https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFOxfjs53u8

At about 4 minutes in, Lee Berger remarks

". . Don Johanson tells me that in East Africa there is
something like a one in ten million chance of finding
a hominin fossil -- if you know that they are already
on the landscape . . . [that is] of ten million fossils
found, one could be a hominin, and almost always
a tooth. . ."

Berger goes on to remark that the "one in 250,000"
number he gave earlier for hominin to antelope
fossils in Southern Africa was much higher; although
countered by the fact that all of them (up to that
point) were encased in breccia, and that each
needed over 20,000 person-hours of slow tedious
extraction work to be removed from the material
that encased them

He doesn't (as far as I know) present any reason why
the South African number should be forty (40) times
higher than the East African one. He has probably not
decided why hominin corpses were much more likely
than antelopes, etc., to finish up in pits in caves.

It's possible that investigations around the h.naledi
findings will throw some light on the problem.
IMHO SA australopiiths regularly slept in caves
(of the 'Rising Star' kind, with narrow entrances --
they certainly didn't sleep in trees!)

But: ten million to one!

Hominins were rare -- exceedingly rare -- on the
landscape. And the same would have applied
everywhere else throughout the Old World.

What does this mean?

It means that hominins were NEVER hunters -- in
any normal sense. If they had been, they'd have
necessarily been reasonably effective. They'd
have occupied a 'hunting niche' similar to those
of other carnivores and omnivores. Their
populations would have been, maybe, around
one hundredth those of antelope; certainly more
than a thousandth. And not one-ten-millionth!

Yet the 'hunting myth' persists. This is from the
paper published two days ago (8 July 2021) in
Nature on body and brain size:

" . . As such, our findings can be related to changes in subsistence strategies
toward more frequent and systematic hunting of larger-sized bovids in these
environments, in association with cognitive changes toward more complex
weapons and coordinated group activity . . "

How can a discipline that pretends to be a 'science'
base itself on such obvious myths?