The ancient human species Homo naledi vanished from the Earth, leaving behind a shocking mystery in the Rising Star cave system.
A recent study published in the journal Paleoanthropology seeks to uncover the truth about what sent shockwaves through the scientific community when excavated last year: A cave structured like a burial site, over 300,000 years old, belonging to a different human species.
Specifically, what paleoanthropologists refer to as the “bombshell” within the Rising Star cave system in South Africa is a series of Homo naledi human remains.
Expedition teams working at Rising Star and some of the Homo naledi remains collected from this cave system – (Photo: eLife/National Geographic).
The remains at Rising Star are not simply scattered on the ground or randomly trapped in sediment.
Instead, these fossils form nearly intact skeletons, resting “peacefully” and neatly within the earth in a rather orderly manner.
In other words, it appears they were buried. A prominent study led by Dr. Lee Berger from the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) supports this hypothesis.
If this is accurate, it would be a groundbreaking discovery.
Situated at the evolutionary crossroads between humans and great apes, Homo naledi was not previously thought to possess the capability for such complex cognitive actions.
Historically, burial customs were considered the “privilege” of modern Homo sapiens, our species. Or at least, only the closest “relatives,” the Neanderthals, were believed to have practiced such customs tens of thousands of years ago. Therefore, both the dating and method of the “burial site” of Homo naledi are shocking.
However, a new research group led by Dr. Kimberly Foecke from George Mason University (USA) has identified a loophole. They explain that Dr. Berger’s team analyzed soil samples from the cave, examining the chemical composition and particle size of the soil, arguing that if the remains in the cave were intentionally buried, the soil above — the soil that humans would have excavated and filled into the grave — would differ from the soil below.
Nevertheless, the article’s description of this process lacks important details in the soil analysis, rendering the data collection methodology unclear.
More importantly, Dr. Foecke’s research team conducted a more specific chemical composition analysis of the soil in this area.
They found no significant differences between the soil on the bodies and the soil in the rest of the cave.
This does not mean that Homo naledi may not have buried their dead. There is insufficient evidence for that.
It is highly likely that the bodies were naturally buried over hundreds of thousands of years.
This aligns with the controversies raised after the preprint of the study by Dr. Berger and colleagues was published online.
The study also did not pass the peer review process and has not been officially published in a scientific journal, partly due to those conflicting opinions.
Yet, we should still hope to find more evidence about Homo naledi to better understand this mysterious species.
Homo naledi went extinct 300,000 years ago, coinciding with the period when Homo sapiens emerged. They are a different species but belong to the same genus Homo as us.
Nonetheless, this ancient human species is described as having a more “primitive” appearance compared to many other ancient humans, resembling more of an ape-like figure than a true human.
