The first gravediggers in human history – Knowledge

A trio of works that published online and have now been presented at a conference, creates an amazing scenario. According to this, around 240,000 years ago, human relatives of short stature carried their dead through a maze of narrow passages into the dark depths of a huge limestone cave system in South Africa. By firelight, these tiny cavers dug shallow graves, sometimes arranging the corpses in a fetal position and placing a stone tool near a child’s hand. Some carved cross-hatching into the cave walls, and others cooked small animals in what amounted to an underground burial more than 100,000 years before modern humans exhibited such behaviors.

This scenario is based on a wealth of fossil finds in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system; if true, it would have major implications for our picture of the beginnings of human behavior and the abilities of our extinct cousins, Homo naledi. “We are faced with a remarkable discovery of hominids, non-humans with brains only a third the size of (modern) humans (…), burying their dead, using symbols and engaging in meaningful activities,” said the team’s leader, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, at a news conference. “Not only are (modern) humans not unique in their development of symbolic practices, but (we) may not even have invented such behaviors.”

Other researchers, however, are mostly skeptical about the work presented in the online journal E Life checked and up Bio Rxiv were published. While the researchers say they are excited about the fossil finds, the bodies could have simply fallen into the pit or been placed there and slowly buried by natural processes. Later hominins may have made the etchings, which are undated.

The leader of the team lost 20 kilos in order to be able to climb into the cave himself

“Looking at the abundance of skeletons, I’m becoming more and more convinced that something amazing happened here,” says paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres of Spain’s National Research Center for Human Evolution. “But they didn’t pass the test to prove deliberate burial.”

Berger’s team made its first discovery in Rising Star in 2013: the bones of at least 15 individuals at the bottom of a chute 50 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg. The team spoke of a new species of prehistoric man because the fossils showed a surprising mix of features, such as a small brain and a spherical skull. The researchers were also surprised at how young the finds were: between 241,000 and 335,000 years, based on radiometric data in the sediments above and below the remains. As more bones turned up, Berger suspected they had been buried on purpose.

Lee Berger explains his thesis in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa.

(Photo: Luca Sola/AFP)

That was an explosive claim. The oldest generally accepted burial is that of a modern human infant, dating to 78 000 years ago in a cave in Kenya and reported in 2021 by Martinón-Torres and colleagues in Nature has been published. Now, Berger says, he has evidence to support his claim.

In 2018, he observed members of his team at work in the caves and followed the action via live stream, as he was too tall to crawl through the narrow passageways to the chamber. Suddenly the camera was bumped and switched to infrared mode. In the black-and-white image, Berger could see the distinct edges of an “oval feature.” “I think that’s a tomb,” he told the excavators. “They said no.”

Further excavation showed that the oval was a cavity 8 centimeters deep and 50 by 25 centimeters in size, filled with 83 bone fragments and teeth from a Homo naledi individual, as well as some fragments from other individuals. The bones were interspersed with orange-red stones that appeared to have come from the strata below. Berger, who lost 45 pounds to see the chamber for himself, believes the stones show ancient gravediggers dug the pit by digging up dirt and stones, setting them aside, and then using them to cover the body.

Were the bodies carefully draped in a fetal or seated position?

Elsewhere in the cave, the team found another group of very fragile bones. The researchers removed two large chunks of sediment with bones in them, wrapped them in plaster of paris and brought them to their lab. There, CT scans revealed 90 pieces of skeleton and 51 pieces of teeth from three Homo naledi individuals, including one child. The scans also showed a tool-like stone object next to the child’s hand. The researchers argue that the arrangement of the bones suggests the bodies were carefully buried in a fetal or seated position.

They also discovered cross hatching and other geometric shapes, engraved on the cave walls; some superimposed on others, suggesting they were engraved at different times. The oldest undisputed symbolic art to date comes from Blombos Cave in South Africa and is 73,000 years old. However, Berger argues that the undated etchings must be the work of Homo naledi since no other hominin left any traces in the caves.

He also claims that Homo naledi had fire to work in the dark, although the papers contain no evidence of this. But hominins controlled fire elsewhere for at least 600,000 years. Berger posted pictures of charcoal and charred animal bones from the cave online.

Homo naledi had a brain about 410 to 600 cubic centimeters in size, which is about the size of a chimpanzee or Australopithecus. Taken together, the scenario suggests “that those of us who teach and write about the evolution of social behavior (…) need to step back and take man off his pedestal,” says co-author Agustín Fuentes of Princeton University. “A lot of what we thought was typically human and caused by a large brain might not even be due to any of those things.”

“It’s not about the size of the brain, it’s about how it’s structured”

Evolutionary biologist Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar National Museum agrees. “It’s not about the size of the brain, it’s about how it’s structured,” he says. He believes the etchings are “most likely” to be from Homo naledi, as no remains of large-brained humans have been found in the cave. “It shows that Homo naledi had a certain level of self-awareness,” says Finlayson.

Others, however, say the team’s evidence doesn’t support such jumps. “The whole thing is unconvincing,” says archaeologist João Zilhão of the University of Barcelona, ​​who has suggested that Neanderthals created early cave art. He and others suggest that the bodies of Homo naledi may have been positioned by natural processes. For example, they could have been thrown, fallen, or been washed into the chamber. Geological movement and sedimentation, common in caves, may have moved the bones and covered them with dirt. The undated etchings, which resemble later carvings of Homo sapiens in South Africa, may have been made much later, adds Durham University archaeologist Paul Pettitt.

As of this writing, the data “unfortunately does not provide clear and unequivocal evidence of intentional burial,” says Pettitt, who is an expert on ancient burials. He says the team needs to complete the excavation of the pits and further examine the bones and sediments to determine whether they were laid in one burial at the same time or at different times, and whether the bodies were later disturbed by geological movements. Martinón-Torres adds that it is unclear from the photos whether the bodies were placed intact, as would be expected in the case of a deliberate burial. “We don’t have articulated bodies,” she says.

It also lacks the numerous fragmentary artefacts one would expect to find at a burial site, such as stone tools used to dig the pits. “There should be cultural remains typical of graves,” says Arizona State University archaeologist Curtis Marean. “Given the extremely difficult working conditions, it will be very difficult to prove pits and burials,” he adds.

Researchers agree that by finding so many individuals of Homo naledi, Berger and his team have uncovered a remarkable death scene. But without more solid evidence, Pettitt and others say that Homo naledi cannot be considered the inventors of meaningful behavior. “It’s the science of excavation that’s impressive here,” says Pettitt. “We can and should ignore speculation about Homo naledi’s apparently complex emotional intelligence and cognition.”

This post is from Science Magazine Science. It is not an official translation of the Science-Editorial staff. In case of doubt, the English original, published by the AAAS, applies. German editing: wet

source site