Did Homo Naledi Really Bury Its Dead and Carve Cave Art?

Background

Homo naledi is an extinct species of early human relative first announced in 2015, following the 2013 discovery of extensive fossil remains deep within the Rising Star cave system near Johannesburg, South Africa. The species combines a puzzling mix of primitive and more modern anatomical features: a small brain, with a cranial capacity of roughly 465 to 610 cubic centimetres against a modern human's 1,270 to 1,330, paired with hands and feet more similar to those of later Homo species than to older, more ape-like hominins. Dating published in 2017, combining uranium-series and electron spin resonance analysis of the fossil teeth with uranium-thorium dating of overlying flowstone, placed the remains at roughly 236,000 to 335,000 years old, meaning Homo naledi overlapped in time with early Homo sapiens despite its markedly smaller brain.

In 2023, a team led by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, who had led the original 2013 excavation, announced a far more striking claim: that Homo naledi had deliberately buried its dead in the cave's Dinaledi Chamber, and had carved deep geometric engravings, cross-hatchings, squares, triangles, and other shapes, into the dolomitic rock walls of a nearby passage. If accurate, this would represent the earliest known evidence of deliberate burial and abstract mark-making by any hominin, and by a species with a brain roughly a third the size of a modern human's, a combination that would meaningfully challenge assumptions about how much brain capacity such behaviour actually requires.

Main Theories

The deliberate burial and symbolic-art claim

Berger's team argued that the positioning and condition of the Homo naledi remains in the Dinaledi Chamber, combined with the presence of the geometric engravings on nearby walls, together indicated intentional mortuary behaviour and deliberate symbolic mark-making, rather than accidental deposition by natural processes such as water transport or animal activity. The team released their findings first as unreviewed preprints on bioRxiv, generating substantial media coverage, before submitting them to eLife under its reviewed-preprint publishing model.

The evidence-is-insufficient critique

A number of independent palaeoanthropologists who examined the published evidence through eLife's open review process concluded the case fell short of what deliberate burial and intentional art require to be scientifically established. Reviewers noted that the geometric engravings themselves cannot currently be independently dated, meaning there is no direct evidence they were made by Homo naledi rather than by later visitors, including modern humans, to the same cave passages. Critics also pointed to the absence of clearly defined, deliberately dug grave cuts of the kind that support burial claims in other hominin contexts, arguing that the sediment patterns described are also consistent with natural processes depositing and covering remains over time without intentional human action. Compounding the difficulty, the Rising Star team has not invited outside researchers to independently examine the disputed chambers and engravings firsthand, which several critics have identified as a barrier to resolving the dispute through ordinary scientific verification.

Common Misconceptions

The controversy is sometimes framed as a claim that has been debunked or rejected outright. That overstates the case: eLife's reviewers assessed the evidence as currently inadequate to fully support the burial and intentional-art interpretation, a significant scientific pushback, but this is different from a formal retraction or a finding that the claims are false. The dispute remains genuinely open, with the fossils' existence, anatomy, and age entirely uncontested and only the specific behavioural interpretation in question.

It is also sometimes assumed that a small brain automatically rules out complex behaviour of this kind. Part of what makes the Homo naledi debate scientifically significant, regardless of how it is eventually resolved, is that it directly tests that assumption: if the burial and engraving claims are ultimately confirmed by further evidence, they would show that a brain a third the size of a modern human's can support behaviour long assumed to require far greater cognitive capacity, which is exactly why the claim drew such intense scrutiny rather than being dismissed outright.

Current Consensus

There is no scientific dispute over Homo naledi's existence, anatomy, or approximate age. What remains genuinely unresolved is whether the species deliberately buried its dead and intentionally carved the Rising Star cave's geometric engravings, with the 2023 claims currently regarded by a substantial portion of the palaeoanthropological community as suggestive but not adequately demonstrated, pending direct dating of the engravings and independent access to the disputed chambers.

Why This Mystery Endures

The Homo naledi debate endures because it sits at a genuinely significant fault line in human-origins research: whether symbolic thought and deliberate mortuary practice require the large brains long assumed necessary for them, or whether a much smaller-brained hominin could manage the same behaviour. That is a real, high-stakes scientific question rather than a manufactured controversy, which is part of why it has drawn such sustained, substantive critique rather than the kind of dismissal reserved for pseudoscience.

The case also endures because of a structural problem this site has traced elsewhere: a dramatic claim announced with striking, highly shareable imagery, deep cave engravings and a hidden burial chamber, reaching the public before the ordinary, slower process of independent verification could catch up, a pattern echoed in this site's coverage of the Piltdown Man hoax, where a sensational claim about human origins also outran the scrutiny that would eventually unravel it, though nothing in the current Homo naledi evidence suggests deliberate fraud of that kind. Restricted physical access to the disputed cave chambers keeps the debate from resolving quickly, in something of the same way that a definitional dispute over what counts as genuine "de-extinction" has kept Colossal Biosciences' dire wolf claim contested well past its initial announcement: a genuinely novel scientific claim, credible enough to take seriously, specific enough to be testable in principle, and not yet settled by the evidence currently on the table.