Cradle of Humankind

This guide to the Cradle of Humankind caves near Johannesburg starts with a 1947 dynamite blast, when paleontologist Robert Broom cracked open ancient limestone and pulled a two-million-year-old skull, nicknamed Mrs Ples, from the rubble. It follows Broom's decades-long conviction that humanity began in Africa, and a museum drawer, decades later, holding a box mislabeled as monkey bones. Listen for what a patient researcher spent fifteen years freeing from the stone.