Purpose of Africa Fossils Tour

In 2015, my close friend and colleague invited me to go to South Africa with him. I jumped at the chance. I knew Lee Berger, PhD was head of the Human Evolution Department at Wits University, which was in Johannesburg South Africa. I had read his book about the African Eve, and wanted to see the famous Taung Child fossil in the Fossils Vault at Wits. So I contacted Berger and asked if I come tbere and tour the Vault. Not only did he say yes, he said he would meet us there along with his colleague proffessor Francis Thackery. What a day that was!! Not inly did we see Taung, we also " The Skull in the Rock" ( google it)....... When we returned from Africa I began to reflect on the trip and what may have motivated me to make it.  I asked myself what was the purpose of my South African Hominin Fossils Study Trip?  And the answer was that it all had to do with our human evolution,  and the resultant evolution of our brain/mind. If we as neuropsychoanalytic therapists can come to understand that our brain/mind changed and evolved over time just like the rest of our physical bodies,  then we can know why we today think and feel and act differently than our ancient hominin ancestors. Then we can help people in treatment to find their way to a more fulfilled life today..........This is the goal of two relatively new fields of study that are being integrated into psychoanalysis: Evolutionary biology and neuroscience. My experience has been that when you integrate these fields you get a fuller understanding of our mental functioning today. This interdisciplinary field is called neuropsychoanalysis  ( created by Mark Solms in 1999.) This was what Africa was all about for me!! ;

South Africa Fossils Tour

This is a pic I took of the original (not a cast) Taung child, the first prehuman fossil found on the continent of Africa by Raymond Dart in 1925. Dart's find  began to confirm the belief that Darwin was right when he postulated that humans evolved not in Asia or Europe, but in Africa..........I was fortunate to travel to South Africa in 2015 to visit the Fossils Vault of Wits University. Dr. Francis Thackery and Dr. Lee Berger were kind enough to take my friend and me on a tour of the vault,  and explain what we were seeing. Though the Taung Child was what I went there to see, there was also in the vault the Skull in the Rock ( Australopithecus Sediba) fossil, found by Lee Berger. What I did not know was that Homo Naledi, also discovered by Berger, was there in the vault as well! It was boxed up in containers on the shelves and not available for viewing because Berger had not yet revealed it to the World........Following our visit to Wits University we toured the Cradle of Humankind outside of Johanesburg, and the Human Origins Center on the University Campus. We further traveled to Pretoria where we visited the fossil vault there, and saw Mrs. Ples, also one of the most famous fossils ever found. What a trip of a life time this was! ......I will close this post by writing a bit more about theTaung. This pic above of Taung is a 3.3 million years old skull that was first thought to be 6 year old girl, but now believed to be only 3 years old. Taung remains one of the most important fossil finds in the history of paleoanthropology! And I got to see it!! Wow, what a day that was. 

Life lessons from Africa Trip

So what I learned on my 2015 journey to South Africa to discover my family roots, is that the ancestry.com DNA test does not go back far enough to get to our African beginnings. The 23andMe DNA test does!! So the revised version of the Melton family history and all modern human history,  is that we likely came from Ethiopia in East Africa ( though there is the new Lee Berger theory that it was South Africa first and we walked up to East Africa and crossed the most narrow part of the Red Sea into Saudi Arabia.)

At any rate, it is also known that the "tribe" we were all a part of back 55,000 years ago that left Africa in the Out of Africa migration, was similar to the tribe of today's San People, who until just recently have remained hunter gatherers in Africa. The theory is based on genetic evidence that the San are the oldest people group in Africa,  and that they stayed when we left!! I learned all this at the San People exhibit in the Origins Center Museum on the campus of Wits University in Johannesburg South Africa. So if you want to know what your oldest ancestors may have looked like, and how they behaved and lived, then check out the San.

I saw Homo Naledi in South Africa but it was in a Box! ( Part II )

Homo Naledi was not only written about in National Geographic that September of 2015, it was in the news all over the world. If you have not heard about how remarkable was this find, and how extraordinary was the way it was found, please google it. Lee Berger, whose team made the find, was all over the news giving interviews and explaining in detail how his team went about exploring the Rising Star Cave in the Cradle of Humankind where they found Homo Naledi.

I will simply summarize by saying the space in the Rising Star Cave was so small that Lee Berger had to hire a team of cave explorers who were small enough in stature to squeeze through -- an 8 inch opening!! And they did it! For the personal story, I had planned to come home and tell all my friends and family about how thrilling an opportunity it was to visit the two South African vaults that housed The Taung Child and Mrs. Ples- two of the oldest and most famous fossil finds in the world ( next to the fossil find of Lucy in East Africa.) Not to mention the surprise of getting to see Sediba in the Wits vault, whose discovery was news to me. But then to have discovered upon returning home that I had been in the same room with Homo Naledi was just too much to comprehend.

So I spent the next several months sharing this story with anyone who would listen. And it would have never happened without my dear friend asking me to go to South Africa with him and his willingness to stay an extra week for the fossil tour. ( We also went on Safari while there, but that is for another post.) Of course the fossil tours trip to Wits University and the Cradle of Humankind would not have been possible without the graciousness of Lee Berger and Francis Thackery. I want to thank them both for treating us as visiting scholars interested in paleoanthropology and it's application to our two disciplines. My friend's interest is in the evolution of symbolic thinking and primitive religions, and my interest is in the evolutionary development of the early human brain/mind. Dr. Thackery arranged a discussion with his colleagues in the Evolution Department around these two topics. Dr. Berger took time from his quite full schedule to visit with us and share with us about his find of Sediba. And finally, what Dr. Berger could not share with us in the Vault that day was that we were all standing next to the shelves with the plastic containers ( boxes) that housed Homo Naledi!! Talk about a trip of a life time....

I saw Homo Naledi in South Africa, but it was in a Box!!( Part I)

The story begins in 2014 when my long time friend, colleague, and Religion Professor said he was going to South Africa to a professional meeting. He said if I would go with him to the meeting he would stay an extra week and do a fossils tour with me. I jumped at the chance and of course said yes.

Why was I interested in going to South Africa on a fossils tour? Because I had read Professor Lee Berger's book, In the Footsteps of Eve, where he tells his story of how he went from hunting arrowheads on his parents' farm in South Georgia ( which I also did as a teen on the farmlands of South GA) to attending graduate school in paleoanthropology, to becoming the Chair of the Human Evolution Department at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. And in that position he is the overseer of the famous fossil vault on campus that houses the Taung Child, one of the most important fossils in all of paleoanthropology. Yes, I definitely wanted to go.

And we did. We went in the summer of 2015. The first week of the trip we spent on the Indian Coast, in Durban, South Africa, attending the professional meeting my friend wanted to attend. I did not know before we went that we would be exploring Apartheid at that meeting, and how it ended in South Africa with the Reconciliation Process that took place under Nelson Mandela. I also did not know that in Johannesburg we would visit Soweto and learn more about this very dark history of Apartheid in South Africa. After the meeting we flew from Durban to Johannesburg. The Wits University, in addition to being the overseer of the famous fossil vault named after former Director of Fossils, Philip Tobias, also owns and oversees the fossil research in the Cradle of Humankind. ( Google all of this if you want the background of this story I am telling.) The Cradle of Humankind, as it is called, is the very well known area of South Africa just north of Johannesburg where there are at least a half dozen Caves where the famous fossils have been found. The most famous cave is named Sterkfontein. We were able to tour this cave and see where Little Foot and Mrs. Ples were found. We futher toured an active archeological dig site and talked with the folks who were digging and researching ancient human fossils there. We also went to the museum in Pretoria, South Africa that housed in their private vault the famous fossil Mrs. Ples. We actually got to see her and touch her! Quite a few days it was!

But to get to the Homo Naledi encounter.....Due to the graciousness of hosts Dr. Francis Thackery, and Dr. Lee Berger we were allowed to visit the private and secure Phillip Tobias Fossil Vault. We could not believe it!! Accompanied by Dr. Thackery from the Human Evolution Department, and Dr. Berger, Chair of the Department, we walked in and saw in a glass case the famous fossil-- The Taung Child, discovered by Raymond Dart in 1925, which proved that humankind began in Africa and not any other part of the world. Dr. Thackery explained The Taung Child to us. Then Dr. Berger explained a recent fossil find that he had made. It was found in Malapa, South Africa in the Cradle of Humankind. We had heard only a bit about this find because it was so recent. If you want to read about it google, The Skull in the Rock. This find turned out to be a new species and was named Australipithecus Sediba, best known as just Sediba.

So we were so thrilled to see The Taung Child and Sediba we could not think much about anything else. But then came the surpise! Dr. Berger said, "Over here," pointing to plastic containers on the shelves in the vault, "is a new find, but we cannot talk about it yet because it is yet to be publically announced." He went on to say to look for the public unveiling in the September edition of National Geographic Magazine ( this was early August.) So we left South Africa after that week wondering what was in those plastic containers ( I refer to as a Box in the title of this Post) on the long shelves in the fossil vault of Wits University. Come to find out in September when the World was astounded by the find, it was Homo Naledi!!! I will speak more of this greatest find in 50 years in my next post. The point of his post is," Oh my God, we were in the same room with Homo Naledi!" How wild is that?? ( Please feel free to ask a question or make a comment.)

We are All One Species

Like many of you, I have had the fortunate experience to visit several Museums of the Smithsonian in Washington DC. Whether in the African American, Native American, Natural History or American History Museum, I was reminded once again that we are all one species ( Darwin, 1871). There are no differing races. There are no inferior and superior people. We all came from that small group of Modern Humans/Homo sapiens who came Out of Africa in 55,000 BC to inhabit the globe. We were the Aboriginals in Austrailia, the CroMagnons in Europe, and the Native Americans in America. And of course we were the Africans who remained in Africa as the San.

But the point is we are all one species. Once the last Neanderthal died 30,000 years ago we were alone ( almost)  on the planet. At one time there were 13 different premodern human groups living in Africa, but they eventually all became extinct and only one group of humans has survived. That group is us-- Homo Sapiens. We all have the same DNA. We mostly only breed with each other( The Neanderthals being the exception). These  are two defining features of a species. Think about it. We are all one common human species-- the only human species to surive on the earth. And we are all ONE.

This point struck home to me a number of years ago as I studied Human Origins. I thought of it again in 2015 on a tour of Southern African Human Origins fossils. And, I was reminded of it once again while walking through the Natural History and other Smithsonian Museums. In the Natural History Museum I saw our Human Origins story displayed in graphic detail. Suddenly all the Museums of the Smithsonian made sense. They are all about us! . So, the next time you are with any group of people, notice the differences in skin color, body size, facial features, culture, religion, history, sex, gender, etc., etc., etc. And then think, "But wow, we are all ONE."

Learning this scientific truth has changed my understanding of our global human community. If you ponder this truth along with me it might alter your understanding of all of us as well. 

Neuropsychoanalysis/Psychotherapy Consultant

• I want to begin this post with the resources  I use in  consulting with psychoanalytic clinicians  interested in neuropsychoanalysis/psychotherapy: 

I first ask the therapists to  either review  my " Eight Introductory Lectures on Neuropsychoanalysis/Psychotherapy", published here on my Blog (2023), or read my my compilation of these lectures in my (unpublished) Book/Training Manual, An Introduction to Neuropsychoanalytic Psychotherapy ( 2024). Then, in follow up Zoom consultation sessions we discuss and explore these readings. These didactic consultation sessions around these readings provide the clinicians with a sufficient introduction to the theory and technique of neuropsychoanslysis/psychotherapy. They then take this knowledge and apply it in their  work with their patients.  

In addition to working through the Book/Training Manual together,  I encourage the therapists to further read the works  of Mark Solms (the creator of neuropsychoanalysis), Jaak Panksepp, and others listed in my selected bibliography.  

If you are such a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist interested in learning neuropsychoanalytic  psychotherapy theory and technique by reading and discussing these writings with me, please leave a comment here on this  Blog  post and I will contact you. Or, you can email me directly at calanmeltonw@gmail.com. I am happy to offer this consultation as a Clinical Fellow of the International  Neuropsychoanalytic Society.