For sure we need a lot more information, we need more evidence, more research in the cave (preferably done by a second research team) Hopefully time will tell us all we want to know, I'm excited for the future when it comes to Homo naledi
Thank you everyone for sharing your thoughts, and views so far! It’s great hearing what you guys think is going on in Rising Star! Remember to keep your minds open, your wits about you, and remain skeptical! But the world out there is AMAZING , there are so many mysteries!
Great video. My armchair opinion is similar to yours. Though I have no background in this, but have watched lots of different experts talking about this Homo Naledi incident - is that I think they were deliberately taking their dead to this cave. I don't buy the washed in/fell in theory, because why are there so many of them, and why has nothing else experienced the same fate in all these thousands of years? Why just lots of Homo Naledi? I agree we need to see lots more to understand the rest. Even until recently, in our own culture, we did occasionally bury people in different places. Look at what happened to Percy Shelley, and that was in 1822.
I wholeheartedly agree with your opinions, having watched our discovery of Naledi unfold over the years in multiple venues and through a myriad of papers. You see the homocentric bias and the gatekeeping in all the sciences, to be honest, not just anthropology.
Well done Seth! You made it clear this is your opinion, and I appreciate hearing it because of your access to many anthropologists in the field and their thoughts. Thank you for all your hard work and bringing this science to everyone! You also made some excellent points such as how we define burial, and not locking ourselves into definitions for modern Homo sapiens, but keeping it more open. I loved how you held up the hand and thought about it making art and fire, I agree, I think there is a bias still towards our large brain superiority which should be questioned. For example has anyone considered a link between Homo naledi and Homo floresiensis aka the Hobbit? HF was also a small-brained and used fire, etc. Anyway, just some food for thought, thank you again. Very well done 👍
Thank you! It has however been shown that Hobbits (I can never spell their scientific name) actually did NOT have the ability to control fire. Or at least there is no evidence based on new interpretations over the last ten years. That one has been just about buried. www.sapiens.org/archaeology/homo-floresiensis-fire/#
Not having read any of the papers, and only having watched the Ted talk from 8 years ago and now the Netflix documentary, I thought they were broadly saying what you said here. In the doc the language used always included "suggests", "if...", "could" and so on. It was obvious they were wishing for the findings to mean HN was in fact intentionally putting their dead there and that it is evidence of a culture. But to me personally it didn't seem like they were set on that and closed off to contradicting evidence. I also don't think that being passionate about a certain option is wrong or harmful, in fact I would say every scientist has an outcome they hope for and it is what gives you the motivation to keep digging (sometimes literally). To get the least biased data we should just do what we usually do in science and have different people with different ideas study the findings. Thanks for your balanced and clear approach! I find the whole thing fascinating and can't wait for more evidence and testing to come out 😊
It is essential to be impartial! Thank you, I can add now that after the big anthropology conference that just happened in L.A this week, there is going to be new naledi information soon! You can hear about it right here, not his channel!
@@worldofpaleoanthropologyYes. I don't mean through all caution to the wind and not correct for biases. All I'm saying is that the pure fact that a scientist prefers a certain outcome/explanation to be true is simply human and not a red flag per se. (and just to be clear: as stated I am only speaking about the documentary, I have no knowledge on the papers and politics). Can't wait for the new info!
I think one of the most important questions to answer is how they got there. If dead individuals were brought there by their tribe to be buried, then how was that possible even if they were a bit smaller than humans? Carrying someone while climbing in the dark without rope or lamps... How much could the passages in the rock have changed in a few hundred thousand years? The obvious solution seems to be that they came from another part of the system than the one entered by Berger and coworkers. And how adapted to living in caves could H. naledi have been? The shape of the hand could just as well indicate adaptation to climbing in caves as arboreal climbing.
There is no evidence of habitation on the caves. There are multiple entrances into the chambers, Lee just likes to talk about the most difficult one. They would not have been adapted to cave dwelling, no. Buried is a very specific word, that’s the issue,
@@worldofpaleoanthropology What I meant was that there might have been an entrance to the actual Dinaledi chamber that is now hidden, for example by the flowstones in the chamber. If there are easier ways to access the chamber, then why are they using the difficult ones? It has been described that the only entrance to the cave is 12 m vertical shaft. Are you saying that is not correct? And aren't all these lower caves pitch dark? Even if H naledi did use fire, climbing into long dangerous cave systems with one less hand, and the other holding on to a burning branch doesn't sound like an easy task - especially if you are carrying a diseased friend at the same time! How do you know that H naledi didn't live in caves? They have never been found elsewhere. Just because this specific cave was not inhabited doesn't that they didn't live i other, not yet explored, caves. How do you know for certain that their hand anatomy is not adapted to cave climbing? Further, it is not yet known what diet caused their teeth to be so worn. Could it be something related to living under ground? I suggest that there is a now hidden entrance to the chamber and that on the other side of it there might be a chamber where a population of H naledi lived. Maybe I am wrong, but hope you want to inform me why my hypothesis is not possible.
We now know, despite Lee’s initial reporting, there are three entrances, and a recent paper I’ll be covering soon by Wood et al. says many more likely existed in the past.
Hello Seth! I don't think a bunch of Naledi's went into the cave to lay down and die. I think they were brought there. In that case, the cave itself is the burial chamber. Use of fire would have been advantageous to get into a dark cave, so that's a possibility. More analysis needs to be done to pin down the who, what, where, and when of Homo Naledi.
The mere presence of all of the remains in the cave system sure seems to suggest intent to dispose of bodies that goes far beyond what would be necessary to avoid the problems of having dead bodies around.
Baboon skeletons are not uncommon in caves or caverns and so are cave bears and many other species, bones in cave is not evidence of ritual or anything else aside the obvious. Until there is actually evidence it's just an idea/question. Interesting notions but the case is far from being resolved. Just my opinion, it sure is interesting topic and discussion.
@@togodamnusBut they have never said this only interpretation and still ongoing. They are proposing hypotheses. In the past, all this was done behind is closed doors. They have released their discoveries as they get them. That has ruffled a lot of feathers .
One of my chats, the latest, with Dr. Berger himself- Lee Berger, Homo Naledi, and the Many Questions Surrounding Rising Star! ua-cam.com/video/xyhO5hcfRHY/v-deo.html
I believe they didn’t specifically refer to the Leti discovery as evidence of a “burial”. The specific site they analyzed as a burial pit seemed vastly under investigated at the time of the pre-publication paper. It felt so rushed. I’m going to remain fascinated by the whole event and will wait for more information. Properly vetted this time.
IMHO...mortuary practice, yes; burial, I don't know; fire, yes; tools, maybe but need confirmation; art, I'm very skeptical on this one--gonna take a lot more to convince me. Frankly, I find it difficult to believe that there isn't another opening for the cave system that has since been closed off. I feel that really needs to been either confirmed or refuted. And if that art is art, then how do we know for sure that Homo Naledi produced it? I'm not even convinced it is actually art yet, but I'm opened to the possibility with lots more evidence. And if it is art, what is the date and can it actually be attributed to Homo Naledi?
You suggest advanced-level intentional disposal of the dead, presumably referring to distinctively hominin-level "intentions", as distinguished from the more instinctual practices (or behavioral dispositions, that may still have some development from experience) from, for example, elephants. I am interested in hominin precursor behaviors that enabled the emergence of language, and what I take away is a need to be precise about early and advanced hominin-level intentions. Any dog owner will tell you that dogs have intentions, I would suggest that what makes such intentions (inferable but not perceptible causal mental states) hominin-level is that they are structured by concepts in some culturally acquired shared scheme of concepts. This is tied up with the overlapping notion of volition (volitional mental state, something to do with the philosophically-fraught notion of "will"). I would suggest a volition is an intention committed to action, an intention-in-action (to borrow from the taxonomy of speech acts of John Searle) whereas intentions might also be prior intentions, or suspended options for action that are considered by not acted upon. I would love to see mathematically-precise models of agents with mental states (proto-concepts and human-like concept-level states), and I am optimistic that precise models could be simulated digitally in a way that could generate hypothesis about what evidence to look for, what scenarios are plausible and which scenarios are contraindicated by current evidence. Such models could inform research into art and symbology, tool making and teaching of tool making, and the range of behaviors of foraging communities in domains like dance, chant, sign language vs. natural gesture, speech vs. non-speech natural vocalizations. Thanks for your videos, I am learning a lot about paleoanthropology.
I agree with you, perhaps they were too trigger happy with some of the language, but that being said… I’m all in regardless, not in a blind faith kinda way, but meaning I take their announcements as strong working hypotheses until I read the papers or until more evidence is shown. It’s interesting to see science “as it’s made”, I just wish they’d insist more on the “work in progress” aspect, for the greater public’s sake. Like the part about the so-called tool in the Netflix show, it’s cool to see them extract the thing, and scan it… even if it turns out to be a nothingberger (😂) in the end, that’s what doing science is like! It’s thinking you got Homo Sapiens cave art when in fact it very well may be Neanderthart! Time will tell who’s right or wrong, but I like seeing it unfold! Plus I’ve been known to be very patient, I’m still watching Curse of Oak Island, I can’t help myself, I’m part French Acadian, and my ancestors lived not too far away from there. 😂 So I put up with the stupid Templar treasure stuff in order to get to the more interesting serious archeological bits. I am willing to put up with a LOT of BS to get to the juicy stuff, basically, so hearing about the digs and seeing inside the cave itself before they’re 100% all papered up is fine by me, selfishly. 😛
What I’ve learned from this whole thing is that the definition of a burial is so narrow as to exclude a large percentage of humans from being human. I believe this is a remnant of the white supremacy origins of paleoanthropology, trying to establish the superiority of putting people in the ground in a specific way. Lee is fond of saying humans aren’t exceptional, and that angers exactly those people who need to feel superior.
Can I give you a feed back. Please do not use they when and be specific as you can. Because when you say they found a burrial pit but it is not... ı know that Dr Berger during all of his presentations he always mention that there are 3 remains in that pit and that they are partial. It is so importqnt to specify who said what. Thank you.
For sure we need a lot more information, we need more evidence, more research in the cave (preferably done by a second research team)
Hopefully time will tell us all we want to know, I'm excited for the future when it comes to Homo naledi
Absolutely! It’s a wild ride and I am so excited to be on it!
Thank you everyone for sharing your thoughts, and views so far! It’s great hearing what you guys think is going on in Rising Star! Remember to keep your minds open, your wits about you, and remain skeptical! But the world out there is AMAZING , there are so many mysteries!
Totally 🖖
Great video. My armchair opinion is similar to yours. Though I have no background in this, but have watched lots of different experts talking about this Homo Naledi incident - is that I think they were deliberately taking their dead to this cave. I don't buy the washed in/fell in theory, because why are there so many of them, and why has nothing else experienced the same fate in all these thousands of years? Why just lots of Homo Naledi?
I agree we need to see lots more to understand the rest.
Even until recently, in our own culture, we did occasionally bury people in different places. Look at what happened to Percy Shelley, and that was in 1822.
I wholeheartedly agree with your opinions, having watched our discovery of Naledi unfold over the years in multiple venues and through a myriad of papers. You see the homocentric bias and the gatekeeping in all the sciences, to be honest, not just anthropology.
Well done Seth! You made it clear this is your opinion, and I appreciate hearing it because of your access to many anthropologists in the field and their thoughts. Thank you for all your hard work and bringing this science to everyone! You also made some excellent points such as how we define burial, and not locking ourselves into definitions for modern Homo sapiens, but keeping it more open. I loved how you held up the hand and thought about it making art and fire, I agree, I think there is a bias still towards our large brain superiority which should be questioned. For example has anyone considered a link between Homo naledi and Homo floresiensis aka the Hobbit? HF was also a small-brained and used fire, etc. Anyway, just some food for thought, thank you again. Very well done 👍
Thank you! It has however been shown that Hobbits (I can never spell their scientific name) actually did NOT have the ability to control fire. Or at least there is no evidence based on new interpretations over the last ten years. That one has been just about buried. www.sapiens.org/archaeology/homo-floresiensis-fire/#
@@worldofpaleoanthropology thanks!
Excellent work. A measured approach, and makes this all the more compelling. Keep it up! xxx
Not having read any of the papers, and only having watched the Ted talk from 8 years ago and now the Netflix documentary, I thought they were broadly saying what you said here.
In the doc the language used always included "suggests", "if...", "could" and so on. It was obvious they were wishing for the findings to mean HN was in fact intentionally putting their dead there and that it is evidence of a culture. But to me personally it didn't seem like they were set on that and closed off to contradicting evidence.
I also don't think that being passionate about a certain option is wrong or harmful, in fact I would say every scientist has an outcome they hope for and it is what gives you the motivation to keep digging (sometimes literally).
To get the least biased data we should just do what we usually do in science and have different people with different ideas study the findings.
Thanks for your balanced and clear approach!
I find the whole thing fascinating and can't wait for more evidence and testing to come out 😊
It is essential to be impartial! Thank you, I can add now that after the big anthropology conference that just happened in L.A this week, there is going to be new naledi information soon! You can hear about it right here, not his channel!
@@worldofpaleoanthropologyYes. I don't mean through all caution to the wind and not correct for biases. All I'm saying is that the pure fact that a scientist prefers a certain outcome/explanation to be true is simply human and not a red flag per se.
(and just to be clear: as stated I am only speaking about the documentary, I have no knowledge on the papers and politics).
Can't wait for the new info!
I think one of the most important questions to answer is how they got there. If dead individuals were brought there by their tribe to be buried, then how was that possible even if they were a bit smaller than humans? Carrying someone while climbing in the dark without rope or lamps... How much could the passages in the rock have changed in a few hundred thousand years? The obvious solution seems to be that they came from another part of the system than the one entered by Berger and coworkers.
And how adapted to living in caves could H. naledi have been? The shape of the hand could just as well indicate adaptation to climbing in caves as arboreal climbing.
There is no evidence of habitation on the caves. There are multiple entrances into the chambers, Lee just likes to talk about the most difficult one. They would not have been adapted to cave dwelling, no. Buried is a very specific word, that’s the issue,
@@worldofpaleoanthropology
What I meant was that there might have been an entrance to the actual Dinaledi chamber that is now hidden, for example by the flowstones in the chamber.
If there are easier ways to access the chamber, then why are they using the difficult ones? It has been described that the only entrance to the cave is 12 m vertical shaft. Are you saying that is not correct? And aren't all these lower caves pitch dark? Even if H naledi did use fire, climbing into long dangerous cave systems with one less hand, and the other holding on to a burning branch doesn't sound like an easy task - especially if you are carrying a diseased friend at the same time!
How do you know that H naledi didn't live in caves? They have never been found elsewhere. Just because this specific cave was not inhabited doesn't that they didn't live i other, not yet explored, caves. How do you know for certain that their hand anatomy is not adapted to cave climbing? Further, it is not yet known what diet caused their teeth to be so worn. Could it be something related to living under ground?
I suggest that there is a now hidden entrance to the chamber and that on the other side of it there might be a chamber where a population of H naledi lived. Maybe I am wrong, but hope you want to inform me why my hypothesis is not possible.
We now know, despite Lee’s initial reporting, there are three entrances, and a recent paper I’ll be covering soon by Wood et al. says many more likely existed in the past.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about H. Naledi; they were such intriguing beings and I'm looking forward to learning more about them!
Hello Seth! I don't think a bunch of Naledi's went into the cave to lay down and die. I think they were brought there. In that case, the cave itself is the burial chamber. Use of fire would have been advantageous to get into a dark cave, so that's a possibility. More analysis needs to be done to pin down the who, what, where, and when of Homo Naledi.
The mere presence of all of the remains in the cave system sure seems to suggest intent to dispose of bodies that goes far beyond what would be necessary to avoid the problems of having dead bodies around.
Baboon skeletons are not uncommon in caves or caverns and so are cave bears and many other species, bones in cave is not evidence of ritual or anything else aside the obvious. Until there is actually evidence it's just an idea/question. Interesting notions but the case is far from being resolved. Just my opinion, it sure is interesting topic and discussion.
@@togodamnusBut they have never said this only interpretation and still ongoing. They are proposing hypotheses. In the past, all this was done behind is closed doors. They have released their discoveries as they get them. That has ruffled a lot of feathers .
@@peggygross7409
Im not persuaded or convinced, so carry on ✌️
One of my chats, the latest, with Dr. Berger himself- Lee Berger, Homo Naledi, and the Many Questions Surrounding Rising Star!
ua-cam.com/video/xyhO5hcfRHY/v-deo.html
I believe they didn’t specifically refer to the Leti discovery as evidence of a “burial”. The specific site they analyzed as a burial pit seemed vastly under investigated at the time of the pre-publication paper. It felt so rushed. I’m going to remain fascinated by the whole event and will wait for more information. Properly vetted this time.
No they didn’t, but I’m positing it’s their best evidence of ritual.
IMHO...mortuary practice, yes; burial, I don't know; fire, yes; tools, maybe but need confirmation; art, I'm very skeptical on this one--gonna take a lot more to convince me.
Frankly, I find it difficult to believe that there isn't another opening for the cave system that has since been closed off. I feel that really needs to been either confirmed or refuted. And if that art is art, then how do we know for sure that Homo Naledi produced it? I'm not even convinced it is actually art yet, but I'm opened to the possibility with lots more evidence. And if it is art, what is the date and can it actually be attributed to Homo Naledi?
You suggest advanced-level intentional disposal of the dead, presumably referring to distinctively hominin-level "intentions", as distinguished from the more instinctual practices (or behavioral dispositions, that may still have some development from experience) from, for example, elephants. I am interested in hominin precursor behaviors that enabled the emergence of language, and what I take away is a need to be precise about early and advanced hominin-level intentions.
Any dog owner will tell you that dogs have intentions, I would suggest that what makes such intentions (inferable but not perceptible causal mental states) hominin-level is that they are structured by concepts in some culturally acquired shared scheme of concepts. This is tied up with the overlapping notion of volition (volitional mental state, something to do with the philosophically-fraught notion of "will"). I would suggest a volition is an intention committed to action, an intention-in-action (to borrow from the taxonomy of speech acts of John Searle) whereas intentions might also be prior intentions, or suspended options for action that are considered by not acted upon. I would love to see mathematically-precise models of agents with mental states (proto-concepts and human-like concept-level states), and I am optimistic that precise models could be simulated digitally in a way that could generate hypothesis about what evidence to look for, what scenarios are plausible and which scenarios are contraindicated by current evidence.
Such models could inform research into art and symbology, tool making and teaching of tool making, and the range of behaviors of foraging communities in domains like dance, chant, sign language vs. natural gesture, speech vs. non-speech natural vocalizations.
Thanks for your videos, I am learning a lot about paleoanthropology.
Good thoughts - thx Seth!
Im glad you liked it! I have enjoyed reading your various thoughts on related topics!
Thanks for your thoughts.
I agree with you, perhaps they were too trigger happy with some of the language, but that being said… I’m all in regardless, not in a blind faith kinda way, but meaning I take their announcements as strong working hypotheses until I read the papers or until more evidence is shown. It’s interesting to see science “as it’s made”, I just wish they’d insist more on the “work in progress” aspect, for the greater public’s sake. Like the part about the so-called tool in the Netflix show, it’s cool to see them extract the thing, and scan it… even if it turns out to be a nothingberger (😂) in the end, that’s what doing science is like! It’s thinking you got Homo Sapiens cave art when in fact it very well may be Neanderthart! Time will tell who’s right or wrong, but I like seeing it unfold! Plus I’ve been known to be very patient, I’m still watching Curse of Oak Island, I can’t help myself, I’m part French Acadian, and my ancestors lived not too far away from there. 😂 So I put up with the stupid Templar treasure stuff in order to get to the more interesting serious archeological bits. I am willing to put up with a LOT of BS to get to the juicy stuff, basically, so hearing about the digs and seeing inside the cave itself before they’re 100% all papered up is fine by me, selfishly. 😛
What I’ve learned from this whole thing is that the definition of a burial is so narrow as to exclude a large percentage of humans from being human.
I believe this is a remnant of the white supremacy origins of paleoanthropology, trying to establish the superiority of putting people in the ground in a specific way.
Lee is fond of saying humans aren’t exceptional, and that angers exactly those people who need to feel superior.
Yes, totally agree 👍
Bird brains are dense in connections. Size seems to be not the dominant factor for intelligence
Can I give you a feed back. Please do not use they when and be specific as you can. Because when you say they found a burrial pit but it is not... ı know that Dr Berger during all of his presentations he always mention that there are 3 remains in that pit and that they are partial. It is so importqnt to specify who said what. Thank you.
They means the team. That was established.