Convoluted human evolution: criticism about H. naledi (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 06, 2024, 15:37 (110 days ago) @ David Turell

Questions about whether they buried dead:

https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-human-relative-really-bury-dead?utm_sou...

"A little over a year ago, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger and his team made an extraordinary claim about a diminutive hominin, Homo naledi, whose fossils his team discovered a decade ago in the dark and twisting narrows of South Africa’s Rising Star Cave system. The researchers argued that despite having a brain about one-third the size of a modern human’s, H. naledi deliberately buried its dead about 250,000 years ago amid geometric designs carved deep in the cave.

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"The initial eLife reviews were scathing. Now, a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal PaleoAnthropology late last month concludes there’s no evidence in the cave sediments that H. naledi intentionally buried its dead. “It’s a really exhaustive paper,” says Elizabeth Sawchuk, a bioarchaeologist with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History who studies ancient burials in Africa. “They assess all the evidence, which they find insufficient.”

"Some paleoanthropologists say the Berger team exploited eLife’s approach to raise the profile of unreviewed conclusions. “I don’t think anything has united the paleoanthropological community like this has, in saying, ‘This is not how you should do it,’” says Andy Herries, a paleoanthropologist and geoarchaeologist at La Trobe University who has worked at Rising Star Cave but wasn’t involved in the eLife preprints. “And we are a group of people that generally don’t agree on anything.”

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"In 2015, deep inside the Dinaledi chamber in Rising Star Cave, Berger and colleagues found fragmented skeletons from multiple individuals partially erupting from the cave floor. The bones of some skeletons were arranged as in life, whereas others were scattered. Limestone walls nearby were etched in crisscrossing patterns that the authors ascribed to H. naledi artists, although critics later suggested the marks could have been made by natural processes or by more recent visitors to the cave.

"...in November 2023, a paper by a group including Herries and María Martinón-Torres of Spain’s National Research Center for Human Evolution (CENIEH), who helped develop the x-ray fluorescence-based technique, argued the Berger team hadn’t ruled out the possibility that the bones might have landed in the cave by natural means, such as washing in with flooding water.

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"Foecke and colleagues note their criticism doesn’t imply H. naledi couldn’t have buried its dead—just that the evidence provided doesn’t support such a conclusion.

“'It is a very good critique,” Herries says.

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"Herries fears public perceptions of H. naledi’s symbolic capabilities and behavioral complexity will forever be influenced by the Berger team’s initial publicity push. “It’s very difficult to walk ideas back once they’re out there.'”

Comment: Until the furious argument is settled, my guess is H. naledi did not bury the dead and are simply another early Homo species.