Professor Berger found the cave containing the new hominid fossil using Google Earth.
in March 2008, Professor Lee Berger from Witswatersrand University in Johannesburg started to use Google Earth to map various known caves and to locate new fossil deposits by learning to identify what sites looked like in satellite images.
With the help of the navigation facility and high-resolution satellite imagery in Google Earth, Professor Berger went on to find almost 500 previously unidentified caves and fossil sites, even though the area is one of the most explored in Africa.
One of these fossil sites yielded the remarkable discovery of a new species, Australopithecus sediba.
This species was an upright walker that shared many physical traits with the earliest known species of the genus homo—and its introduction into the fossil record might answer some key questions about our earliest ancestry in Africa.
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