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Encore - Homo Naledi and the Cave of Bones Controversy - TAS 246
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This week we tackle one of our favorite topics - controversy! Last summer, the team working on the Rising Star Cave site in South Africa released a series of pre-prints making some incredible claims about the pre-human species, Homo Naledi. They were closely followed by the Netflix documentary, Cave of Bones which captured the attention of the public. However, other researchers are pushing back, claiming lack of solid evidence and published peer reviewed research. Join us while we look at both sides of the debate, and let us know where you land!
Links
- Controversial Claims About Homo Naledi Are Stirring Up Evolution
- Enigmatic Hominin Seemingly Buried Dead and Carved Symbols 100,000 Years Before Modern Humans
- Unknown: Cave of Bones - Netflix Documentary
- No scientific evidence that Homo Naledi buried their dead and produced rock art
- Cave of Bones Explorer’s Club Talk with Dr. Lee Berger
- 241,000 to 335,000 Years Old Rock Engravings Made by Homo naledi in the Rising Star Cave system, South Africa
Contact
- Chris Webster
[email protected] - Rachel Roden
[email protected]
RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Introduction to 'Cave of Bones' and its Controversy
00:00:04
Speaker
You're listening to The Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Archaeology Show, episode 246. On today's show, we talk about the controversial Netflix documentary, Cave of Bones. Let's dig a little deeper and hopefully find some more tools in that deep, deep cave. Welcome to the show, everyone. Merry Christmas.
00:00:41
Speaker
Oh, wow. It's Christmas Eve, isn't it? Points to anybody who gets that reference. Like literally anybody, you're my best friend. So it's Christmas Eve when we're releasing
Discussion of Homo naledi's Discovery in Rising Star Cave
00:00:55
Speaker
this episode. So our Christmas present to you is talking about, you know, so but scandal Scandal? It's not a scandal. It's not really a scandal. It's just a little bit of a controversy, I guess, maybe a little bit. Every discovery is a controversy. It's not that either. You're making something out of nothing. I am not. Go look at all of the links and sources that we have linked in our show notes. But so what we're talking about today is Home on the Lettie and the documentary on Netflix called Unknown Cave of Bones. Yeah.
00:01:31
Speaker
And I think we heard about this documentary when it came out over the summer, but like we were busy, we were traveling a lot, we just did not get around to watching it when it first came out, but it sort of circled back into our into our sphere sometime recently and we were like, oh yeah, that thing, let's watch it and talk about it. and So that's what we're doing today.
00:01:50
Speaker
Indeed. so Take a look at the links. If you haven't seen the documentary, go watch it. If you don't have Netflix or you knowt want Netflix, or for whatever reason, there's something that I link to. It's ah in our notes as, let me go up here, Cave of Bones Explorers Club Talk with Dr. Lee Berger. I think I mentioned this on the last show. I was in a hotel room and I couldn't get my Netflix to work because I wanted to watch it while I was on ah on a client meeting.
00:02:15
Speaker
And so I just looked for something on YouTube and the explorers, he's part of the explorers club. He's a member and they did a talk earlier this year. I think it was in the early, early fall. Yeah. And it's, it's really good. I mean, yeah it's, it's got video, it's got pictures. It's, it's him talking about what made up this whole documentary, but it's more of a, I wouldn't say a scientific lecture, but it is a little bit more... More presentation. Yeah, a little more than the documentary sensationalism that they do. The documentary is super slick, but it does have those sensationalized moments, whereas it sounds like that is a little bit more information presentation sort of a thing. It's good. It's very engaging. It's about an hour. There's some questions and answers at the end. And it's really good. And the documentary is just a little over an hour, too. So it's like an hour and a half. Yeah, it's not a huge commitment. But it's totally worth watching for sure. So let's start this off by talking about Homo Naledi and the Rising Star Cave and what that's all about. Then we'll get into the documentary. Yeah, for sure. So, Homo naledi is the most recent addition to the human family tree, or not human, but the pre-human, what is the word I'm looking for, paleoanthropological family tree, you know? And naledi is the mean star. Okay, by the way gotcha. Yeah, that's where I did not end up, but that makes sense because of rising star cave Yeah, they were found in the rising star cave in South Africa.
Dr. Lee Berger's Role and Homo naledi's Characteristics
00:03:35
Speaker
Yeah, and in 2013 I think is when the bulk of the discovery of these remains happened Yeah, at least the initial discoveries. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, and they really figured out what they had going on there And it was dr. Lee Berger here who's who's lived in South Africa his old career basically. He's actually from Georgia, which I didn't know and But yeah, he's lived in South Africa for a little career because he's a paleoanthropologist. If you want to be a paleoanthropologist, you need to go where the paleoanthropology is. South Africa has long been a hub of this kind of stuff. Partly because of the cave systems. You mean it's not Georgia? I'm shocked. It's really not Georgia. Although Georgia, the country has a lot of cool stuff too. They do. At least that's where the Denisovans were. Oh yeah, good point, good point. Anyway, he's been there and it was something interesting. His son actually found a rock that was a skull of an early home walk. I can't remember which one it was. Yeah, I remember hearing about that too.
00:04:32
Speaker
So the group of individuals found in the cave have this interesting mixture of human and ape features. This would be the Homo naledi. They were not like anything that had previously discovered, which is why they pushed to give them a new species name. And as far as I can tell, this has been 10 years since this happened. So it's pretty well set in the academic community that Homo naledi is a new species. They're like a new side branch on the, on the family tree, essentially. right and There have been more bones found of Homo naledi than any other yeah animal species in existence ever. yeah right sure i mean Besides maybe Neanderthal. but for I don't even know if that's true, to be honest with you. i mean There are so many individuals in this cave.
00:05:14
Speaker
that it's irrefutable that this is a new species. Regardless of what you think about it, it's a new species. It definitely is. And this is a new, very old species. They date to somewhere from 236,000 to 335,000 years ago. So very, very old, pre-human, pre-modern human for sure. And I think it's a little unclear still where they fall as far as in the family tree line, if they're leading to another species. They're not in the human branch, I don't think at all, but they could be going, I don't know, I'm not sure exactly how they fit into the family tree, so. Yeah. Some of their features that make them what they are is they have a heavy brow ridge, much like some of the people I went to college with. They're flat nosed and have a protruding mouth. That was really mean to the people you went to college with. What's wrong with them? Actually, there was this one guy who was super cool, very smart, but we always used to say he had definite Neanderthal genes because He had the biggest brower I've ever seen in my life. Really? Well, you know what? It still exists in modern humans today. He was cool, though. He knew it. But anyway, so protruding mouth like an ape, their teeth, however, were more similar to modern humans than apes. Their brains are very small, which is one of the reasons why
00:06:29
Speaker
If you're going to build a controversy around this thing, yeah a lot of people, when the research first came out, were like, there's no way an individual or a being with brains this size could do the things that you're saying they're doing. yes that is Because we didn't have evidence of it before that. yeah It's the heart of the controversy, really, is how small. their Their brains are about a third of the size of a modern human brain, like about the size of an orange. which It's quite small, really, when you think about it. I know. I'm like an orange that you find at a fruit stand or an orange at the grocery store, which is the size of our brains. Like a naval orange or a clementine? Which kind are we talking about here? What kind of orange?
Challenges of Cave Exploration
00:07:03
Speaker
They walked upright, but had slightly longer arms than humans, although when you look at the documentary, they show the hand, and it is a human hand. Yeah, but the fingers are a lot longer for grabbing. But the shape is more human, whereas with an ape-like species, a more ape-like thing, the thumb is in a different orientation, more for grabbing onto branches and things. Yeah, true. Height-wise, they would have been in the 4'8 to 5'2 range, and they were super skinny and much better adapted to climbing than humans. So you're like a tall Naledi.
00:07:38
Speaker
If I foot three, so I would be a giant among their people. Rude. As yet, there is no evidence for tool making by this group, but we will get there. No hush, we will get there. I don't know why you would write that since we will get there. Because that is the current agreed upon but research for the this group of people, or group of pre-humans.
00:08:05
Speaker
The Rising Star Cave has, so but let's talk about the Rising Star Cave now. It's a really, really cool cave system. It has a few man-made openings from mining activity about a century ago. yeah And that is the the way that they're getting into the cave today. The natural opening that would have been used by the Homo naledi has collapsed and is not accessible anymore. But fortunately, miners have created an entrance for us. Yeah, it was only about 10 meters away from where their command center was yeah that they had, which is what they call the area where basically they had all the camera and audio feeds running up to because Lee Berger, I mean, we'll get to it, but yeah you know he he didn't go down into the cave every day right like Billy and other people did because it was very hard to get in there.
00:08:49
Speaker
But they were watching every step of the way yeah know through these camera feeds. They had eyeballs on the whole thing. So it was really cool that from a technology standpoint what they had to set up in order to keep track of all the excavations. Because a lot of the people heading these activities, the other guy, John Hawk, I think his name was, or Hawks, something like that, he was not able to go in the cave either. yeah I've met John Hawks. Oh, have you? OK. He's not a small guy either. Yeah. yeah I mean, it doesn't take a lot to not be able to go in this cave. So yeah anyway, of so from the command center, you start heading down into the cave and you reach this first tight passage that they call the Superman's crawl. And you can imagine what that would be like. It's literally like you have to crawl down, like through this opening and you're sort of pushing your gear in front of you or maybe attaching it to your foot and pulling it behind you, depending on the circumstance. So it's a very, very tight, tight crawl. It looked like. Although, it looks like most people could fit through that. You just have to be comfortable like crawling through a tight space. Well, it's caving. You have to be comfortable in all kinds of tight spaces. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. That opens up into what's called the Dragon's Back Chamber, which is tall and has room for a bunch of people to work together. This is the area where the current excavations and by current, we mean like recently. Like this recent season, yeah yeah. That's what those are focused on.
00:10:07
Speaker
Yeah, they show that a little bit in the documentary where they're working on some areas in that front, that that Dragon's Back Chamber area, which is like the first big chamber. From there you climb up what they call the Dragon's Back Ridge, which is basically straight up almost as high as the Cave entrance. entrance And if I remember right, it's called that because it's it's very spiky, but it looks like it's a lot of rockfall too. Like the ceiling collapsed down onto this. It does look like that. It may not have been like that when Naledi was climbing up it.
00:10:34
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder what kind of they didn't really talk about what the orientation of the cave would have been when the Naledi were using it. It might not be able to tell. They might not be able to tell. I wonder if they've had geologists look at it and be like, well, this looks like it fell more recently or whatever, because that that would be very important information, which we will get to later on as you know, the skeptics of this documentary basically are talking about, you know, how they could have gotten back there and why they would have gone back there. Yeah.
00:11:01
Speaker
Okay, so after you climb Dragon's Back Ridge, at the top, you have to drop down what's called the chute. And this is a 12 meter vertical shaft, and this is the problem for anybody who's larger than, yeah you know, well, a pretty tiny person. I think they said it was 18 centimeters. Yeah. That is at its narrow. What is that like?
00:11:23
Speaker
That's not a lot. Eight inches No, it's eight inches. You are sucking in your stomach the whole time. It's not it's easy. Yeah. I mean, if you're a woman, you're probably binding your boobs in order to squeeze through there because I can't imagine how you could do that. So anyway, very, very, very tight shaft and also vertical. So you're climbing down while you're trying to squeeze through.
00:11:46
Speaker
Once you get to the bottom of the chute, you enter what's called a hill anti-chamber.
Theories on Homo naledi's Burial Practices
00:11:49
Speaker
And then from there, there's a very narrow passage which takes you to the Dinoletti chamber, where the new species was initially discovered yeah and and lots of it. yeah So let's get into the controversy just a little bit as we end this segment. Yeah, so over the summer, Lee Berger and his team of researchers released what's called a series of pre-prints about their recent finds. And I would i had not heard of pre-prints before, so that was new to me, but basically they are pre-peer reviewed research publications. It's kind of like a look what we found or look what we did or here's something cool that's coming out soon. But it's kind of like veiled in this
00:12:30
Speaker
sort of scientific academic way because they come out in association with these academic journals or or whatever. so But they're called preprints. The research is not peer reviewed yet. And in this particular case, if the claims that they make in the preprints are true, it'll really upend what we know about human evolution and early human behavior. So that is the controversy. and That's what we're going to talk about.
00:12:57
Speaker
as we go through sort of deconstructing the documentary in the next couple of segments. All right, we'll do that on the other side of the break. Back in a minute. Welcome back to episode 246 of The Archaeology Show, and if you haven't watched it already, go check out the Netflix Unknown K-Fap Bones show. Yes, spoilers about to happen. Yeah, because if you haven't seen it, you're about to see it virtually through us. Yeah, we're going to walk you through it. yeah So my first impression is regardless of what you think about the conclusions of this documentary, it is really freaking cool. It is really cool. It is really well done. You get this really close look at a super unique excavation. They really feature the archeology. You know, they show the grid setup where they're excavating the different units and the different features, which are the the ah quote unquote burials, which we'll get to. yeah
00:13:52
Speaker
like They really, really do feature the archeology, and I have to give them really big props for that. They did such a good job. They made it interesting. They made it cool. And I guess the site itself is cool, so like they didn't have to work too hard to make that look cool, but it was really cool. So, for this documentary, they almost certainly did not get camera people down into this cave. Only because... No? You don't think so? No, no, no. I don't think so, but you have to be like...
00:14:17
Speaker
a real caver to get down there, yeah and the people, the archaeologists they had going down there, and the um exploration technicians, I think they called them, going down there. I mean, these people were experienced cavers. That's why they were going down there. And I think if Lee Berger had been able to fit into the Dental Eddy Cave, hu we wouldn't have any of this video footage.
00:14:37
Speaker
Oh. Because who videos their excavation like this? Yeah. The reason we have most of this is because he needed to see every single minute from above. Yeah, because he couldn't go down there. Right, and the other people as well. So I think we benefited by his girth.
00:14:51
Speaker
in and anybody's girth. It's a very small percentage of the population that could even fit in here. True, but they did have a camera on the more recent excavations and it does seem like that was done by somebody who at least knows how to work a camera. They might have had to hire specific it's not hard to do people with the specific skills to get down in the cave. You can see the shadows of it a lot of times in its GoPros for sure. Is it really? GoPros are 4K and 8K these days. They're high quality images. Well, regardless of how they filmed it, yeah I was just enthralled the whole time. I thought it was really cool. so yeah One thing you really get from the documentary that you might not get in other places because of you know funding is you get a really good description of the cave and these really awesome kind of black and white
00:15:37
Speaker
Like, almost like drawings? Yeah, drawings, but like they move and it's animated. But it's really good and it gives you a really solid idea of the journey that you have to take. The only reason we were able to describe the cave as well as we did in the first segment is because of those drawings, animated drawings that they had in the documentary. So that was really great. Keep in mind too. I mean there are some some narrow passageways But the only place that burger couldn't get to and other people that are just too big Was the actual dinner lady chamber at the very end because of the shoot. Yeah We described the shoot and it was just in fact in the documentary. He's He's on his way down, and he's like I I can't get through this one part He's like it's like a centimeter my chest just gives a scrambling it so yeah So he got up and somebody had a hammer and they basically just like chiseled away Yeah, spoiler alert, he does go into the chamber at the very end of the movie. That was like one of the dramatic moments they had. But yeah, they had to like hammer some rock out the way so he could fit through. Yeah. So like we've said a couple of times, they have very sophisticated video and audio equipment that goes with the excavators so that it can be managed from the command center where Lieberger and the other folks that are managing it can keep an eye on things.
00:16:51
Speaker
And so during the initial investigations, Berger and his team, Berger or Berger? Berger. Berger. That's what he said in the explores club. So during the initial investigations, Berger and his team considered many possibilities on how all of these Homo naledi remains got into that chamber in the back of the cave. yeah You know, they thought maybe animals had dragged the bones in and then they dropped them through the shaft.
00:17:16
Speaker
That was one theory in the very beginning, not not currently, but in the very beginning. But then they examined the bones and there's just there's no bite marks on the bones. That's what you would see on bones if there were animals dragging them around. yep Also, there was at least one articulated foot. And if you have articulated remains, they probably weren't dragged around by animals because they would fall apart. you know We have been recently accused of having too much jargon in our podcast, which surprises me. Oh, really?
00:17:45
Speaker
Yes. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, OK. Articulated is a little jargony, isn't it? Articulated just means it looks like a foot would look. It was put together. All the pieces are still arranged. The bones are in the orientation they would be as you look at your foot now. And the only way that happens is if it gets down there with flesh around it to hold those bones together. Yeah. And like pretty solid pieces of flesh. It can't just be like the little droopy bits that you see. Yeah, it's got to be solid enough that it's still connected and stays together. This was an actual float when it got into the cave. Yeah. OK, so we've got to throw out the animals dragging the bones in. So next theory.
00:18:25
Speaker
Yeah, so the next theory is that Homo naledi themselves dragged the bodies through the cave and they they brought them in there on purpose. And we're looking for a place to, you know, protect their dead yeah for lack of a better way to say that. Yeah. yeah and And they kind of like went with that theory for a little while.
00:18:42
Speaker
And they have a little bit of proof of that because there is evidence of beetle activity on the bones. And those particular beetles would only have done that if there was still flesh on the bones when they were deposited in the cave. yeah So they know that these these remains got there with flesh on them still, basically, yeah which indicates like a body doesn't just get there without some help. yeah So now they're kind of theorizing, well, well maybe the Naledi dragged them in there and then dropped them down the chute. And that's how they got there with with the flesh on their bone still. And like any scientific work, you have to think, well, what are the other possible ways this could have happened? You you want to think of the ways that
00:19:25
Speaker
change the world and put your name on the map. But what are the other possible ways? So obviously, there's a few ways that we can think of. One is that the bodies could have washed in with water activity. yeah right Because caves are made using water anyway. Usually it's dripping in long-term water. But there's a lot of moisture in water water down in South Africa. And these caves will fill up with water pretty quick yeah you know if it starts to rain. yeah So that's a possibility. Also that people just could have crawled in there and died themselves. Maybe they couldn't get out of the chute. Maybe they got turned around or got trapped and just ended up in a place where they fell down the chute. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it could have happened. And then finally, these could have been ancient astronauts that beamed in there and then couldn't beam back out. Oh my God. That is one of the current theories that is yet to be disproven. That is not a theory. We do not support that. but To be clear, please don't pull out that sound bite. Sound bite of Chris saying that. For I to disprove it. I i dare you. Oh my God.
00:20:24
Speaker
All right, so to recap, they have these bones that went into this chamber with flesh on them. and They don't know exactly how it happened, but they know that they need more evidence to find out why. yeah So after that initial excavations in the 2013-14 timeframe, they went back in 2018 to keep looking. yeah And that's when they found what they are now calling burials. yeah So in this context, the burial means that basically a pit was dug, yeah right? And it was an oval-shaped pit, and the remains deposited in it. And then it was covered with dirt and other debris from the cave. Yeah. So when that happens, you have this very obvious change in soil color and texture yeah around the remains.
00:21:12
Speaker
And I will say one thing about that from my own experience excavating burials is that the other thing that causes a change in soil texture is the decomposition of flesh. It enters the soil around the body and it completely changes it into a different type of soil. It's something you're looking for when you're excavating a burial because when you hit that soil,
00:21:39
Speaker
texture difference, you you know, okay, there might have been yeah a body deposited here. Now these are 230,000 years old. so And there's bones in the burial. So I like i don't either know that that is necessarily true in this case, but that's what they're saying. Well, one of the things that that led them to believe that this was an intentional burial and not just something that was laid here and then covered with dirt naturally is, and this I don't feel like was covered very well in the documentary. really He really had good pictures of this in the talk that I saw. But basically, they showed an image of a flat surface with like ah kind of a crust on the surface, because the surfaces get kind of a crust on them. And then they showed this burial that was dug into that surface, right? Well, if this had been naturally covered through water action, through rooffall, through other things, so you would have different types of soils in this in this burial, right? yeah But instead, what they see is the the broken up fragments of the crust from the surface. So it's clear evidence that it was excavated, and somebody was laid there, and then that particular dirt was thrown back on top of the body. okay yeah It was thrown in a jumbled fashion, but they can see the evidence of the layers of dirt next to it in the layers of dirt that are right there, proving conclusively that this was dug on purpose, a body was put there, and that dirt was put back. right okay Yeah, they don't really ah show that very well in the documentary. no They just say, take my word for it, it was soil that was you know deposited on top by ah by another human. Yeah, some things have to get cut, I understand, but it's pretty foundational as far as I can tell.
00:23:16
Speaker
okay so You might be wondering, like why is this significant? Why is this a controversy? Well, previously, the oldest human burials date to 100,000 to 120,000 years ago. The Naledi burials date to 236,000 to 335,000 years ago. That not only pushes back more than 130,000 years, the oldest burial practices, right but it's, it's done by a species that has a brain that is a third the size of ours. And it's technically like a non-human species. It's, it's Homo, but it's not Homo sapien. yeah So those are two really, really huge and extraordinary claims.
00:24:00
Speaker
And one of the people that was on these excavations was Augustine Fuentes. And it's funny, Rachel didn't actually remember this. I did not remember this. But it was about five years ago or so. I looked it up. He's he's got a book that came out in 2019 called ah Why We Believe, and it's about the evolution of religion.
00:24:16
Speaker
and we used to belong to a group called the Reno Freethinkers, and we got him on a Zoom call, Augustin Fuentes. I kind of remember it, not that you start talking about it yet. To come into our meeting and basically talk to us about that book and we ask questions and stuff, but one of the things he's talking about with this whole burial thing is it's... You got to think, you know, there's a lot of emotion tied up in this and it's a very complex, advanced way of thinking that animals just don't do. They just don't do it. Yeah. And, but the emotion is I can't handle watching your body eaten by other animals. I can't handle watching the elements destroy you. I can't handle all of this stuff. Therefore I'm going to either bury you or I'm going to take you deep into a cave where nobody can possibly find you and then I'm going to bury you there. And that is very complex emotional state. It's so complex because it's not just take you into a cave and bury you. It's take you under, like drag your body underneath the Superman's passage where you have to be on your hands and knees crawling and pushing a body through and then dragging it up this huge, you know, the dragon spine and then down through the shoot where granted they were much smaller individuals so they would have fit a lot better, but still like that is so much work. Just to find a place to Put their dead to rest which is a little almost a little Unbelievable to note to think that like that the people doing this I keep saying people but I mean, I know they're not like non-human Yeah, they're yes the the Homo naledi doing this and they have such tiny brains It's like how is that even possible? That's why people are so skeptical of this
00:25:50
Speaker
But the evidence of burials, are i mean it looks pretty good from what we can see just you know from this non-peer-reviewed research. Well, I don't know about you, but we're going to take a break. And while we're doing that, I'm going to think about how my tiny brain relatives get anything done. All right, back in a minute where we finished talking about the documentary.
00:26:09
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 246 of The Archaeology Show. and We're talking about the Homo Naledi discovery in Rising Star Cave in the Netflix documentary. If you haven't seen it, again, go watch it. yeah definitely so I think we've been mostly positive about everything we saw in the documentary. I mean i i know that the burial stuff is a bit of a reach so far, but I mean, the evidence looks pretty good. They need more actual peer review research published before it's for sure, but I mean, it looks pretty good so far. And they had lots of really cool scenes in the documentary that kind of added to the picture, although some of them were not very scientific. It's a documentary. Yeah, I know. So like in this one scene, they they sort of rebuilt the skeleton of a Homo naledi, because again, they have so many individuals that they were basically able to
00:27:00
Speaker
put together a complete skeleton from a bunch of different individuals. And that way, you could see what the skeleton of one of these these individuals would have looked like. And it was really cool. It's not really worth anything from a scientific standpoint, I don't think, because it's not like and it's not a single individual. It's a bunch of people put together. But it still was a cool visual to see it like that.
00:27:22
Speaker
Kind of makes you wonder, I was thinking about this, with the fact that there's no 100% complete skeletons leads you to believe there must have been some animals that got into there. There must have been. Because those bones were either drug away or eaten, or possibly they just didn't make the fossilization process. Oh, maybe, and they decompose. Yeah, they just decompose. I bet that would be a big one. That's probably more part of it. And water activity, too. I mean, like you said, caves are formed by water. So there would have been water in there at some point or another, mucking things up. Well, it's not like they've excavated down to solid rock yet, either, in all the whole thing. So it's possible that there's just been movement. Yeah. Another really cool moment on camera, which
00:28:04
Speaker
Maybe it was a little staged, maybe not. They probably knew it was there and and then like made sure they had cameras on it. But they uncovered, in quotes, a hearth or fire feature. And it looks like the ah the hearth had bits of bone in it, basically bits of burned bone.
00:28:22
Speaker
Yeah. Burger was like, nobody had fire and also cooked meat and it was really, you know, he was standing there and it was pretty cool. But you know, the thing is that is actually really cool because seeing evidence of fire, you can see evidence kind of of hearths because of the the way it changes soil and things like that. But actually seeing evidence of fire like this, that's that old, regardless of the species that did it is unheard of. Yeah. Absolutely unheard of. It is. The preservation in this cave environment and how all that just worked out from a chemical standpoint is what caused that to be. But it's it's just unheard of to find something this old that is direct evidence of fire. And I think the thing that made me pause though is that they found this this hearth in the the first chamber, the bigger chamber that anybody could
Skepticism and New Discoveries in Rising Star Cave
00:29:07
Speaker
access. Yeah.
00:29:08
Speaker
And that would mean anybody in the last 200,000 years. yeah And they don't know for sure that this fire was created by the Homo naledi. Definitely not. They just don't have evidence of any other human ancestors or humans in this cave. so I think it's dangerous to jump to the conclusion that it was Homo naledi who made this fire. Just because you have it there's an absence of evidence doesn't mean that it's that conclusion. yeah Does somebody have to have died there to prove they were there? Exactly. right yeah so Again, not fully excavated either. Maybe there are other burials there from modern humans. And this is in the area that their current, the current excavations are focused on. So maybe they will find yeah more direct evidence for who created that fire. Maybe it was Hummel and Letty, but it might've been somebody more recently. yeah I suppose they need to date the hearth still too. They should be able to do some kind of analysis on it. Maybe not carbon 14 though, right? Cause that wouldn't, I don't think you can go that far back with carbon 14, right? yeah Yeah. They would have to find a different type of dating technique. yeah So yeah.
00:30:07
Speaker
So other interesting things that I just noticed, because you know, I'm always looking at this with a skeptical eye at something like this, because it's our field, right? So I'm like, what are they doing? And one thing I noticed is that they showed tons and tons of fragments of bones with numbers on them. And the numbers were like in the two hundreds, right? But they never said how many individuals there were in the home, in the Dinaletti chamber where the home on the lady were found.
00:30:33
Speaker
And I looked it up online and the minimum number of individuals is, or the estimated number of individuals is 15, which is a massive number for a for paleoanthropology, right? yeah But when they show these fragments of bones with numbers in the 200s, it makes it seem like there's a lot more individuals than that. It's just the fragments that are counted. That's why I wanted to make sure that that was clear. It wasn't clear in the documentary. That was fragments, not individuals. Yeah, of course. You wouldn't put the number, same number on every bone. Yeah. yeah And another sort of, I guess, critique I had is they, like we talked about, they had all these amazing animations that they were doing, sort of these like, almost like sketch of animations, right? And they did one for this like supposed burial that the Homo naledi would have done and this like teary eyed group of mourners gathering around a dead loved one. The body is wrapped with some kind of cord, which of course they have no evidence for because cord would not survive in the archaeological record. And I just was like that
00:31:38
Speaker
is a really nice fantasy. And that's the kind of thing that archaeologists love to sit around at a bar having a beer and fantasizing about that. But I'm not sure that those kind of fantasies have a place in documentary world or in research. Documentaries is where those belong. They don't belong in a paper.
00:31:56
Speaker
Only if they're clear in the documentary that this is an idea and this is what we this is a cool way it could have happened. Of course they were. They didn't say that this is how it happened, but what they're trying to represent is what we mentioned in the last segment is that you don't you don't make this journey, this perilous journey, even for somebody who's four foot eight and it probably wasn't as perilous for. But you know they can fit in there. and and But it was still really difficult. You didn't have flashlights. You had fire you were trying to maintain while you were going in this really dark, scary place. yeah And not only that, but you're bringing your dead you know relative or friend along with you. And the the emotion that's part of this would have been real. yeah so
00:32:38
Speaker
I mean, they were definitely sad to see this person go. Otherwise, why would they be going through ah so much trouble to to bury them? And I don't know if they even had tears, to be honest with you. But yeah I mean, I appreciate the i guess the the theory behind the animation, right? Yeah. Like I said, this is the kind of stuff that we love doing. We love to sit around and theorize how something could have happened. It's the fun of doing this kind of work, right?
00:33:05
Speaker
For somebody who doesn't do this kind of work, yeah I'm not sure they did a very good job of drawing that line between fact and fantasy. yeah These illustrations and animations came across as this is how it would have happened, rather than this is how it could have happened, in my opinion.
00:33:23
Speaker
So we got to talk before we end the show yeah about one of the other major, major finds that they had here. And one of these was from a child burial. yeah So they found these really tiny finger bones. And when they were looking at this, they were super fragile and they were like, how are we going to get this thing out of here? I don't think we can excavate it. So they ended up wrapping the entire thing without excavating. They wrapped the entire thing and in plaster, like you would do like dinosaur bones or something. like And then they pulled the entire piece out of the cave, this whole small, small, small child. Yeah. It's crazy. Like, like they did an animation, I think of it as well, where they were like yeah pulling it up the shoot and write all the crazy. Oh no, it wasn't animation. They had actual footage of it yeah because they have cameras on everything. Yeah. Yeah. So they they still haven't, as far as I know, they still haven't broken into this plaster. I don't think they have. Yeah. But they did do a CT scan. So Lee Berger's wife is also a scientist, but she's also in the in the medical side of things when she has a CT scanner and they looked at it, but it wasn't,
00:34:21
Speaker
high enough resolution, they couldn't really get the detail that they wanted to really find out what was going on here. But one of the things they did see was it looked like there was a piece of rock in with this burial. And you don't find a lot of rock in there, they said, that's not like roof fall. And this wasn't roof fall rock, this was anything else, because it's all like limestone and stuff in there. so yeah But this this rock was different. And it was like kind of like flat, and it definitely had like a tool-like shape to it. So they I thought this was really funny. They started calling it the tool-like rock, yeah which is exactly what it looks like, really. So yeah. So they ended up taking it to the European synchrotron radiation facility in France, which is basically a gigantic scanner. to do this sub-millimeter-level scan yeah of the things inside to produce 3D images of what was in there. And they ended up seeing this rock that everybody is saying, my god, this looks like a tool, and it looks like it was directly placed in this child's hand. yeah
00:35:18
Speaker
after death. yeah You know, it was buried with this tool in its hand and maybe it was just like, you know, I mean, you you can speculate all you want, but a lot of times in obviously later burials and like the Egyptians and and and everybody else, they would literally give them things that would come to life in the afterlife yeah and and help them like servants and things like that, yeah representations, also tools and Things for protection, food, supplies. You're going on a journey, right? and mean We're not saying that these guys did that, but it could have been even something as simple as, well, the kid really liked playing around with this. yeah And so they wanted to give him something comforting. But even that representation, that thought is is
00:35:58
Speaker
It's so advanced, right? and And we kind of glossed over this, but when they did this 3D image, they definitely saw a full skeleton encased in this piece of rock that is covered by plaster right now, that they they just can't excavate it because it's too fragile. But I'm not sure they really need to, because they can see the full skeleton with this crazy good imaging. you know I think it's time.
00:36:22
Speaker
Do you think so? Yeah, I think they should. I just would hate to ruin it. But you know, I mean, not going to ruin it they got to get to that rock and figure out if it's an actual tool or not. They also need to know if it was placed there or if it got in there in another way, which excavating might give them some clues about that. Because when they looked at the scan of the rock, there wasn't really conclusive evidence that it was a tool.
00:36:45
Speaker
And it could have just been a natural piece of rock that fell in, so that knowing if it was placed in the hand, if it's an actual tool, like all that would be very important. so But in the documentary, they really played this up, right? Well, of course it is. They're making tools. yeah these are These were pre-human species that are making tools. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Let's back up for a second. like We don't even know this is a tool yet. I don't know. There's a lot going on here. There is, but like we don't even know this is a tool. So i know slow your roll, guys. It's just two of the two the things that define Homo sapiens, yeah ah really, yeah is ah i mean aside from brain size, yeah is ah burials and tool making. They're the only species on the planet that have ever done something like that. yeah well
00:37:28
Speaker
Intentional tool making. There's tool use in other animals like chimpanzees, even even dolphins and things like that. There's evidence of tool use, but not tool making. right right That's a very different thing. so um Expediently using something that already exists as a tool is different than seeing something and saying, I see something inside this that I can make. yeah you know So there's another thing that they made that we need to talk about right at the end here is the pictographs, which really are petroglyphs. I don't know why they kept calling them pictographs. They did call them pictographs. So I went with that because that's what they called it in the documentary. Pitroglyphs are typically painted images only. Yeah. And petroglyphs are etched or scratched or carved in some way. Petroglyphs can be painted, but that doesn't make them pictographs. Yeah. I was like, maybe that's just a different term they use in South Africa or something like that. Maybe. I don't know. Anyway. Yeah.
00:38:15
Speaker
So Lee Berger, who ah said famously he will never go down the chute because he was too big, yeah lost a whole bunch of weight and yeah to his credit yeah and because he wanted to go down there. And then on the way in, and I know you you wrote up these notes, i did but you didn't watch the dark you didn't watch the talk that I watched, but and he he goes in and on his way discovers these pictographs and you said it felt very staged. It did feel very staged, yeah. And I think they represented it that way in the documentary a little bit, but the way he said it was on the talk that I saw was, you know, they were they were cavers going in and they were they were very focused on on the ground and getting through and weren't really
00:38:56
Speaker
weren't really paying attention to some of that stuff. And even in the documentary, and I don't know if this was real or not, but one of the guys was like, you don't think that that's natural?
Critique of Documentary's Conclusions
00:39:03
Speaker
Like some people may have seen that and thought it was natural. And he's like, this is definitely not natural. You know, he's, he's just talking about that. And that, that couldn't have been staged because he only went down there that one time, right? For the documentary. I don't know if he's been down there since, but yeah at the time that was his first time down there. It'd be hard to stage that. Unless they staged him going down there the first time for the documentary, like maybe he had already been down there once before. I don't know. The emotions seemed real. Yeah, and they had to like chip away pieces of rock for him to get down there. So i don't think it did seem real. That was all real. Yeah. So maybe it maybe it wasn't staged. I don't know. But it just seemed a little unbelievable to me that nobody had noticed these lines on the rocks and pointed it out at least. so yeah But that's fine. He had his dramatic moment of being the first to notice, quote unquote, rock art.
00:39:51
Speaker
But the scratches themselves, they're located on the dolomitic walls of a natural pillar at the entrance and exit of the passage that connects Hill Antitamber, which is at the bottom of the chute, with the Dinoletti Chamber, which is where most of the burials have been found.
00:40:08
Speaker
Interestingly, though, I think they said that the child burial that has the tool and it's so the quote unquote tool like rock yeah in its hands is near where these petroglyphs were found. yeah So there is a lot of reaching in the end of the documentary there where they are trying to say that like reaching up to scratch the rocks. That they like scratch the rock, put that that that tool into the child's hand and then buried the child. And I'm like, wow, that is a lot of of separate things that you're trying to draw together into one story. And I wasn't super comfortable with that because there's, I don't know that they could ever have evidence for for that being the case, but well yeah. Well, yeah, they did. I mean, some say that it could be natural weathering, that's for sure. And you can't rule that out in some cases, but
00:40:56
Speaker
you You can with some better scans, right? I mean, if you can see some some definite, I mean, there's there's there's evidence that tools will put onto rock art, right? I mean, that that you can say that this was made by something else. And I just don't know if, at least by the time this documentary is done, and even the talk that I saw, yeah that that work had actually been done. yeah But one of the things he did show in the talk that I saw was,
00:41:19
Speaker
they They put out these images, and they're calling it the hashtag, right? Because there's these like tic-tac-toe shaped etchings in one part of it with some other stuff superimposed on it. And there's almost identical scratchings in a cave up in Europe somewhere. I can't remember where it was, but but it was 150,000 years later, too. yeah But almost identical. and by Neanderthals, I think, right? Something like that, yeah. But it's very easy markings to make. They're very primitive. It doesn't take a lot of brain size to be able to come up, something like that. It's more the intention behind it, like the why of it all. And the earliest art by Homo sapiens that we know of so far is in the Blombos Cave in South Africa. It was made approximately 80,000 years ago. So again, we're pushing the
00:42:07
Speaker
dates of this kind of stuff way way, way, way back and into a different species, which is why this is all so extraordinary. And I don't think anybody's against it. All this stuff sounds amazing. I want all of it to be true. I really, really do.
00:42:24
Speaker
But a lot of this came out in preprints. It's not been peer reviewed, published research yet. So I think a lot of the skeptics are just like, we need more evidence for this. Like it looks yeah good so far, but you just can't draw all these conclusions yet. We need more evidence. We need to see your evidence, you know, in a peer reviewed paper.
00:42:46
Speaker
So I'll leave you could put but with this. I don't think we need more evidence to know that this is real. I think it's great. I think we need more evidence to just solidify the picture a little more. Like I totally believe this entire thing. It's pretty solid for me. It's pretty strong. But the big questions I have are,
00:43:04
Speaker
First off, this is the only place Homo naledi has ever been found. Where's the rest of it? yeah Where's the rest of Homo naledi? There's been a lot found in South Africa, but still, you know there's also a lot of animals down there that eat people. right so There's not a lot of really good things left. Most of what's been found down there has been found in cave and limestone environments. right yeah so you know We need to find more stuff like that. but also if they were so you know quote, advanced 250,000 to 300,000 years ago, you know you know why didn't they change more dramatically than that? yeah didn't they and But that's not that's not even a fair question because you see that in the archaeological record all the time where somebody's doing something and they just do the same damn thing for 50,000 years yeah you know and nothing changes. So that's, I guess, not too surprising. I wouldn't expect him to have cars 10,000 years later. And where's the rest of them?
00:43:56
Speaker
Yeah, and like why aren't they in our direct line of evolution? Like they're on a branch over here and Probably didn't even contribute to well we don't know that yet I mean, I think that they're separate but we don't know that yet I mean, I guess maybe they yeah, maybe they are more in our direct line, but then like they then humans Or the ancestors lose that ability? Like, why didn't those abilities continue on? Or have we just not found evidence of it? I don't know. I mean, this is a time frame when multiple human-like species were living on the planet. Yeah. You know, not all of them made it to Homo sapiens. Yeah, these guys just seem so advanced. So like, why didn't they make it? Why didn't the things that they're doing continue on to the next stage? But you're not asking the right question. They seem so advanced, sure. But maybe we just don't have evidence of the other human-like species at that time doing this because we haven't found it yet. It's the common problem of absence of evidence doesn't mean that it didn't happen. It just means we don't have the evidence yet. So it's really important to keep that in your mind. Were they advanced or were they just normal? And we haven't found evidence that other species did the same thing. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely possible. It's a very unique environment that it's going to be difficult to find again. Yeah. So why is Homo naledi the only one that managed to make it there? Yeah. You know, not anybody else follow them in.
00:45:14
Speaker
That's why I'm like, can we say for sure the rock art was the Homo naledi? Like maybe that was a later species yeah that managed to get in there, do the thing. The burials that were there from the Homo naledi would have been long covered at that point if like, you know, a hundred thousand years later, some Homo sapiens, you know, somebody from that branch got in there and made the rock art. yeah So I think that's where my skepticism comes in is like drawing all these things into one picture together for the Homo naledi when they could be separate you know disparate things that happened you know completely separate and maybe hundreds of thousands of years apart. yeah I think that's probably my biggest critique. i't I'm not saying none of this happened that it's all wrong. I just, I think the big picture is not, I don't know, there just needs to be more evidence before you pull all of it into one story together. yeah
00:46:04
Speaker
But that is the fun of archaeology, right? Is telling the story. So I understand wanting to sit around and tell the fun story, right? You just have to be careful when you're communicating to the public that are not experts that don't know that you're not, you know, creating a fantasy that that doesn't have evidence supporting it. yeah So yeah, that I think that was where I fall on all of this.
00:46:24
Speaker
All right, well, tell us what you think. Yeah, I want to hear it. I'm very, this documentary almost more confused me than than anything because I want to believe it so bad. The evidence is so cool.
00:46:36
Speaker
All right, well, we're going to end it there. Hopefully, if you celebrate Christmas, hopefully you have a good one tomorrow. Yeah. Actually, hopefully you're not listening to this on Christmas Eve. Yeah. I mean, if you are, that's fine. Like, go hang out with your families, right? Yeah. Or not. Do what you're going to do. You know. Yeah. Sometimes you need a break, right? A family break. I know. We're going to go hang out with Hans Gruber. So we'll see you guys later. Oh. Oh. Oh.
00:47:06
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment in and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening and have an awesome day.
00:47:29
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his ah RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.