the chamber, and everywhere it shone I could see pieces of bone.” Each fossil was carefully wrapped and relayed along a chain of scientists and cavers to the surface. After three weeks they had unearthed 1,550 fossils belonging to 15 different individuals and had added a branch to humankind’s family tree.

After finishing her degree, Elliott moved to South Africa to continue excavating and analyzing the materials and dating the bones with Berger. Ten years earlier, a class on human origins had inspired her to abandon a career in veterinary medicine and become an anthropologist. Now future students will likely read of her discoveries.