Lee Berger: Australopithecus sediba was a transformational moment when I first saw it, even though I didn’t know it by name then, because we would later name it. I had had a fantastic scientific career, but one full of huge ups and downs, which are typical of many people. I had rocketed to a position as chair of a very prestigious research unit at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, at a very young age, in my early 30s. I had taken over from a very powerful and famous paleoanthropologist named Philip Valentine Tobias. I had made some discoveries. When I first got to South Africa to do my Ph.D., I discovered two little hominid teeth. Those two teeth were the first new early hominids from the site of Gladysvale discovered in Southern Africa in 48 years. They appeared in National Geographic. Two teeth! That’s how rare this stuff was at the time. I had done other work, looking at what killed the Taung Child. I had looked at body proportions. But I had not made major hominid discoveries, because they are just that rare. I had got into the type of ups and downs and wars I’d had. Units closed, units reopened. I’d had the most ferocious fights with colleagues, and one of the odd things about paleoanthropology is what would normally be just an internal academic spat that might appear in a conference review ends up on the front pages of The New York Times in paleoanthropology. Those kinds of things were happening to me.