Awesome to see the Rising Star Expedition on HN! I was working in Johannesburg while the expedition was active and my partner managed, through a serious of very fortunate events to become a caver on the expedition. Here she is carrying up some of the first bones they extracted - <a href="https://i.imgur.com/IfT4PQz.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/IfT4PQz.jpg</a>.<p>For those of you interested, the expedition was sponsored by National Geographic, and there was/is a fairly extensive blog (<a href="http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/blog/rising-star-expedition/" rel="nofollow">http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/blog/rising-star-expedi...</a>) covering most of the details. When they first started pulling up the fossils, the excitement was palpable - <a href="http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/11/video-first-day-in-fossil-cave/" rel="nofollow">http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/11/video-first-...</a>.<p>The expedition occurred nearly two years ago, and there were so many bones still left in the catchment that they left many behind.<p>Incidentally, though the article says it was scientists who discovered the fossils - they were actually discovered by amateur cavers. The Cradle of Humankind (so named because there are so many similar catchments in the surrounding area) has a massive system of caves and some of the most hardcore amateur cavers in the world.
The Guardian's coverage of this contains a fair amount of scepticism:<p><i>Christoph Zollikofer, an anthropologist at the University of Zurich, said that many of the bone characteristics used to claim the creature as a new species are seen in more primitive animals, and by definition cannot be used to define a new species.</i><p><i>“The few ‘unique’ features that potentially define the new species need further scrutiny, as they may represent individual variation, or variation at the population level,” he said.</i><p><i>Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, goes further. “From what is presented here, they belong to a primitive Homo erectus, a species named in the 1800s.”</i><p>--<p><i>“Intentional disposal of rotting corpses by fellow pinheads makes a nice headline, but seems like a stretch to me,” said Jungers. Zollikofer agrees. “The ‘new species’ and ‘dump-the-dead’ claims are clearly for the media. None of them is substantiated by the data presented in the publications,” he said. Hawks is open to other explanations, but said that disposal made sense. “The evidence really tends to exclude the idea that they entered the chamber one at a time, alive, over some time, because we have infants, small children, and very old adults who would almost certainly not have managed to get into this chamber without being deposited there.”</i><p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/10/new-species-of-ancient-human-discovered-claim-scientists" rel="nofollow">http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/10/new-species-o...</a>
Something I've never understood (since highschool some 30 years ago) is; when getting partial skeletons perhaps from only a single individual, how can they claim new species? I mean what's diff with that and some hypothetical future anthropoligist looking at siberian with roundish skull thicker brow ridges and that of six foot tall masai with long face and then a sub 5 foot native peruvian and declaring them all different species?
Here is a short video of caver Rick Hunter squeezing through one of the tunnels to the Dinaledi Chamber. Not for the claustrophobic.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTPRx8xVafE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTPRx8xVafE</a>
"What we are seeing is more and more species of creatures that suggests that nature was experimenting with how to evolve humans, thus giving rise to several different types of human-like creatures originating in parallel in different parts of Africa. Only one line eventually survived to give rise to us,"
Far out. What if they could make a Jurassic Park, but instead of dinosaurs, extinct human-like species?
Amazing fly-through video of the Rising Star cave where these discoveries were made: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI-JF28T44U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI-JF28T44U</a>
Using a type of subterraneous mapping lasers I imagine as you see some kind of globular markers dotted around the cave as you pass through.
Unable to find exactly what tech they used for this. Would be interesting to hear any more info on this!
Jerry Coyne had written a nice blogpost that discusses the exaggerated media response and the actual academic novelty of this discovery and its description.<p><a href="https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/a-new-species-of-hominin-hits-the-news-what-is-it-and-what-does-it-mean/" rel="nofollow">https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/a-new-sp...</a><p>Tl;dr: the fossils possess intriguing anatomical features that appear to be (or more probably closely related to) a transition point between Australopithecus and Homo. Any inference of behaviour or even fossil age is speculation. The academia behind it seems to be quite good, but again the media are blowing it out of proportion.
entirely off-topic: 'Naledi' means 'star' (the celestial kind) in both <i>Tswana</i> and <i>Sotho</i> - 2 of South Africa's 11 official languages[1].<p>1. Also included: English and Afrikaans. South Africa is a pretty diverse place <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_South_Africa" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_South_Africa</a>
A number of paleoanthropologists are skeptical of the claims.
They say that the bones look like H.erectus and that some of the more bizarre claims sound "tailored for the media"
<i>Like all those working in the field, he is at pains to avoid the term "missing link".</i><p>"But we're journalists, so we have no such compunctions."
Pleasantly surprised to see the group photo of the scientists who made the discovery was all female! Is paleontology one of those strongly gender-biased fields, like working in HR, or software development?
In the past decade or so, I've become aware of a vaguely human-like species that invades my lawn now and then. Usually playing some disco music drives them off.
If truly a new species, this is a huge discovery. Why then is it not published in a more prestigious journal, such as Science or Nature? Not that a prestigious journal is necessary, but the authors' choice is curious, especially when many scientists are skeptical of the claims.
Wow! That's so cool. I'm especially interested to see whether this is taken as evidence that ritual behaviour emerged far earlier than previously believed.
I don't understand why they spend that much money finding out what had happened in the past or where we came from. Why not spend those money finding ways to save our future? Maybe a technology that converts those smoke coming out from factories to oxygen instantly or something that will clean the water or fix the ozone maybe? We need all the help we can get.