Basically, basically, basically....thanks for watching! Videos mentioned in the video: Paranthropus - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lzBwFh0dYIs.html How did early hominins dispose of the dead? - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0oSZ7rkliz8.html Basically.
I find it easy to speculate that different hominins didn't really take much notice of each other if encounters happened, just as different species of animals kind of don't take notice of other closely related animals in the same environment. If they're not a threat, competition or targetted for use like food, they would just be part of the scenery and given their own space just like different species of monkeys living in close proximity do with each other. We would be much more curious only because of how we are now, but even local modern people who existed around chimps for ages probably just took them for granted, though noting their similarity, and unless really wanting to eat them, would probably not want to disturb them very much as they do look potentially dangerous, just like we sensibly leave a big troop of wild monkeys or baboons alone. As for the remain's location, as soon as I heard about it on the news I imagined that being a bit smarter than chimps, the local population may have developed a kind of cultural habit of just throwing their dead down a well known hole in the area simply because they didn't like the dead bodies hanging around, and not for any ritual burial reasons. It's easy to imagine that looking at a corpse would be gruesome enough and smelly enough, as well as attracting unwanted vermin and predators that just getting rid of it would be desired, with ready memories of what has happened before. It certainly explains no tools or other things, and their deposition over time.
Sir, I’m not sure if you’re new to RU-vid but please don’t link sources in the description. It makes it difficult for us to make baseless vitriolic claims in the comment section.
My father died in 2009. Every time there's a new discovery or advances in science it make me think " I wish he was alive to see this." Especially when they decoded the Neanderthal genome. Thanks for the great videos.
Just think...someday you will be on your elderly deathbed, ruing the things you will not get to see and your children will remember you when new things are found and deciphered. This is the human condition.
pallexa All the while you’re Dad now has the Creator telling him, can you believe they believe in this Made up nonsense ? Anything but me ,they will believe, until they come and meet me.
pallexa well that is very sad . Even the Devil knows GOD is real, and one of the Biggest tricks he has ever done, was to convince people that GOD doesn’t exist. Don’t be that fool. I would imagine if your Dad loved or cared for you in any way, he would be pleading with you to come to the knowledge of GOD and the eternal Salvation through the blood JESUS CHRIST. I can guarantee it. It’s very simple. It’s humbleness and a heart thing. Admit your a sinner like everyone else, acknowledge Jesus as Your personal LORD and Savior and let him change your heart. I challenge you to do so.
@@oldschool3484 Fools like you are what make this world a madhouse. I'd feel bad for you, but I know you cant change. The next generation will have less of you and we'll have to be content with that.
Isn't this the cave for which they had to gather a team of physically tiny female paleontologists/anatomists/anthropologists who also had spelunking experience? That's a pretty interesting story too.
@Current Batches, Definitely not!! and I'm one of those. The first time I went down into one of the caves in this very area, u go down 60 metres, most of it u can walk however there's a spot where u have to either crawI or go thru in a crouching position for about 10 meters. Panic set in and I promptly turned around and was walking back against people that were lining up to go thru. Quite embarrassing I must say however I did go thru it about an hour later. I did hyperventilate my way thru though...🥵🥵
I think it was after two years of studying Naledi thay they announced the discovery to the world here in South Africa which kinda gripped the country like no other discovery had in recent memory. They had the bones on display at Maropeng in The Cradle of Humankind. Hundreds of people turned up, some were really disappointed as they were expecting more than just bones. Just what they were hoping to see is beyond me...
We really do love for things to be fantastical and over the top don't we? But for sure, not sure what they were expecting lol. The fact that we're able to find ANYTHING from so long ago is incredible really. Just thinking about all the variables and length of time, and all the things we'll never find; the fact that we're able to discover as much we have/can is amazing. Even if it's "just bones."
I would imagine that the cave was already quite an enclosed space or difficult to access when they were deposited there. If it had been easily accessible, then, regardless of how the bodies got there, they presumably would have been scavenged by carnivores after they were deposited.
I would even imagine the possibility that the bodies were disposed elsewhere but ended up in the cave by means of a natural pehomenon. For instance a river or landslide. It could explain the lack of evidence for human activity.
@@BlacksmithTWD That is a good point. We know the earth shifts/moves. Is there a possibility that the cave structure was different and had an easier access point back then? Have the geologist explored the "growth" of the cave given then timeline?
@@miriamkelly3106 With the information we got we can only speculate alas. Though it demonstrates one of the phenomenons when practiciting scientific research : Trying to get the answer to one questions results in becoming aware of a whole bunch of other questions we don't know the answer to either.
Hello from the future. I actually learned about this from gutsick gibbon's channel, but because the bodies had been added over a longer course of time (ie, not a single event) and were still mostly articulate (their bodies entered as a single piece and did not get jumbled around once inside), their being there makes it reasonable that it was intentional to some extent. Whether this would be from curious goers getting trapped and dying (perhaps less likely as only naledi skeletons have been found in that space to my knowledge and nothing was brought with them) or it was a form of intentional burial to avoid bringing in scavengers. It was a while after this video came out, but later teams did find evidence of fire in the caves and even bones of small animals in and around the "hearths" (didn't sound like evidence of cooking, more of disposal or maybe ritual). Dating the site is difficult so it could have been a different group later, but a minor command of fire used in the larger sections of the cave would help to explain how they were able to navigate through the darkness of the cave system to get to that area where the bones were found.
They're Hominids my friend, not quite human.They're more closely related to us than they are other great apes but they're not humans. It's like how the animals that eventually became dogs were more similar to modern dogs than they were wolves, however they're not quite the same as modern dogs.
@Kingvanga Infinite we probably killed them all. they weren't mated with save erectus, neanderthal and denisova all of which are still alive in living peoples dna. Is Naledi the ancestor of black Africans?
Jimmy Schmidt - Only Caucasians and Mongols have non-human (Neandethal, monkey etc) DNA. Black Africans have full human genetics. So I doubt this is their ancestor. www.universityherald.com/articles/70130/20170321/harvard-researcher-says-africans-are-100-pure-human-than-the-rest.htm
What always comes to my mind regarding the Naledi is that we'd have never known of them except by this accidental discovery, even though this is one of the most heavily searched areas of the world for hominid traces. Makes me wonder how many other specie were there that disposed of the dead such that there would be no trace at all left.
It wasn’t accidental though- the two cavers were looking for bones. In fact, a caver had made it into that chamber sometimes in the 80’s (a lone cave flag was found) but they didn’t know/understand what they were looking at. Or didn’t even see it. Upon the release of Google Earth, Dr. Berger was able to discover the remnants of caves that hadn’t been noticed nor explored/investigated all around the cradle of human kind. Two years before Naledi, his team discovered Australopithecus Sediba. His teams have been exploring several cave sites ever since. Right now they’re working on a new discovery found at one of those sites, a known cave that was never investigated by “fossil hunters”. Cave site 105 had been blown up by miners at the turn of the century, explored by modern spelunkers, and the movie Tremors filmed a scene there. But no one ever looked for fossils there. So far the discovery is just being called the hominid of site 105 as we eagerly await its details. Could be an already known hominid like Sediba or Naledi, or it could be another new discovery. The remains are encased in breccia, so it’s gonna take a bit longer to figure out. You can follow their progress on social medias.
Lets take a moment of gratitude..because he spent jis time explaining despite how no one would pay attention to it because its too long..(no offense..)
Well we find new sites around the world all the time that were filled in by the occupants before they vanished so it's not a bad train of thought to go down.
Like the 160kyo H longi, Or how many survived to this day and despite tens of thousands of witnesses, are dismissed as "crazy whack a do" Cough cough *Paranthropus aka Bigfoot*
I've thought about that, like what if for hundreds of thousands of years there was a huge practice of burning the dead hominids after they died? Homo erectus was around for over 1 million years, and they discovered fire pretty early on.
So many questions: did they have language that helped them hunt, gather food, and take care of their young? Also, their ability to walk upright (bipedalism) plays a major influence for brain growth, it gave them cognitive ability to forge for food, plan hunts, possibly cook meat, and socialization. There’s a lot to learn from our ancestors, so thanks for sharing, it’ll help us more understand how we evolved.
The cavers were sent to explore the caves in the cradle of humankind to specifically look for homin or other remains. They only escavated a small area of the chamber, at the bottom of the chute, and they only went down about a meter. There are lots more remains in the chamber, including some where a stalactite developed on top of it. There’s way more than 1500, and it is so exciting! Thanks for this video!
@@pacotaco1246 watch NOVA’s “Dawn of Humanity”-it’s excellent. One of my favorite NOVAs. Here on RU-vid you can watch talks by Dr. Marina Elliott, Dr. Lee Berger & Dr. John Hawks. They are excellent speakers & not at all dry or boring.
Sounds like burial to me. It amazes me how much people, even scientists, underestimate the mental capability of creatures they dont yet fully understand.
Tell me about it. Even elephants will cover their dead with brush and leaves, even elephants not from their herd. And it would only make sense that we figured out burying the dead= less predators being attracted
@@damonbridge3124 True. This makes me think of crows wich, while not burying their dead, gathers around them in a silent moment of (I assume) mourning, before flying away. From a practical stand point, burying the dead also means less risk of illness.
What if they were herbivors? The plant remnants would decompose and not leave archeological evidence. The Hominins could than have had multiple purposes for the cave to use: Storage, Living and Burialsites.
You have to be careful about applying behaviors and social attributes without evidence. Making assumptions about behavior is how we got the classical 'caveman' depiction of Neanderthals which have been found to be far more complex than originally thought because of the archaeological evidence.
No idea how I stumbled across your videos Stefan (started with the one on Azores) but they are fantastic. Great presentation style from you, awesome sense of humour and brilliant content. Ill just keep quietly binging these til I run out. This channel deserves way more followers.
I truly and wholeheartedly enjoy and look forward to all of your content. Please do continue to spread knowledge across the world. I and I’d assume many others, appreciate what you’re doing here. Much love from Cananda
@Kingvanko Infinite Why you are so fixiated with rape, do you got a story to tell? If yes youtube is probably not the right place. But with prehistory we have mostly evidence of hard non-composting stuff, so any idea about the spreading of DNA via violent or other non consenting method is very speculative. Perhaps it happens this way sometimes in prehistory, but i am positiv man an believe that in a egalitarian society you are more dependent on the well beieng of your surrounding people. Because if don´t comply to basic rules,you could end with a knife on you throat.
There is not only the dwarves and the Fae. In many tropical countries of Africa, Asia and America, there are legends of forest or jungle people, and small people in general. Some antropologists atributed them to confusions and misidentification of apes and monkeys, however this kind of things makes you wonder. Modern humans meet some of these creatures for sure. I wonder if they could comunicate in some way.
Is it possible that early man recognised that their dead might be scavenged, so hid them away so as not to give predators a taste for "human" flesh? Could it be that simple?
New subscriber here, and most likely a patreon soon. I'm so happy I found this channel and I've been consuming your content at a very fast pace. Many things I knew, many I didn't. But even the ones I knew, I've been now given a whole new refreshing perspective. The quality of the content is superb and something that's really missing from this platform. The research questions, the delivery, the artwork, the humor, the respectful handling of scientific uncertainty, the citations. You sir are a breath of fresh air on youtube. Keep up this excellent work. thank you
@Lazarus Zoolander 2:06 Infants were found in the chamber. They didn't wander in on their own, and it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which an adult would carry an infant into a pitch black cave, groping blindly into the dark until reaching the terminal chamber, and then simply staying put. It's not like any remains were found along the passage into Dinaledi chamber, nor is the path a difficult one to retrace, even in absolute darkness. ='[.]'=
Even chimps use caves. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070412082939.htm www.nbcnews.com/id/18057867/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/chimps-spotted-using-caves/ But the few bodies seem the have been deposited over many centuries: _"The layered distribution of the bones [in clay-rich sediments] suggests that they had been deposited over a long period of time, perhaps centuries."_ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Star_Cave#2013_and_2014_excavations Seems more like every couple decades an individual wandered off and fell down the chute. The fact that 9 immature and 6 adults were found, indicates to me that they were just a tad too curious.
Gavin Harper If evolution has no trajectory, is that why I occasionally observe evolution working in a non entropic way? Darren Bauer So a proper working model of a species evolution would include a species’ offspring emerging to life before the death of its parent?
@@letyvasquez2025 life is an anti entropy machine, genes matter organisms don’t. Maybe you mean an elegant characteristic has a survival advantage and becomes refined, that’s not entropy. The children are more thermodynamically stable because age radiates disorder that’s entropy.
What if one kid or adult wanted to explore the chamber of the cave they inhabited and got lost? Then others searched him there and couldn't find the exit. Then, probably, future generations of curious Naledi wanted to see what is with that part of the cave that made people disappear or the process just repeated with Naledi getting lost and being searched? So more and more Naledi were trapped there. I presume the chamber exit will be impossible to find without a light, being so narrow. Dragging a corpse is very hard, especially in a narrow place, so the the graveyard theory is very unlikely for this reason. Kids always want to explore new places forbidden to them and parents always will try to find them at any cost.
That's an interesting supposition. I have always thought this whole discovery to be a bit fishy.... Something just doesn't add up. Then the 300k YBP just blew me away. It upends everything I thought I knew about not only H. Naledi , but our.lineage as well.
I agree. To me, it's not a burial chamber. Dragging dead bodies through the narrow spaces where explorers need to crawl on their stomachs to get through is not feasible.
Love these kinds of videos. Human evolution fascinates me, basically anything about humans until shortly after the Neolithic revolution is interesting, but I have a focus on the origin of language and culture, and how various hominids interacted with each other. I like to think that some form of language is actually a lot older than we typically give credence to, especially since we so often look for physiological evidence for the changes to our vocal tract that indicate the potential for oral speech, but there's a growing theory that manual speech (handsign language) predates that. Bit of a tangent from this video, but what I'm getting at is that simpler manual languages might have existed this far back, and might have allowed for communication between hominids, even ones as archaic as the Naledi, seeing as their fingers are largely structured the same, and sign language has been successfully replicated (I hesitate to say taught or understood) by other great apes. So your speculation on Sapiens and Naledi interacting in a meaningful way might not be impossible. Keep up the good work.
Wow. I've never seen anyone do in-video citations. Kudos to you for that. I sincerely hope that becomes the norm on educational content going forward. It's nice when videos have sources but it is sometimes unreasonable to just say "Well the sources are right there" when you have questions about one section in a 15-30 minute RU-vid video.
David. Agreed. One must always question the self-professed experts. Biased tend to latch onto ego, which often limits and frustrates others thinking outside that restricive box. Huzzahs for the uncaged mind!
@@dstinnettmusic There's a social justice activist's channel EssenceOfThought that does that, provides timestamps of other people's videos, so you can check there's no misrepresenting/out of context, provides their transcript, and all that... It's really... another level of professionalism and support for their claims. Definitely more creators should do it.
Many went before me, but I have to compliment you with your style, intonation, soothing voice, clear concise well supported arguments as broadly angled and with an abundance of details supporting any theory you come across. And it is actually calming me down, without loosing a thread, and keeping me engaged. Love your long forms exactly for this reason: without any exaggeration I can say both content wise and presentation they are such a welcome treat to tired ears and eyes!
Homo sapiens struggle to cope with variations in appearance between members of our own species. I can only imagine what horrors we would have visited on our cousin species if they were still around.
Very interesting. These are my favorite kind of videos you make. I love learning about prehistory, and our distant ancestors and their branch offs from our section of the tree.
What a beautiful vid this was, the forest was gorgeous & the graveyard tugged my heartstrings with the inscriptions for the long-ago beloved dead......and speaking of graveyards, in my personal intuition, I think morning star cave is a graveyard of sorts...I do believe they were moved by & reverent of death....I daydream often of what our hominid ancestors were like, how they loved, what they meant to eachother, what they thought of the world & their place in it. 👍
I like the style of your videos -- very accessible, and sticking to facts without unjustified speculation. Could you make one on the Red Deer Cave People?
That seems a more likely possibility. At 250-330k years ago, there would have been plenty of larger brained hominids that would have hunted homo Naledi if given the opportunity. It's not hard to imagine a group of terrified h. Naledi fleeing into the deepest recesses of the cave system to escape a hunting band of archaic homo Sapiens.
@Lazarus Zoolander putting a dead body in a cave so it’s not attracting animals or stinking up the place seems a responsible behavior for them to have had.
Hvala ti Stefane na ovim videima, nemaš pojma koliko si mi sreće doneo. Mnoge od ovih stvari sam pokušavao da saznam godinama, sve dok nisi počeo sa ovim kanalom. My deepest admiration professor!
3 года назад
Love your vids, work and style. Really inspirational and packed with knowledge. Thanks!
This retired anthropologist/archeologist suggests that H. naledi lived largely unmolested around the area for eons, but then a group of larger hominids, maybe even H. sapiens, competing for resources suddenly arrived, perhaps due to drought pressure, etc. to the north. Not being able to easily follow H. naledi into the cave complex, they simply besieged them until they starved to death.
Isn’t there now evidence of soot on the roof and hearths on the floor? I’m pretty sure it just wasn’t completely examined yet. I would love a new updated video here Stefan!
Could it be possible that these people were living in this cave at a time when the cave was more easily accessible, and they later got locked in there during a cave-in?
Homo naledi change my perspective of human evolution. Maybe there are still amazing hominin fossils out there like Homo naledi that we don't know and are waiting to be found.
i too am an obsessive hobby anthropological enthusiast, and this stuff does indeed keep me up and fascinated. I just really hope we can use technology to obtain DNA, or come up with some other sort of molecular tests that can work in place of DNA to show us the biological relations of different groups. I feel like there are two major options with hominids: one- there were only a few literal species, fully speciated from each other and most of the time our evolution occurred within large cosmopolitan single species with a contemporary genetic cline across regions. or two- There were occasional cosmopolitan expansions of a species across regions, followed by climatic, geographic and clinal speciation events as time progressed, and later there were a diversity of different literal species and species groups that overlapped in features, behaviors and traits that were either conserved "in situ", or independently adapted and evolved parallel to some other elsewhere. It could also be a mix of those two options, with perhaps some surprises waiting for us out there. i would laugh if some group turned out to be completely separate from hominids, like Paranthropus ended up being a close cousin of gorillas or something.
I would guess they were disposing of the dead there... You got a dead body of a loved one that you don't want animals to scavenge and you sure don't want them stinking up your living space and attracting more predators. Who knows but seems a pretty basic thing to do with the dead if you are living in 1 place.
Is there some kind of aversion to thinking they weren't "disposed of" in the chamber, but simply laid there to rest by their own people in an early religion sense? Humans aren't the only species that put their dead into chambers or in the ground
Krishna: It takes very specific conditions for bones to become fossilized - the forest (or jungle) floor is one of the least likely places for fossils to form. Animals tear a body to pieces & scatter those pieces over a very large area, plant life turns those bits into soil. They have tree climbing features because they climbed trees, it's just that the trees (& other creatures they lived among) are long gone.
@@greenbird777 good point about preservation of bones. i wonder if there is something maladaptive about long arms - we know that human beauty standards tend toward symmetry regardless of culture.
Hi I currently have a gaming channel but I am thinking of doing paleontology mainly Miocene sharks and fossils but also Paleozoic fuana would anyone like that
You should make the videos that you want to make because your enthusiasm will come through. I made videos on lots of topics before archaeology but as they weren't my passion, they more or less sucked. People love learning about ancient biology. If Miocene sharks tickle your pickle, you should do it.
Amazing that so many different and relatively complete remains of hominins from different periods have been found in the Sterkfontein area. H. naledi, A. sediba and A. prometheus. With the exeption of Turkana boy and Lucy, these are the most complete hominin remains, and in the case of H. neledi and A. sediba, bones more than just a single individual (Prof Lee Berger is the luckiest man alive). Limestone caves and deposition all played a role in preserving the remains, which may have been lost or dispersed in any other type of geology. This does suggest that rather than this being a cradle of mankind, our species ranged widely, and the evidence has been lost elsewhere. I grew up a short distance from Sterfontein, and was lucky enough to attend a few of the public lectures given by the charismatic Philip Tobias, Lee Berger's predecessor. He was a gifted communicator with a wonderful sense of humour. Lee Berger is himself a credit to an open and inclusive study of his finds.
I've had this in my watch list for too long, a pity. It's intriguing to think of so many different species living on our planet at the same time, it says a lot about the potency for life that Earth gives us. Now if this particular species was in comparison smaller and perhaps not as advanced/successful as some other human types, couldn't it be a possibility that this place was like a hiding place for Homo Naledi at times when larger more advanced species were in the territory on hunting missions etc. Not wanting or being able to compete or possibly even being a food source for the larger Hominid group, perhaps this place of refuge was were they could escape capture, but if the enemy were lingering then maybe these ppl. starved as they waited. These caves may have been the way that Homo Naledi were able to survive for so long even after evolution had produced a more advanced version of Humanity.
I was thinking the same thing. They crawled in there to escape or hide from dangerous larger threatening animals and they starved while waiting for the danger to pass.
How far back could one go and still be biologically similar enough to successfully breed with the Humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and the like? Asking for a friend.
At this stage it looks like 700 000 years because there are human populations with Ancestry/Genes from a group who separated 700 000 years ago from the line who became Modern Human and Neanderthal....
@@bezahltersystemtroll5055 it's nothing. It's just hat cleaner. From Tibet. From the '20s. I use it for my training my parakeet for long-distance carriage pulling. See? Nothing.
I believe we have some of these creatures here in the US. Just drive through Baltimore, Chicago or Philadelphia and you'll see them everywhere throwing stuff at your auto as it passes. Must be a tribal thing?
Yeah...this was a huge discovery and they've done a huge amount of work. It was an accidental find...if you watch th longer programs available here on RU-vid you can learn all about it, it's astonishing!
I am just thinking about you saying all those words so fluidly . Try that after 6 pints of beer. Keep up the great work. You do a great job . Very passionate, to the point and your stories flow very well
I fee like the traditional view is a bit... smug? I dont know how to put it, but it feels to me like they’re almost working backwards and acting as if anatomically modern humans, especially sapiens, were the inevitable conclusion of hominin evolution or something, instead of just the one that happened to stick. 🤷🏿♂️🤷🏿♂️
That’s the only framework inwhich I can see people being surprised about these skeletons not being millions of years old. It makes me wonder: if chimps somehow died out before we started recording history and drawing cave art that could depict them, would people have been surprised that chimp skeletons only dated to a few thousand years ago? Would they have assumed that these chimp skeletons were “millions of years old” due to “archaic” features?
Wow, absolutely fascinating!!! Yet another pre-history mystery lol. My first thought was a possible sacrifice made by early hominids...? Definitely going to keep an eye out for updates on Homo Naledi.
If only evolution was real eh? Fortunately it's not. Ron Wyatt found all of Gods Earthly evidence! And that evidence proves how dumb the world has really become!
Yeah and unicorns are also real ,because i read in a book somewhere that someone heard of someone telling another one that he knew one who saw one. And according to your bible,that´s evidence enough,isn´t it ?
Just a thought here; could they have all gone into the cave to escape bad weather and then ended up trapped? And then over time, more and more earth covered the opening? I'm sure someone has thought of that, and I kept waiting for it to be ruled out, but I don't remember hearing it. Anyway, it's just a thought I had about why they were there in the first place.
I still think that our species existed for much longer than we have suspected! I don't think that 1,000000 years is too short of a period for an entire species to evolve!
Like jesus Who created adam from sand lol Sand contains SiO2 silicon and oxygen Human body contains nearly 25 elements So stop believing such stupid book written 2000years ago
It seems likely to me that the most significant thing about Homo Naledi is that they're most likely to have occupied a relatively isolated ecological niche, much like Floresiensis, and that they're probably about as unlikely as Floresiensis was to have been ancestral to Homo Sapiens.
Stefan, here's what keeps me awake at night; to dare and think the possibility that we/they would have merged and, on the other side some other species would have survived. 300k later, a blink of an eye, we probably still be hanging from tree branches. And why not what makes us so special, mother nature will find the way.
