麻豆淫院

Anthropologist Lee Berger and his team at the University of the Witwatersrand, working within the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, have published their most extensive evidence yet of deliberate burial by Homo naledi, a small brained hominin that walked the Earth with several current modern human cousins over 240,000 years ago.

It began with a Facebook call for short, skinny and fit anthropologists who "must not be claustrophobic." There is a backstory to the beginning of course, but it is here in this Facebook advert for the smallest in stature and bravest of heart to drop everything and fly to South Africa where the team was assembled.

Their task: delve 30 meters down and explore an over 100 meter-long topography of a treacherous and at times impossibly narrow cave system.

The original announcement of the find in 2015 was met with amazement, some skepticism and a hint of controversy. Amazing because it was impossible to imagine the discovery of a new species of hominin, not by a single bone or fragmented skull, but by a trove of over 1,500 well-preserved fossilized bones from a minimum of 15 individuals, many articulated in place, buried in a cave that had been undisturbed for possibly more than 300,000 years.

With so many fossils awaiting excavation, the team dubbed the most concentrated area within the Dinaledi Chamber the "Puzzle Box."

Naledi has a unique configuration, with feet, wrists and hands similar to a modern human, yet hips and shoulders more akin to a more ancient australopith form. Small-bodied, with an estimated height of under 5 feet tall and a brain around the size of a 3-month-old modern human infant, it sits well apart from other known hominins of its time.

Berger and his team announced their initial conclusions of naledi burial ahead of any publication or peer review, and so soon after the discovery that it raised concerns in the anthropology community.

Part of the concern comes from the lack of outside experts being invited to inspect the finds, something the current study has been more open to as the current paper includes authors from six countries and 28 institutions.

It was a monumental claim. Intentional burial had been considered a very current modern human act, one that had been weaved into a narrative of superior cognitive abilities, of symbolism, sentimentality and even supernatural beliefs.

Neanderthal burial sites were already in the midst of decades-long debates about whether or not they were intentional, with anthropologist Ralph Solecki's famous "flower burial" at Shanidar Cave in Iraq taking center stage.

Ultimately, flower pollen found below the interred Shanidar Neanderthals was determined to have most likely been placed there by burrowing bees, not remnants from offerings. But that scenario also would have required soil to have been dug out in advance of placement, a find that both confirmed the intentionality of the burial, and removed some layer of sentimental symbolism.

Since then, multiple other potential Neanderthal burial sites have been found, along with evidence of cave paintings, symbolic artifacts and advanced methods of manufacturing resins for attaching stone and bone hunting tools.

These discoveries, along with tool and possibly raft use among the small-brained hobbit height, Homo floresiensis, have set the stage for dramatically reassessing the cognitive capabilities of current modern humans' ancient cousins.

In the study, "Evidence for deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi," in eLife, researchers designed a minimal cultural-burial hypothesis to test against alternative noncultural processes across multiple contexts in the Dinaledi Subsystem, aiming to assess whether skeletal concentrations and their sediments reflect intentional interment.

Results identify two new areas with concentrations of naledi fossils. Around 90 skeletal elements and 51 teeth are described, with at least three late juvenile individuals identified by dental association and position.

A substantially intact right foot and ankle with adjacent lower limb bones, partial right hand with wrist elements, a series of ribs, and mandibular and maxillary teeth in correct occlusal order are all from one individual.

Sediment evidence and clast morphology indicate dry-cave autobrecciation without water flow or size sorting, and spatial relationships exclude burial by slumping or spontaneous sediment movement.

A single stone object occurs within the Hill Antechamber Feature in an orientation discordant with both floor slope and bone positions, the context of which remains under analysis.

Broader subsystem mapping shows floor drains and constricted passageways that would obstruct mass sediment transport from the Hill Antechamber into the Dinaledi Chamber. Reworked areas lower on the slope contain scattered fragments and a cercopithecoid maxilla consistent with a baboon.

Authors conclude that cultural burial best fits the combined lines of evidence across features with whole bodies entering the subsystem, articulated elements far from any entry point, a lack of carnivore marks, and a dry cave environment ruling out water transport that could have carried bones to the location.

Many of the well articulated bones show signs of nearby disturbance, as though buried and then later digging partially disturbs part of the remains, perhaps as a new burial location is being sought.

Even with the large sample population the Rising Star cave offers, there are few other clues to their way of life. Within the Rising Star cave system is the only location where Homo naledi has been found, and it shows no signs of habitation, only a place to bury the dead.

As a burial site, the location is far from convenient, requiring the living to have carried the dead bodies deep into the cave, climbing and crawling their way to the burial location in absolute darkness, or perhaps guided by the light of fire. Even with the aid of fire, navigating so deep into the cave could be dangerous. So why risk it?

Could it be sentimentality, or a supernatural belief drawing the naledi back to the same location to deposit their dead? There are, of course, practical benefits to burial. It covers the smell of the decomposing body and prevents that smell from attracting predators. It also prevents former loved ones from witnessing the rendering or happening upon loose body parts as the carcass is taken apart by multiple carnivorous scavengers.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the find is that it exists at all. A previously undiscovered human species that once walked Earth, persisted long enough in the region to bury its dead over generations, and did so over 100 thousand years earlier than the first current modern human burial evidence.

That only a single cave site has preserved this knowledge, hints that for as much as we know about hominin evolution and origins, there could be still other archaic humans, still more ancient mysteries to uncover.

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