When a Virgin Galactic commercial flight soared into space on 8 September 2023, there were two Virgin Galactic pilots, an instructor and three passengers on board – as well as two fossils of ancient prehuman relatives from South Africa. Timothy Nash, a businessman, carried a clavicle belonging to Australopithecus sediba and the thumb bone of a Homo naledi specimen. The fossils’ brief journey – the VSS Unity’s flight lasted just an hour – was organised by palaeontologist Lee Berger, who led the team that discovered and described Homo naledi in 2015. Berger was granted an export permit in July by the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) to take the fossils from the country to the US launch site for VSS Unity. SAHRA is a “national administrative body responsible for the protection of South Africa’s cultural heritage”.
The event has drawn the ire of scores of human evolution researchers from South Africa and beyond. Some have labelled it “unethical” and a “publicity stunt”. Berger has not yet responded to the furore. In a statement quoted by Nature, SAHRA said it was “satisfied that the promotional benefit derived was appropriately weighted against the inherent risk of travel of this nature”.
The Conversation Africa asked Dipuo Winnie Kgotleng, director of the Palaeo-Research Institute at the University of Johannesburg, and Robyn Pickering, co-director of the Human Evolution Research Institute at the University of Cape Town, why the space flight created such unhappiness.
