Lee Berger: Homo naledi, Human Evolution, Ritual Burials, & the Origins of the Human Mind | #38
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- Опубліковано 18 чер 2024
- Nick talks to paleoanthropologist Dr. Lee Berger about human evolution. Dr. Berger is a professor of anthropology in South Africa and explorer-in-residence for National Geographic. Lee's team has mapped and explored caves all over South Africa, discovering a treasure trove of ancient human fossils. This includes the discovery of Homo naledi, an ancient human ancestor that had a much smaller brain than humans, but may have nonetheless harbored advanced cognitive abilities. Lee described the discovery of Homo naledi, human brain evolution, and why we are in a gold age of paleoanthropology.
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ABOUT Nick Jikomes:
Nick is a neuroscientist and podcast host. He is currently Director of Science & Innovation at Leafly, a technology startup in the legal cannabis industry. He received a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University and a B.S. in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
0:00:00 Episode Intro
0:04:16 Lee Berger Intro
0:09:45 Lucy (Australopithecus)
0:13:08 Multiple Human Species
0:19:50 Determining Behavior From Fossils
0:27:50 Exploration & Discovery of New Fossils
0:35:23 Rising Star Cave System in South Africa
0:37:22 Homo naledi anatomy & skull
0:45:07 Mating Between Human Species
0:49:42 Homo naledi & Ancient Ritual Burials
0:55:07 Fossil Teeth & Ancient Diets
1:00:03 How to Find New Human Fossils
1:11:22 Funding For Paleoanthropology
1:16:15 New Homo Naledi Studies
1:18:30 Death Rituals & Ancient Drug Use
1:24:28 Final Thoughts - Наука та технологія
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I have so much respect for Lee Berger. He has such wonderful enthusiasm and he is so open and willing to share his discoveries with scientists and students all over the world for mutual study. He isn't like the scientist of the past who jealously guarded their discoveries for years before they revealed them. He is open to collaboration which will truly advance the field and our understanding of the past. How cool is that? He deserves every bit of luck he has had in his two most recent discoveries which is unique in the world of paleoanthropology. I love his humor over our assumptions that Homo sapiens thinking they are the "pinnacle and purest of creatures". It is, quite amusing when you think about it.
Mr. Berger gets more excited and more enthusiastic as the interview goes on! It is “as if” he has just left the cave, and has a big story to tell. Lee Berger, as an individual scientist, is just as important, or more important, than the discoveries that he made. He is leading the way for a new science, “new eyes”. A man of the new age.
Lee Berger is my new favorite scientist to learn from and listen too. Lee Berger-Richard Dawkins-Lawrence Krauss-Neil deGrasse Tyson…
Dr. Lee Berger always fascinating discoveries in the Star Cave system and newest discovery of Homo Naledi. I wonder if DNA has been extracted yet? Keep on exploring!
Excellent interview thank you!
Thanks! mindandmatter.substack.com/
I would love to go to Africa and just see the cradle of human kind and participate on a dig thank you mr berger
Thank you. Excellent interview and really appreciate the “we really don’t know” responses.
Elephants, corvids, and apes have mortuary practices, so I don't find it too difficult to imagine Naledi doing it. That's even easier to believe because Naledi lived near humans, and could have copied human mortuary practices.
Great interview! Fantastic scientist!
Thanks! You may be interested in this content: substack.com/search/human%20evolution?focusedPublicationId=513528&searching=focused_posts
Excellent, honest interview, thank you!
Thank you! mindandmatter.substack.com/
Two things I learned: the verb to "intragress" meaning to have sex with another kind of human; and the fact that the present situation, with only one kind of human around, is exceptional.
I just can't believe this can be caused by anything else than homo sapiens wiping out "homo anything else". After all humans kill other humans for fun - that's what head-hunting, and war in general, amounts to. We have no difficulty at all seeing our fellow humans as monsters, let alone people with differently shaped skulls and bodies, who probably didn't speak like us.
Without wanting to put words into Professor Burger's mouth, he seems to be suggesting that we make an assumption of complexity rather than simplicity. That starting whith "we don't know" opens up the mind to "what if" (of course, such what-ifs remain so unless proven). It is at least fun, if not usefull to think in this way about the behaviour of Homo N. and its possible interactions with our African ancestors. Think of all the "modern" human interactions with our own and other species: mutual aid, trade, conquest, marriage, slavery, domestication, bestiality, worship, adoption, genocide, alliances.........we see interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans as perfectly natural, after all we now see them as being very close to us. How can we tell how our ancestors viewed other hominins, can we rule out the interbreeding Professor Burger hints at, could "we" not have "decided" for any number of reasons that "they" were "close enough".... and of course, that may have been mutual....
basically 1/4 million years ago, early modern humans banged some archaic hominid. naledi for all its primitive traits has features like the globular shape of the cranium shared with only modern humans
Is it possible the naledi climbed down into the chamber and were unable to get out?
Is there any above ground evidence of their existence. how did they live, huts, etc?
Video starts at 4:15
EXTRACT THE DNA!!
The skeleton resembles a chimp. The only humanlike feature is the feet. Therefore the name should be pan neladi not homo neladi.
I suggest you look into this more. I can not remember the name of the other hominid Professor Berger’s then young son found the first piece of before H. Naledi. They have quite a few fossilized bones for it. Nowhere near as many as for H. Naledi but more than many others that have been classified as Homo.
He opened up all that they were doing to the world online for free. I only listened to presentations on UA-cam. I have sleep problems and use interesting speakers to help me sleep and get over nightmares to sleep again. Anyway, they probably still have archives for the public you can access if you want to know why only Naledi earned Homo Naledi. In one of the presentations on UA-cam he covered it a bit. If I remember correctly, one of the reasons was the complexity of the brain structure. But I may be mixing that up with why Homo Flores (the Hobbit) got the classification.
National Geographic probably has quite a few articles on it too since they are one of the major sponsors.
From your other comments it seems you have only watched this video. I can answer one of your questions and talk about your one demand.
No, they, plural, did not get trapped in the part of the cave system where the two teenage boys first saw lots and lots of bones on the ground. After the first season the women archeologists, with climbing skills who could fit through the smallest gaps, retrieved about 1,500 bones. All the same critter. To date I think they have retrieved about 2,700 bones total from there and other parts of the cave system. Only recently did they discover, and verify, they used fire in the caves and seem to have cooked a few birds. The skull of a small child intentionally placed on a rock. Some long lines carved into at least a couple of places on the cave walls. The first area they had found is where the H. Naledi took their dead. They have a virtual thing that displays the explored cave system. Professor John Hawks’ has presentations on UA-cam with that. He is a Paleo Anthropologist. He, like Berger, can not fit through many of the routes to where the bones have been found. No, the Naledi were not trapped in the cave system. They used it.
They have likely tried to get DNA. Unless the South African government has a ban on the process, I assume they have not been able to get any of Naledi’s yet. DNA from bacteria and other stuff, including the modern humans, but not it. Paleo Genomists, like Svante Paabo or someone else from the Max Planck Institute, would have presentations by now. Things have to be dam near perfect for them to get even a teeny tiny bit of DNA from fossils over about 50,000 years old. They were shocked and surprised at the Max Planck lab when they got that bit from a teeny tiny bone in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains. Svante Paabo was woken up by a call from the lab. “It isn’t Neanderthal”. It wasn’t Sapiens either. The layer of the dig it was found in is dated at about 50,000 years old.
They have gotten extremely Neanderthal DNA from extremely old layers of a couple of digs. One in Spain dated around 400,000 years old. I think the other is in Croatia. Think. You can research why getting DNA from the very long dead is very hard and usually fails.
basicaly: Darwin is dead
Actually, Darwin is dead.😂
Humans today are the same humans yesterday. There is no difference between us now and us yesterday (ancient) so to continually mention “modern day humans” is tricky to the eager minds.
The way they speak about all these so-called human species is based on a made up definition of what a human is. We aren’t the only mammals on this planet but that doesn’t mean we evolved from other mammals or they’ve evolved from us so to say that they’re our ancestors is false and misleading.
Apes are apes, monkey’s are monkeys, Gorillas are Gorillas, Bonobos are Bonobos and Humans are Humans. No evolving separated us nor combined us.
These skeletons that they’re “discovering” and calling them “new species of humans” is just them finding an extinct ape, monkey or gorilla then reconstructing the image giving it a human like appearance when clearly the eyebrows bone are the same as a gorilla, ape, or bonobos of today. It’s no different than them discovering a new dinosaur fossil which they could easily say “hey, we’ve found a new reptile never before documented.
Apes, monkeys, Bonobos etc still occupy caves like they’ve done back then. They’re the ones being found in these cave systems in places a human could not fit or navigate without proper equipment. Those are apes they’re finding that’s how Lucy was found at 4ft tall. They’re great climbers.
They’re the same “Hunter Gathers today that they were yesterday. Nothing has changed with them. So when they discover a structure buried in an area where apes roamed, they have this tendency of acting like the apes built them but lost the technology over time when it was us humans who existed during those times as well.
Don’t have them convincing you to donate to no effort to dig up extinct animals like it’s going to tell the. Story of our ancestors. It’s just going to tell the stories of an animal that once roamed the planet that went out like the dinosaurs. This is why they can’t find any close relatives because we aren’t related thru generations. Only by physical comparison.
Apologies for the long text. We can’t move forward looking back at history that doesn’t involve our growth and development. That trickery has to stop. Reconstructionist needs to reconstruct an ape and stop making it look humanly with bare skin.
no