The Homo naledi situation

 

The above presentation is about our fossil relative Homo naledi, given by a very nerdy specimen of Homo sapiens. The first 15 minutes are kind of comprehensible, the rest is very technical stuff perhaps only of interest to paleoanthropologists (who I´m sure can´t be as many as 100,000 – the number of subscribers to this particular YouTube channel). 

That being said (LOL), Homo naledi was an interesting cat (or hominin), to be sure. First, it was rather “primitive” and yet the fossils found in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa were dated to circa 300,000 YBP. They “should” be much, much older. Second, it has been suggested by some scientists that this primitive human relative buried its dead. The findings are controversial. Third, one team of researchers claimed that in addition to ritual burials, Homo naledi also made art and controlled fire. The claims were made in conjunction with a Netflix documentary in a paper that wasn´t peer reviewed in the “classical” manner, leading to all kinds of flame wars (especially after the team were accused of incompetence by other scientists). 

Fourth, a recent paper – the one highlighted in the YouTube clip above – strongly suggests that there is *something* strange about the fossils in the Rising Star cave system. The short story is that the fossils – while clearly from different individuals – hardly display any variation of the kind you would expect in virtually any population sample. If the site isn´t a burial site, this suggests a strongly inbred population which somehow ended up in the cave through natural means. Of course, another possibility is that Homo naledi did bury its dead, the lack of variation being the result of conscious sorting. Only a certain kind of individuals were buried in the Dinaledi Chamber. 

The YouTube video above tries a middle ground: maybe Homo naledi was intelligent enough to dispose of its dead, but still lacked ritual burials or a symbolic culture? “Ants do the same”. Sure, but corvids have sometimes been observed carrying out virtual “burial rituals”, and they are presumably less intelligent than an ape-man…

Something tells me the Homo naledi situation will continue, perhaps for another 300,000 years.