homo naledi The little hominid is still causing a stir. This little hominid was discovered in 2013 in a cave in South Africa by the team of paleoanthropologist Lee Berger. Did he bury his dead in caves? Did he carve signs into the walls? Had he, with his brain the size of an orange, developed a spirituality, a symbolism? This is what the American researcher, affiliated with the National Geographic Society, claims.
On June 5, 2023, Lee Berger put forward these hypotheses in several not yet peer-reviewed papers (preprints), indicating that they would appear in the journal. eLifeA few weeks later, he appeared in a documentary broadcast by Netflix, leading the investigation into the very heart of the Rising Star Cave, located near Johannesburg.
He supported the revolutionary idea that this extinct cousin of debated status could have developed funerary rituals two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, long before the first burials attributed to our own species and to Neanderthals, dated around one hundred and twenty thousand years ago, in the Middle East. In a new preprint published online on August 12, he reiterates this hypothesis, providing new analyses aimed at answering the numerous objections he has raised.
Warnings
In fact, since June 6, 2023, in The conversationA formal critique of this thesis was published online. Then, on July 13, Lee Berger’s articles published the day before in eLife It appeared accompanied by anonymous comments commissioned from experts, according to a specific operating method of the magazine. These Opinions were severe. E-life He himself included in the header of each manuscript an evaluation considering premature the conclusion that H. naledi would have intentionally buried his dead. All this accompanied by an initial response from Lee Berger’s team.
These warnings by eLife Some specialists considered them too late, while Lee Berger’s work, which had previously been rejected by the journal Science – had already benefited from widespread publicity. “That’s what politicians do: they say what they want and they know that when the fact-checkers come, people will have moved on.”said Jamie Hodgkins (University of Colorado, Denver), who had agreed to review the papers, in a YouTube podcast.
The criticism went further. In November 2023, María Martinon-Torres (National Center for Research on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain), already a signatory of the article by The conversationand his colleagues published, in the Journal of Human Evolutiona study titled “There is no scientific evidence thathomo naledi buried their dead and produced cave art.” According to them, the fossils could also have accumulated naturally at the bottom of the cave.
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