Lazarus Kgasi walks with ease across a gently rolling landscape about an hour's drive outside of Pretoria, South Africa. A few trees are sprinkled here and there but it's mostly grass. Kgasi, a tall man with a big smile, knows the place well.
"We are going to see a fossil site in the Cradle of Humankind," he says, referring to the UNESCO World Heritage site that has produced a stunning trove of early hominid fossils, helping prove that the African continent was indeed the birthplace of humanity.
"This is where the story started," says Kgasi, age 52. "Every fossil here help[s] us to reconstruct the past — to tell the story of where do we come from."
When he arrives at a sunken pit of uneven stones and dirt that was once a cave, Kgasi says, "I hear voices of our human ancestors." Some of those ancestors left Africa to explore Europe. But others remained. "I'm the descendant of [those] that stayed in Africa," he reflects. "And hence my skin color. It's [a] bit darker to cater for the harsh African sun."
That darker skin color meant that Kgasi might have never ended up as a professional paleontologist.
This is the story of how Kgasi became a prominent junior curator at the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in a field dominated by white researchers.
Digging without credit
Kgasi is one of eight children. Back when he finished high school, he knew full well what he had to do — find a job to support his family.
"I felt that I needed just to chip in and help," he says. "When you are strong enough to go and work, it's what every Black boy at my age do."
He did clerical work. He tried his hand as an auto mechanic. Then, on a whim, in 2000, he applied for a job as a fossil digger in the Cradle of Humankind. "I just picked it up as a random job," he says.
Kgasi was joining the ranks of the numerous Black men who, over the years, dug out fossils for white researchers (some from South Africa and others from overseas) who examined and identified them — and then took credit for them.
"Black people were not viewed as equals," he says. "They were viewed as their names were not warrant to be on research articles. By depriving them that knowledge, you basically control them. You are just a laborer."
Black contributions were simply erased. It's a practice that began during apartheid, "a very dark period for South Africa," says Kgasi. And it continued after apartheid ended in 1994, including the time when he was hired.
For months, Kgasi didn't know why he was digging. He had never learned about human evolution or the role that his country had played in reconstructing the story of our ancestors. He just dug.
But after about two years, Kgasi began to wonder — what exactly were these things he was pulling out of the earth? So he asked the American and European researchers he was working for, and they started explaining things to him.
"I was one of the luckiest one to be taught why this is important and why are we doing this," recalls Kgasi. "Because that's where I believe everything started lifting off for me. I started having a lot of researchers sharing their knowledge with me and treating me as an equal."
A natural scientist
In Kgasi, the researchers noticed something familiar: the makings of a scientist.
"They saw a potential in me that you have an interest in these fossils," he says. "And they start giving me more responsibilities."
The researchers put Kgasi in charge of the field site. He began doing preliminary identifications of the fossils before handing them over. He got hired by the local university, first as a fossil excavator and then as a manager of the other excavators. And soon, he started doing his own research, which he continues to this day.
Kgasi makes his way down to one of the vertical surfaces of the pit and scrapes it gently.
He reveals a small chunk of something white. "It's a bone," he says with an air of reverence. "I would say it's something of a clavicle around 3.5 million years old." He believes that it's from a non-human primate that once lived here.
This is the kind of fossil that Kgasi is looking for. He wants to find the animals that once shared this landscape with our ancestors. That's because to know how they once lived, Kgasi says it's essential to understand the world they inhabited.
"With the hominids only, we cannot paint that picture of what they saw to tell you about what the environment looked like," he argues. "You need other extinct animals so that you put everything together. In a simplest term, you need the whole zoo."
Over the years, Kgasi has helped fill out that zoo by unearthing bones from frogs, monkeys, birds and the first fossil snake fang to be found in the Cradle of Humankind.
And then there's Kgasi's crown jewel.
Kgasi's dynamite discovery
Inside the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria, in the room adjacent to the main entrance, sits a large display case. An array of 1.8 million-year-old fossilized bones is laid out on a red carpet. They belong to Panthera shawi, a giant prehistoric cat.
"This one is a male," says Kgasi. "It's twice the size of an African male lion. It's huge."
Kgasi could barely contain himself in 2015 when he discovered this specimen in one of the caves in the Cradle of Humankind. He was off the ground, suspended by a series of ropes, to chip away into what was once the cave wall.
"They have to beg me to come down from the ropes to come and have lunch cause I didn't want to stop," he says. "I was screaming, 'I found this! I found a femur!'"
Much of Kgasi's excitement came from the fact that for years, all that had been known about this species was derived from a single tooth found in the late 1940s by Robert Broom, a renowned white paleontologist. In other words, there wasn't much to go on.
And here Kgasi was, pulling bone after bone out of the soft rock, ultimately extracting the entire skeleton and a chunk of the skull. Its sheer size revealed just how formidable a hunter this feline was.
"It will help us to know: Were these the big cats that ate our ancestors?" he says. "That were chasing our ancestors? These are the things that we're trying to understand."
Subsequently, Kgasi found an adult female of the species and six cubs.
This finding, among others, helped him earn the respect of certain corners of the paleontological community.
"I've just been really fortunate to work with Laz and to count him as a friend, getting pretty close to decades, if not over," says Justin Adams, a vertebrate paleontologist at Monash University in Australia. He says that Kgasi is "a genuine paleontologist" and "representative of the hidden history of Black South African contributions to our discipline. Laz's passion transcends the categorizations of a job."
Kgasi routinely sets aside fossils that he's sure that Adams will appreciate. "He knows intrinsically from his training and his experience what actually does rise to the merit of — this requires attention," says Adams. "He's processed the first articulated skeleton of an extinct hyena that's ever been found anywhere in Africa. And he's the only person I would trust with it."
A magical mentor
Everything that Kgasi knows he has learned by doing. He never went to college or graduate school.
Perhaps due to his lack of formal training, he recognizes the power of a solid education. This is one reason he spends a good chunk of his time speaking to young people in the field and at the museum — to encourage them to consider studying paleontology.
"It's so magical, if I may put it that way, to bring them in here and they sit down," he says. "You look like them. You are telling the story of these fossils in their own language, Setswana."
This matters because the global language of science tends to be English. So by speaking Setswana, Kgasi is making these discoveries accessible and recognizable to young Black South Africans.
Kgasi also helps mentor graduate students like Boitshepo Motsodisa, who's pursuing her Ph.D. in paleontology at the University of Pretoria.
"I think if he can do it, then no matter the odds, that means that I can have a successful career in this field," she says. "So representation matters a lot for me and it's what has kept me going."
That motivation has helped her navigate the challenges that she's run into as one of the few Black students in her department.
"It's not very overt," she explains. "But I had trouble. One of my reviewers did not think that my work was of scientific value. And you question yourself."
However, Kgasi has zero doubts of what Motsodisa is capable of.
"In my personal view, she's going to reach the sky," he says proudly. "She is the hope of South Africa. She's got big shoes to fill. And I think she's got big feet. So that means those shoes will be filled."
Motsodisa's eyes are wide. "No pressure at all," she says with a laugh.
For Kgasi, the students and young people he engages with are heirs to a powerful legacy.
"These fossils are not mine," he says. "They belong to everybody in South Africa."
This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
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