Rising Star

So excited - been waiting 2 years for today's announcement!

Anyone care to discuss?

Yes gladly, but what announcement ?

Amazing find. I remember seeing a show about Berger's son making discoveries. Finding these bones may have been difficult, but that will be nothing in comparison to unraveling the mysteries they contain.

I am rather traditionalist in these things. Let's hope that this is not another "Piltdown man"

Where big egos are found all things are possible. It seems though that the find is genuine and the article acknowledges no conclusion can be drawn on how old they are.

No, Piltdown was exceptional in many ways, including that no one else was involved in the discovery, and it was presented as a legitimate find. The claim was that a worker in an excavation in England gave it to the investigator.

Here dozens of people were involved in a highly complex excavation. Possibly no excavation of the hominid past was as documented as this one. Every step of the way, we were able to see the unfolding of the story.

Whatever these bones turn out to represent, a fraud is not one of the reasonable possibilities.

Wednesday Sept 16, PBS, NOVA will air a program devoted to the excavation and the new findings. This is must-watch TV!

>4 pmackey: yes, Berger sent his 15 year old son through the 8-inch opening leading to the cave system, because he himself is far too large to fit. He says he may qualify for "Worst parent of the Year", because when his son emerged, instead of saying are you ok, he said, "Well?!"

His son was so overwhelmed by what he'd seen that he couldn't speak, until finally he told his dad how unbelievable and beautiful was what lay within.

Really telling comment right at the end:

If we learned about a completely new form of hominin only because a couple of cavers were skinny enough to fit through a crack in a well-explored South African cave, we really don’t have a clue what else might be out there.

I suspect that, over the years to come, the 'family tree' is going to be revised and revised and revised. It's like Saturday morning matinee when I was a kid - can't wait for the next episode.

It is pretty clear that the hominid family tree is "bushy", not linear. And sparsely preserved. There must be more out there, but extremely widely distributed and hard to find. Almost every find alters our understanding.

The only part I'm not sure about in the quote is the notion that the cave at issue was "well-explored". What I have gleaned is that it had been visited by recreational spelunkers, but not thoroughly examined.

Now having heard Berger speak at length, it is clear that while the cave system itself had been entered by spelunkers previously, no one had ever explored far enough to have found the remote chamber in which the bones were found. There is an extremely narrow vertical cylindrical path 90 meters into the cave leading to the fossil chamber, the opening of which is only located by reaching a remote inner chamber and climbing up one if its interior walls.

Correction: the smallest opening that must be traversed is 6.88 inches in width. That does take a small person!

I'm wondering if there's more information to be discovered about the cave itself - or, at least, yet to be shared with the scientists. From the information we've been given in that article, the location and nature of the remains don't seem (to me) to lend themselves to any sort of convincing theory. As things stand so far, it just doesn't seem to make sense.

It's a fascinating mystery. At this point, according to the scientists, caching of bodies for whatever reason is the leading explanation. They have reasons to disbelieve other possibilities such as being dragged in by animals, a group being trapped until death, or bodies being washed into the cave.

They are debating one issue relating to the site: should they leave some of the finds where they are, in the cave, for future study by people who may be equipped with superior technology.

>15 stellarexplorer:, I say don't leave the anything in the cave as much as possible. I expect there will be more finds for later generations. Speaking of which, seems we should have cavers poking fiber-optic cameras into every little crevice.

>16 pmackey: yeah, on that point Berger revealed that he has been studying other nearby sites and says he has multiple additional finds not yet ready for publication. Very promising!

Couldn't there have been collapses and other changes that made a once easily accessed cave into the really big pain it is today?

>18 Bookmarque: I guess it could have been, but Prof. Berger says it was not. He sounds confident the cave and fossil chamber were not readily accessible at the time of the deposition nor at any time since. There are tell-tale signs to indicate the bones have lain undesturbed, and that the cave was never open to the air.

>19 stellarexplorer: >18 Bookmarque: This is really the bit I'm struggling with.

I'm a sport caver myself, so I know a little (tiny) bit about caves. It is impossible that that chamber was ever open to the air. But it's a remarkable place to have chosen to deposit bodies if it wan't accessible in any other way. You couldn't even just push them in at the top and expect them to fall away, rock is exceptionally annoying like that, things snag at the least opportunity, you'd have a blockage of bones halfway down the slot. Carrying them down there just isn't slightly feasible.

It is very hard to say without having been there and looked at it. But my most likely explanation is still that they'd have been washed in from somewhere deeper in the system, which then silted up blocking that passage. AT the very least they were placed there and subsequent floods blocked the entrance without disturbing the bones too much. Either way still implies consistent fire control in order to explore that far!

That seems a reasonable explanation reading_fox.

>20 reading_fox: Knowing nothing of caves -- other than they're scary places -- I thought that the access must have been easier somehow in the past. I've only been caving one time and even with that limited experience, I didn't think one could get a dead body down a tiny shaft.

The circumstances of the cave and the bones themselves are marvelous -- in the fullest sense of the word. I can't wait to hear what science finds from this discovery.

>20 reading_fox: that is a logical thought, and of course they looked for evidence of the action of water. Problem is there is no evidence that there has been any water in the cave.

Water does leave silts, as you indicate RF. It leaves layers of sediment. It announces itself. Fossils deposited in that way -- a common situation in which to find them - are encased in layers of mud and silt. Not here. These fossils are lying on top of the cave floor much as they were when first deposited. The only material in there is a small amount of very fine dust that has accumulated from the walls of the chamber over a very long time.

"But water would inevitably have washed rubble, plant material, and other debris into the fossil chamber along with the bones, and they simply aren’t there. “There isn’t a lot of subjectivity here,” said Eric Roberts, a geologist from James Cook University in Australia, svelte enough to have examined the chamber himself. “The sediments don’t lie.”

I wonder if it might have been an ossuary. Bones can be deposited down a narrow shaft much easier than bodies.

Also, these people are likely to have been much smaller than modern humans. Adult modern humans can fit down the shaft, or at least some of them can, so it may not have been such an issue for our "cavemen."

>24 PhaedraB: right - their size might well have made it an easier transit

>24 PhaedraB: It's brain was half the size of a human brain, so burial rites seem unlikely.

>26 jjwilson61: That's a small brain, for sure. Larger than a chimp's, but small. But we really don't have a clear understanding of the correlation between brain size and specific cognitive and behavioral tasks.

Maybe we start with how the bones got there. If it turns out that naledi itself placed them there, so be it. We would then need to rethink the behavioral repertoire possible with a brain much smaller than the one we're using.

"Burial rites" may be a misleading term here. It implies a custom we tend to associate with a church or organized religion, or at least with culture as we conceive of it. Maybe the idea that they put the dead in a hole deep inside a cave would seem more plausible if we used another term?

>23 stellarexplorer: ""But water would inevitably have washed rubble, plant material, and other debris into the fossil chamber along with the bones, "

That's just flat wrong. Underground water sources just don't have access to that sort of material. Yes a surface stream would have washed that in, but a lot of caves aren't formed from direct surface capture streams. I've been in a lot chambers floored purely with fine silt and clay obviously deposited by ancient streams that haven't been near the surface.

>28 reading_fox: But then there would be signs of water-borne silt and clay in the cave and it seems that there isn't.

>29 jjwilson61: - the bones aren't resting on rock, which means they are resting on water-borne dirt from some location. Caves form by the process of water eroding solid rock, any dirt/silt/clay present comes in from water. (Although maybe a lot older than the bones... it would be interesting to know the relative ages... caves can have been formed as recently as the last ice age) The few pictures I've seen all show the bones buried in the earth, hence why I still suspect they were washed in from a more accessible location deeper in the cave system. But I have only seen limited pictures and without seeing more details of the hydrology and the karst region, I can only speculate.

>27 stellarexplorer: Maybe we start with how the bones got there. If it turns out that naledi itself placed them there, so be it. We would then need to rethink the behavioral repertoire possible with a brain much smaller than the one we're using.

I agree. Establish the facts, then address the implications. Answer the basic who, what, when, where, and how (as much as possible) then ask why.

Edited to add "how".

>30 reading_fox: RF, I wish I could answer as a professional geologist, but I can't. I'm at the mercy of hearing and trying to evaluate what professional geologists and scientists who have spent two years on this are saying. These are careful people, aware of the egg that will adhere to their faces if they miss something as basic as "water washed them in" when they have boldly told the world "There has been no water in the cave".

Call me naive, but I know some of these people personally (I took John Hawks class, for instance. He's incredibly smart, experienced and organized.). I just don't believe they would make a mistake that basic and of that magnitude. And the world is watching this project, like none before it.

Oh, one more consideration on the above topic. Never before has there been a find composed solely of hominid fossils. Universally such finds are accompanied by antelope bones, rodents, etc. what kind of event solely selects hominids? Water is not selective. No predator goes after hominids alone. It would be an unknown kind of water event that would produce a huge cache of the bones of only hominids.