Homo naledi and the Rising Star Claims

"Out of 20 H. naledi individuals screened, no male individuals were confidently identified" — Palesa Madupe and colleagues, with Hawks and Berger among the authors, Cell, 2026¹

Summary

In October 2013 Lee Berger's team recognised hominin bones in a chamber of the Rising Star cave system near Johannesburg, about 30 m below the surface and 80 m in a straight line from the nearest entrance. A short excavation of one small pit, with collection from the chamber floor, recovered 1,550 specimens from at least 15 individuals, nearly every bone of the skeleton repeated, which the describing paper calls the largest assemblage of a single hominin species yet found in Africa.² A second chamber, Lesedi, has yielded 131 more specimens from at least three individuals, including a partial adult skeleton with a nearly complete skull.³ The species was named Homo naledi. It had a brain of 465 to 560 cc, in the australopith range, on a body with human-like hands, feet and legs.² This article covers what was found, whether it was human, and how the bodies got there on each reading. The date has its own article, Homo naledi: The Date, and so do the 2023 claims of burial, engraving and fire, Homo naledi: Burial, Engravings, and Fire. The australopiths are in Lucy and the Pre-Human Hominins, and the baraminology method in Lucy and Australopithecus afarensis; the other members of the genus are in Homo erectus, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Was it human? The evidence leans yes, and the one experiment expected to settle it did not. The mainstream puts it in Homo on the skull shape, teeth, hands and feet. Creationism's only quantitative method, Todd Wood's baraminology, puts it in the human holobaramin with a silhouette width of +0.49, which flips to −0.49 if it is forced into the non-human cluster.⁴ The one sustained creationist dissent, J. O'Micks across five papers, argues from the australopith-like shoulder, pelvis and ribcage. When Wood and Peter Brummel scored 239 skeleton characters in 2023, the result was mixed: distance correlation kept naledi with Homo, one skeleton-only clustering grouped it with habilis, the hobbit and the australopiths, and the authors called its status "less clear."⁵⁵ In 2026 the excavators' own team recovered enamel proteins from 20 individuals. They found no male, no variation at all between individuals, and two amino-acid differences from living humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, one of them the ancestral state shared with Paranthropus and living apes.¹ The authors call their own phylogeny "tentative".¹ What the result points to is a small, isolated or inbred population, which Kurt Wise predicted from tooth-size variation in 2016 and Christopher Rupe and John Sanford from the anatomy in 2017.⁶⁷

The date is a model-dependent bracket, not six clocks agreeing. The team's range is 241 to 335 thousand years, and it concedes that some individuals "may represent a broader time range".⁸ The only measurement made on naledi bone itself gave radiocarbon ages of 33.0 and 35.5 thousand years on bone carbonate, was set aside as later calcite, and was never repeated.⁹ None of this reaches a young-earth timescale: the youngest figure any mainstream writer will entertain for the bones, the set-aside radiocarbon age, is at least six times older than any young-earth date for the Flood,¹⁰ and of the five creationist answers to the date, one makes a sound point that the dating paper's own review file confirms and three contain checkable errors. The whole case is in Homo naledi: The Date.

Burial, engravings and fire are unproven after two rounds of review. In 2023 eLife's editors rated the burial evidence "inadequate" and reported the four reviewers "in strong consensus" that the data did not support the conclusions;¹¹ in 2025 only two of the four returned and they split, and the editors rated the evidence with two terms at once, "convincing" and "incomplete".¹² The engravings were never dated, and no scientific paper has reported the fire evidence.¹³ The reviews, the critiques and the team's replies are in Homo naledi: Burial, Engravings, and Fire.

How the bodies got there is unsettled, and the creationist literature is split down the middle. The excavators' own data count against water transport, carnivores and a hard fall: no abrasion, no coarse sediment, no tooth mark on 1,550 specimens, no fresh-bone fracture, no other large animal, and an articulated hand, foot and child's leg deep in the chamber.¹⁴¹⁴¹⁴¹⁴ The 2015 paper says it can "preclude" water as a major factor and calls a predator "very unlikely", but it still counts a death trap as plausible beside deliberate disposal.¹⁴¹⁴ Wise, Wood, Matthew McLain, and Rupe and Sanford read the chamber as a human burial place.¹⁵ Peter Line reads the bones as human and calls their arrival a mystery. O'Micks and Timothy Clarey read it as apes washed in by post-Flood floods. Answers in Genesis reads it as apes with any fires and carvings left by later humans. On the site data the burial camp has the better of the argument: McLain uses the excavators' sedimentology correctly, and the washed-in reading has to float dismembered bodies of one species over a rock barrier 5 to 15 m high and through a 20 cm slot while leaving behind the bones of every other animal, and now has to explain why twenty of twenty tested individuals carry no male marker. But both burial readings, mainstream and creationist, need artificial light in a chamber in total darkness, and no paper has yet shown any.

Verdict. Homo naledi is probably human, on the evidence now in hand, and the article says why the caveat is real. The date is not secure to the precision claimed, but every alternative a mainstream writer has published is far older than any young-earth chronology, and the creationist answers have not yet engaged the uranium-thorium ages that are the strongest part of the case. The burial claim is live and unresolved; the engraving and fire claims are undated, and no scientific paper has reported the fire evidence. What would move each question is stated at the end.

Part 1: What was found, and where

The chambers. The Rising Star cave system lies in the Cradle of Humankind, north-west of Johannesburg, and had been visited by recreational cavers since the 1960s.¹⁶ The bone-bearing Dinaledi Chamber is about 30 m below the surface and about 80 m, in a straight line, from the nearest present entrance.¹⁴ Getting there means one of two passages to a large ante-chamber called the Dragon's Back Chamber, a 50 m route past a squeeze called the "postbox" or a 120 m route past the "superman crawl"; then an exposed climb of about 15 m up the side of a dolomite block that fell from the roof, the Dragon's Back; then a narrow vertical fissure, the Chute, descending about 12 m with squeezes as tight as about 20 cm, to the chamber floor.¹⁴¹⁴ Later papers name the space at the foot of the Chute the Hill Antechamber, from which passages less than 50 cm wide and about 7 m long lead into the Dinaledi Chamber. The 2025 burial paper gives the squeeze as less than 18 cm and says the Chute "cannot be traversed by humans who cannot fit their bodies through" it.⁸ A second site, the Lesedi Chamber, where the cavers Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker found hominin bone in November 2013, is reached by a different and easier path: 86 m downhill "with several narrow passages and short climbs, but only one squeeze and no significant crawls".³ The shortest route between the two chambers is almost 145 m.³

The bones. The first excavation in the Dinaledi Chamber was a pit 0.8 m square and 20 to 25 cm deep, which with surface collection yielded 1,550 hominin specimens, 737 of them partial or complete bones or teeth, from at least 15 individuals. Thirteen can be given an age class: three infants, three young juveniles, one old juvenile, one sub-adult, four young adults and one old adult. The other two are known only from isolated teeth.¹⁴¹⁴² Apart from a few bird bones and some rodent pieces, every identifiable large bone from the chamber is hominin.¹⁴ The bird bones lay on a rock where a caver had put them, carry a film of calcite the hominin bones lack, and were identified in 2018 as one barn owl of the living species.¹⁷ Later work found more: a juvenile baboon, six surface fragments, in a locality reached by climbing over fallen blocks deeper in the subsystem than the main chamber;¹⁸ a baboon tooth 55 to 60 cm below the old floor, under the hominin layer;⁹ a patch of bone in the Hill Antechamber, roughly 45 by 55 cm, found in 2017 to 2018 and lifted in three plaster jackets; and a second concentration on the Dinaledi floor, found in 2018, partly excavated and left in place.⁸ The Lesedi Chamber yielded 131 hominin specimens from at least three individuals, two adults and a juvenile, one of them a partial skeleton with a nearly complete skull.³ In 2026 the enamel-protein study drew on 23 teeth from at least 20 individuals across the system, which its authors say covers every known naledi individual with teeth.¹

What the bone surfaces show. The 2015 taphonomy paper examined every surface. It found no marks from carnivores, rodents or other hominins, no cut marks, no burning, no trampling beyond recent caver damage, no water abrasion and no weathering from sunlight.¹⁴ It found no spiral fractures, the kind fresh bone makes when it breaks, which the authors read as evidence that the bodies did not fall into the chamber or arrive in a flood.¹⁴ Most bones carry microscopic surface damage of the kind modern snails make, and a tenth carry marks consistent with beetles.¹⁴ The sediment is fine mud with angular mud clasts and no coarse material, and on that basis the paper states that it can "preclude transportation by water as a major taphonomic factor".¹⁴

One caution about the 2015 stratigraphy. In 2015 the team reported hominin bone in two sediment units with flowstone between them and used this to argue for repeated deposition over a long period. The 2017 dating paper reassigned all the hominin-bearing sediment to a single sub-unit, 3b.⁹ The Geoscience Research Institute noticed at once what that removed: "This evidence had been used to imply repeated events of “disposal” of carcasses and to exclude the mass mortality/death trap scenario."¹⁹ The 2015 statement that the bones lie in two units should not be quoted as current.

Part 2: Was Homo naledi human?

The anatomy is a mosaic, and both sides measure it the same way. From the type description:²

trait	resembles
endocranial volume	about 560 cc and about 465 cc, overlapping the australopiths
cranial shape	early Homo
dentition	small and simple
hand and wrist	human-like
foot and lower limb	human-like
finger bones	more curved than in any Australopithecus
shoulder, trunk, pelvis, upper femur	australopith-like
body mass	39.7 to 55.8 kg
stature	about 144.5 to 147.8 cm

Body size is that of small-bodied living human populations. Brain size is not. Within genus Homo, only the smallest H. habilis specimens, one H. erectus skull and H. floresiensis overlap those brain volumes.² The mainstream puts naledi in Homo on the skull shape, teeth, hand, wrist, foot and lower limb, while noting the australopith-grade brain, shoulder and pelvis. Nobody disputes the measurements. The dispute is what to call the animal that has them.

The mainstream's own difficulty is the date, not the anatomy. Before the 2017 dating, two estimates from the anatomy were in print. Francis Thackeray, from skull measurements, put the bones at "in the order of 2 million years".²⁰ Mana Dembo and colleagues, from a Bayesian analysis of skull and tooth characters, gave "the most likely age" as 912 thousand years, with a 95% interval running from zero to 2.388 million years.²¹ Against the measured maximum of 335 thousand years, Thackeray's best guess was six times too old and Dembo's nearly three times, though Dembo's interval was wide enough to hold the measured date. The excavators then wrote that "palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists have generally assumed that morphologically primitive hominins such as H. naledi did not survive into the later parts of the Pleistocene in Africa", and that in the absence of context "anthropologists often rely upon a fossil’s morphology as an indicator of its age".²² A reviewer of the dating paper put the problem more sharply: a correct young date "conflicts with the evolutionary assumption that more primitive species cannot compete with more advanced".⁹ The team's answer is a relict lineage surviving beside large-brained humans, which Pettitt and Wood describe in 2024 with the words "There is no obvious precursor to H. naledi, and no evidence of any later descendant taxon."²³ Creationists have said for decades that fossils without context are dated by how primitive they look; here the excavators say it themselves, and it costs the young-earth side nothing to point at it. It does not follow, as Rupe and Sanford and O'Micks both argue from opposite directions, that the date shows naledi to be human, or to be an ape. A late date fits a side branch as well as either.

Creationism's own quantitative method says human, by a clear margin. Todd Wood's 2016 supermatrix analysis placed both "early" Homo and H. naledi in the human holobaramin.²⁴ Sinclair and Wood's 2021 re-analysis, run with the clustering methods a creationist critic had demanded, gives naledi an individual silhouette width of +0.49 in the human cluster; moving it to the non-human cluster drops that to −0.49, and giving it a cluster of its own gives an average of 0.16.⁴ The authors state the result with a caution: the human holobaramin "probably includes" naledi, and their aim "is not to render a final judgment on the human holobaramin".⁴ How the method works, and what it does to the australopiths, is in the Lucy article.

The creationist dissent is one author, and he aimed at the right place. O'Micks began on the other side. His first paper, on skull and tooth characters alone, concluded that "Placement of H. naledi in the human baramin is supported".²⁵ He reversed that within the year, and then argued in five papers across 2016 and 2017 that naledi is not human: a re-analysis adding postcranial characters, a reply to Wood on taxon sample size, a rebuttal of McLain and Wood, a study of vertebrae and ribs, and a short note on brain size against body mass.²⁶²⁷²⁸²⁹³⁰ Wood answered the re-analysis on taxon sample size,¹⁵ and McLain answered on the geology and taphonomy of the site.³¹ Wood's hominin datasets up to 2021 were craniodental, and naledi's shoulder, trunk and pelvis are the australopith-like part. Of O'Micks's call for postcranial characters, Sinclair and Wood wrote: "He is unquestionably correct on this point."⁴ Wood and Brummel then scored 239 skeleton characters for 14 taxa in 2023. Distance correlation and cluster analysis kept naledi with Homo, but on the skeleton alone a three-cluster fuzzy analysis put it with habilis, floresiensis and the australopiths, and the authors wrote that the status of naledi, floresiensis and habilis is "less clear."⁵ They count the burial claim in its favour: body disposal "tentatively confirms" naledi as human.⁵ That is a real weakness in the "human" verdict, not a dodge. One of O'Micks's arguments should be dropped, though. In the vertebrae paper he writes that "The fact that the bones were buried neither in an extended posture, nor lying on their side (which are characteristic of human burial) (Byers 2002) also suggest that H. naledi was not human."²⁹ That uses the burial evidence to decide the classification while elsewhere using the classification to decide the burial. The two questions have to be kept apart, and this article keeps them apart.

The other creationists read it as human, and two of them made a prediction. Wise, in 2016, from the excavators' own numbers: "In the case of H. naledi, Berger et al. reports three CVs – a body mass CV of 9%, a lower first molar CV of 3.2% (n ≥7), and an upper first molar CV of 2% (n≥7). This suggests that not only are the H. naledi specimens of the same species, they are from the same population of humans, and probably the same close family."⁶ Rupe and Sanford, in 2017: "It is increasingly realized that many generations of inbreeding, and long-term starvation produces human populations that will display pathologies, dramatically reduced body size, and very dramatically reduced brain size. Naledi appears to be an example of this process happening within an Erectus (fully human) population."⁷ Line reads them as "post-Fall descendants of Adam, perhaps erectus-like post-Babel humans" of whom "A number of them suffered from a developmental pathology, cretinism, as suggested by the region’s history of endemic iodine deficiency."³² McLain: "Intentional burial lends credence to the hypothesis that H. naledi is a human being."³¹ Note that McLain's inference runs from burial to humanity, the mirror of O'Micks's, and carries the same risk.

The proteome has now been run, and it did not end the argument. An earlier version of this material, in the Lucy article, said that a naledi enamel proteome clustering with Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals rather than with the australopiths would settle the question and was the single highest-value experiment available. In June 2026 Madupe and twenty co-authors, including Hawks and Berger, published exactly that experiment in Cell, on 23 teeth from at least 20 individuals.¹ Three results.

No male. "Of the 20 H. naledi individuals, 19 were confidently identified as females with a probability above 95% (Pr(Female [F]) > 0.95), while the signal from the remaining individual was consistent with a female attribution with a probability between 50% and 95%".¹ That includes the Lesedi skeleton "Neo", until then "considered a likely adult male due to its relative robusticity and cranial capacity".¹ The authors give two readings: the sample is all female, "or because of a deletion or mutation present in all the male H. naledi individuals we may have possibly sampled", and they call the second "possible, though unlikely".¹ For the first, "assuming a population sex ratio of 1:1, the odds of finding all female individuals are extremely low and represent 0.0000954%".¹ Ten of the twenty are juveniles.¹
No variation. "There is no variation in the protein sequences recovered".¹ The authors write that this "appears inconsistent with a sample of a large and diverse population", that even in the least diverse living human populations the chance of sampling no variation is "1%–12%, depending on the population", and that "prolonged isolation and/or inbreeding" may explain it.¹
Two differences from every later human. Two amino-acid positions "differentiate H. naledi from present-day humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans".¹ One of them, position 635 of the collagen protein COL17A1, is the ancestral state found in living non-human primates and in two Paranthropus robustus individuals, while H. sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans carry the derived state. The same site "has not been covered so far in H. antecessor, H. erectus, and A. africanus".¹ The authors' conclusion on relationships: "the derived phylogenetic analysis of H. naledi should be considered tentative".¹

What this does and does not settle. It does not settle human-or-not. One ancestral site shared with apes and Paranthropus cannot say which side of a line naledi falls on when the same site is unread in H. erectus, and two informative positions are not a phylogeny, as the authors say. A young-earth reader should not pretend otherwise in either direction: a unique naledi substitution and an ape-like one are what a small, long-isolated human population would also show, and what a non-human lineage would also show. What the result does bear on is the population's structure, with one caution: the recovered sequences are partial and short, and the authors count only 18 informative sites across the great apes and humans.¹ Twenty individuals from places up to 145 m apart with identical enamel proteins and no detectable male point to a small, isolated or inbred group, which is the explanation the authors themselves offer. That is what Wise inferred from the coefficients of variation in 2016 and what Rupe and Sanford inferred from the anatomy in 2017, and it is the opposite of what a species spread across southern Africa for a million years should look like. O'Micks's suggestion that the chamber might hold more than one species is dead for every tooth-bearing individual.²⁷ Madupe and colleagues themselves think a single family "unlikely", because the remains "come from different locations in the cave system, separated by as much as 145 m, and were not deposited at a single time";¹ a reader should weigh that against Wise's "family" meaning a few generations of one lineage, and Rupe and Sanford's "several generations".

On the male-marker result specifically, the all-female reading and the deletion reading lead to different places, and neither is comfortable for any model. If the chambers really hold only females, then whatever put the bodies there was selective, which favours deliberate placement over any accident and leaves every burial theory to explain a cemetery with no men. If instead every naledi male lacked the AMELY protein, that is a Y-chromosome deletion fixed in the population. In living men the deletion is harmless and rare, "ranging from 0.018% in an Austrian population to 8% in a Pakistani population", and has been seen in one Neanderthal.¹ A harmless Y-linked variant carried by one founding male fixes by chance with probability one over the number of breeding males, so in a group founded by a handful of men it is an ordinary outcome within a few generations.³³ Either way the sample points to a small population. Line's cretinism diagnosis is a separate matter. Iodine deficiency is not inherited, so a protein sequence cannot test it. What counts against it is the anatomy: Line says "a number" were affected, which predicts a mix of affected and unaffected skeletons, and the excavators found that wherever a bone is repeated the examples "exhibit little variability".¹⁴

Where that leaves the human question. The evidence leans human: the mainstream puts it in Homo, the creationist method puts it in the human holobaramin by a clear margin on skull and tooth characters and less clearly on the skeleton, the single creationist dissent has been answered in print, and the molecular data show a small inbred group rather than a long-lived species. Remaining undecided is defensible on one specific ground, that the skeleton, where the dissent aims, gave mixed results when it was scored, and the enamel proteome, being enamel only, could not close that gap. A reader who stays undecided should know the evidence is not balanced.

Part 3: The date, in brief

The 2017 dating paper applied six methods and reported 236 to 335 thousand years;⁹ since 2021 the team cites 241 to 335 thousand.⁸ Three numbers carry the range. The floor is the lower error limit of one uranium-thorium age, 242 ± 5 thousand years at one lab and 242.9 ± 6.6 at the other, on one recrystallised stalactite.⁹ The authors read the alteration as uranium taken up after the flowstone formed, which "would result in apparent ages that are younger than the true age"; on that reading it makes the floor safer, not weaker.⁹ The ceiling is the upper error limit of the electron-spin-resonance scenario the authors prefer, and of that limit they write that it "relies on 80% Rn loss throughout the burial history of the fossils and is probably an over-estimate".⁹ And the only measurement on naledi bone itself gave 33.0 ± 0.2 and 35.50 ± 0.16 thousand radiocarbon years on bone carbonate, which the paper reads as "late calcite precipitation in the bones".⁹ The two ESR labs' blind results "varied significantly" until both were given the same dose inputs,⁹ and the authors told a reviewer that they "altered the unit assignment after the dates came in", which they called usual practice.⁹ Every figure a mainstream writer has put on the table, from the 33 thousand radiocarbon years that one team leader will not rule out to the 500 thousand and more that Pettitt and Wood raise from the chamber's oldest flowstones, is at least six times older than any young-earth date for the Flood, and a young-earth model puts these bones after the Flood.³⁴²³¹⁰ How each method bounds the age, the arithmetic that prices the radiocarbon result on both timescales, and what is right and wrong in each creationist answer are in Homo naledi: The Date.

Part 4: Burial, engravings and fire, in brief

The 2015 paper claimed "deliberate body disposal", not burial, and kept the death-trap reading "plausible".¹⁴ The 2023 preprint claimed three burial features; the four eLife reviewers were "in strong consensus that the methods, data, and analyses do not support the primary conclusions".¹¹ In the 2025 version of record only two reviewers returned and they split, so the editors rate the evidence with two terms at once, "convincing" for one reviewer and "incomplete" for the other;¹² the main feature is still in three plaster jackets and the "tool-shaped" stone has never been handled.⁸⁸ The engravings carry the age of the bones by assumption and were rated "incomplete" in 2023 and 2025.³⁵ The team's third, interpretive paper rests entirely on the other two, and in 2023 the editors noted that the evidence in those two "is incomplete at this stage".³⁶³⁶ The fire claim was made in a public lecture in December 2022, and no scientific paper has reported the evidence.¹³ The excavated hearths are in a different chamber,³⁴ radiocarbon dates on one hearth were "very young" and are unpublished,¹⁶ and as of September 2025 the team writes that "the age of these occurrences has not been reported yet".³⁷ Both burial readings, mainstream and creationist, need artificial light, and no paper has yet shown any. The reviews, the published critiques, the team's replies and the full fire record are in Homo naledi: Burial, Engravings, and Fire.

Part 5: How the bodies got there, on each reading

What the excavators' data count against. Against water: no abrasion, no coarse sediment, angular mud clasts that would not survive transport, and the paper's statement that it can "preclude transportation by water as a major taphonomic factor associated with the delivery of skeletal elements into, or within the cave system".¹⁴ Against carnivores: "No evidence is noted of vertebrate modifications such as those caused by carnivores, rodents or other hominins", on 1,550 specimens, and no carnivore bones, so that the paper calls a predator "very unlikely".¹⁴¹⁴ Against a fall or a flood: "The lack of green fractures on any of the elements in the assemblage suggests that the bodies did not enter the chamber due to catastrophic accident such as falling into the chamber or due to flooding".¹⁴ That is "suggests", not "excludes", and it is aimed at a hard fall: the same paper allows that bodies were dropped down the Chute, provided "it is unlikely that they would have fallen rapidly, or landed with any force".¹⁴ Against a death trap: no other trapped animal, and age classes from infant to old adult, though the 2015 paper could not exclude it statistically: "a mass death scenario involving some sort of calamity or death trap cannot be completely excluded".¹⁴ Against "nothing else could get in": the juvenile baboon deeper in the subsystem and the baboon tooth under the hominin layer.⁹¹⁸ Pettitt adds the owl to that list,³⁸ but it is weak evidence: its describers think a living barn owl "became lost in the system" and died, and a bird is not a test of what could walk or climb in.¹⁷ And one concession in the 2015 paper that later papers lean on less: "Flowstone formation continues today (Flowstone 3), changing the morphology of cave passages. This makes it possible that a more direct access-way or easier passage may have existed when hominins entered."¹⁴

The access dispute is inside the team's own papers. Elliott and colleagues in 2021 reported that "geological and speleological investigations both on the surface and underground have failed to find another entry into the area and several lines of evidence suggest that the Chute was the only viable access point during the time that the hominin material accumulated, and thereafter", and that the parallel fissures "average less than 25cm wide".¹⁸ Pettitt's reply: fissures too narrow for cavers "would presumably be no obstacle while they were clear of fill, given that the team have been capable of descending The Chute, which narrows to 20 cm in places", and "easier still for the relatively smaller bodies of Homo naledi as for a baboon and owl".³⁸ Then there is Robbins and colleagues' 2021 flowstone paper, written by members of the team. Its abstract says that deposition and erosion "changed the access route into the Dinaledi Chamber", that between 290 and 225 thousand years ago the route "may have further changed due to the collapse of the Dragon's Back block", and that "H. naledi would probably have entered the cave through an access point in the roof of the Postbox Chamber and made its way along a SW trending fracture towards the Dragon's Back and Dinaledi Chambers".³⁹ The body of that paper was not read for this article. eLife's Reviewer #1 quotes its section 6.3, and the next sentence is given on the reviewer's word: "Prior to the collapse of the Dragon's Back, sometime before 241 ka (new minimum age for H. naledi from RS68), the cave could be entered by H. naledi via a shaft in the roof of the Postbox Chamber. From there H. naledi could walk along a straight passage that follows a gently descending, SW trending fracture into the Dragon's Back Chamber and, with the Dragon's Back block still attached to the roof, would have only needed to climb over a ~5 m high sill to access the Dinaledi Subsystem behind it."¹² Martinón-Torres and colleagues read the same paper the same way: it "implies that prior to 241 ka and the collapse of the Dragon’s Back block hominins and other species could have more easily entered the cave via the Post Box Chamber and beneath the Dragon’s Back Block before it fell".¹⁶ The team's 2025 burial appendix confirms the sill and the suggestion, and then limits them. It reports a "sill of dolomite" about 5 m high between the two spaces, and that Robbins and colleagues "suggest that passage beneath this block may have been possible prior to its displacement". But the block "alone does not form the separation": the spaces were connected then as now "only through various small passages of a fissure network in the dolomite bedrock", and how far easier passage under the block "may have affected ingress into the Dinaledi Subsystem is not evident".⁸ The same appendix says a hypothesised past entrance would cut the route "by up to 20 m, making it around 80 m in total", and sums up: "H. naledi localities all are located a minimum of 86 m from the nearest identifiable current entrance into the cave system, and one hypothesized past entrance may reduce this minimum to approximately 80 m. All localities are accessible only through narrow passages that include vertical descents of at least 30 m, sharp turns, and squeezes of less than 25 cm and remain the case for any hypothesized past entrance."⁸ The reviewer's "80 m" shorter is a slip for the appendix's "up to 20 m". A 2025 preprint by the team admits that the single 12 m "Chute" of 2015 was a simplification, since "previous descriptions of this space have not been based on detailed survey", and claims that "While some changes have occurred in the last 335 ka, these did not change the access from the rest of the cave into the Dinaledi Subsystem."⁴⁰ That sits badly with the 2021 abstract, which says in so many words that the access route changed. The two can be squared only on the appendix's reading, that the easier stretch ended at the foot of the fissure network and the fissures were always the last step. Whether the body of the 2021 paper supports that reading could not be checked. The team's own position on access is, in its reply to the reviewer, that "the accessibility of the subsystem is not strictly relevant to the hypothesis of cultural burial".¹² It is relevant to everything else: to the claim that only deliberate transport could have put bodies there, and to O'Micks's and Clarey's question of why anyone would choose the hardest place in the cave when the Lesedi Chamber, with its one squeeze, was in the same system.

The creationist readings, in their own words.

Human burial or disposal. Wise: "The best explanation for how the bodies got there is that humans, using artificial light, carried the bodies along challenging cave passage to deliberately deposit them there. … The naledi are probably a family unit recently dispersed from Babel, who used this isolated cave passage as a burial chamber for the duration of their residence in the region."⁶ He rules out a flood on the same grounds as the excavators, "It is unlikely, for example, that a flood event either killed the H. naledi or washed their bodies into the Dinaledi Chamber after their death",⁶ and reads the pile as "a ‘death assemblage’ – an accumulation of a population’s dead over a prolonged period of time".⁶ McLain, from the sedimentology: "a close examination of the sedimentology and taphonomy of the site reveals data that are inconsistent with rapid, hydrodynamic deposition. As it stands, the best hypothesis for the origin of the H. naledi assemblage in the Dinaledi Chamber is still intentional burial/disposal by other H. naledi, which implies that H. naledi is human."³¹ He adds that most young-earth geologists put Pliocene and Pleistocene sediments after the Flood, "which rules out the possibility that the H. naledi remains could have been deposited by the Genesis Flood", and that even if not, "the H. naledi specimens could not have been deposited in a flood or by any kind of energetic hydrodynamic processes".³¹ Rupe and Sanford: "The evidence further indicates Naledi had ritualistically buried their dead over several generations."⁷ Line, in 2017: "the truth of how the fossils got there is still very much a mystery."⁴¹ In 2015 he had floated three guesses, that diseased individuals "could have been forced into the chamber, and left there to die", that another entrance "collapsed or was blocked, leaving them trapped inside the chamber", and that the broken long bones were "strongly indicative of cannibalism", with the chamber "some sort of garbage disposal area", and gave his own verdict on them: "The above scenarios are very speculative, and one could invent more scenarios … but the truth is that no one really knows what happened."⁴² The cannibalism guess fails on data Line had in front of him: no cut marks and no fresh-bone fractures, and marrow extraction breaks fresh bone.¹⁴¹⁴

Apes, washed in or trapped. O'Micks: "Why would H. naledi choose the most difficult part of the cave to reach when they could have buried their dead closer to the entrance? We also know that the Genesis Flood caused massive fossil graveyards all over the world, so fossils from 15 individuals, possibly not from the same species found in a hard to reach part of a cave system raises this possibility."²⁷ In reply to McLain he conceded the Flood point and moved on: "just because these fossil remains were not deposited by the Genesis Flood, it doesn’t necessarily follow logically that they could only have been buried intentionally."²⁸ He adds that the bones' fragmentation "also argues for possible carnivorous animals having chewed on the bones",²⁸ and, citing Clarey, that "the H. naledi remains could have been deposited in multiple, closely spaced flooding events (Clarey 2017). Flooding is not excluded by even those who discovered the remains (Berger 2017b)".²⁹ Clarey, in the Journal of Creation: "their conclusion only considered water flow along the bottom of the cave system, not suspended, mud-rich sediments and floating H. naledi remains. It is only the suspended material (clay-rich faction and floating partial remains) that seems to have made it through the tight opening and into the Dinaledi Chamber. All the coarser, sand-rich deposits were left at the base of the Dragon’s Back Chamber."⁴³ And: "It is therefore possible that flash-flooding of the Dragon’s Back Chamber transported either previously deceased or H. naledi taking refuge in the cave entrance, ultimately dismembering the bodies and floating the partial remains to the Dinaledi and Lesedi Chambers of the cave system".⁴³ For ICR he wrote that "Exactly what the bones represent remains unclear, but they are certainly not human", and asked: "Why place bodies in the Dinaledi Chamber, with its tortuous and narrow passages that can take an hour to traverse, if other H. naledi were being disposed of nearly simultaneously and in the same system in a chamber much easier to reach?"⁴⁴ The next year he wrote that the bones "represent assemblages of apes caught in the wrong place at the wrong time",⁴⁵ and, after the 2023 critiques, that "A better explanation for these scattered bones is that they were simply washed into the cave system during a post-Flood (possibly Ice Age) catastrophic flood event."⁴⁶

Apes, with later human fires and carvings. Ken Ham for Answers in Genesis, on the 2023 claims: naledi is "just a variety of ape", and "Humans—the only beings known to bury their dead with rituals, carve meaningful symbols, and use fire—might have left behind all these “carvings” and burned-out fires."⁴⁷ The old-earth Reasons to Believe accepts the date, treats naledi as a non-human hominin, and treats the burial claim as a threat to human exceptionalism to be met by doubting the evidence.⁴⁸

Testing the washed-in reading. State what it must do. Water has to rise in the Dragon's Back Chamber high enough to spill over the top, 15 m on the 2015 geometry or about 5 m over the dolomite sill of the 2021 and 2025 papers,⁸ carrying floating carcass parts of one species, pass them through a slot of 18 to 20 cm, drop them in a chamber on the far side of floor drains, and leave every bone of every other animal in the lower chamber, which holds "predominantly non-hominin fossil remains" in "high abundance and diversity".¹⁴ Then it has to do it again at Lesedi by a different route. Against this stand, from the excavators' data: an articulated hand, an articulated foot and ankle, and a child's leg with tibia, fibula and ankle bone in place, in a pit about 11 m from the entry and on the far side of the floor drains;¹⁴ angular mud clasts; no water-worn bone; no other large animal. Clarey's answer that "Transport by water does not necessitate abrasion"⁴³ meets one of those four and not the others. One part of his picture is not in dispute, and it should be credited: the team itself says the chamber's mud arrived as suspended load. The 2015 paper has fine mud that "accessed the chamber through narrow cracks that filtered out coarser material".¹⁴ Jelle Wiersma's 2021 thesis on the cave's sediments has flood water entering by the Postbox roof, pooling in the Dragon's Back Chamber, and reaching the Dinaledi Chamber only "through narrow fractures that filtered coarse sediment and stopped strong water flow. Thus, only suspension load could enter the Dinaledi Chamber".⁴⁹ That is Clarey's account of the mud. The dispute is whether body parts could follow the mud. The 2025 burial paper says they could not: the sill "leaves no possibility for bodies or bones to have been transported into Dinaledi by water flow", and the sediment touching the bones "did not form in flowing water or with saturation sufficient to round the shape" of its mud clasts.⁸ Neither source gives the width of the fractures the mud came through, so the plumbing alone does not settle it. The bones have to, and they are the three points Clarey leaves unanswered. Two of the sources Clarey cites for support say something else. Egeland's paper "does not falsify" disposal, a caveat Clarey's own article quotes, and proposes no flood,⁵⁰ and Martinón-Torres and colleagues' statement that Dirks "document significant water flow through these deposits" overstates two papers that preclude water as the carrier of the bones and speak of a rising water table, standing water, and sediment slumping into floor drains and being washed down them.⁹¹⁶ O'Micks's "Flooding is not excluded by even those who discovered the remains" is the opposite of what they wrote. The source he gives for it is Berger and Hawks's popular book Almost Human, which says the sediment showed that the bones "could not have been washed into the Chamber".⁵¹ His carnivore chewing contradicts a survey that found no tooth mark on any bone. The 2026 result makes it worse: twenty of twenty individuals without a male marker and with identical proteins is not what a flash flood sorts out of a population. Could the model be priced further? Not from published data: the volume of the Dragon's Back Chamber below the spill point, its drainage through the karst floor, and the inflow needed to fill it against that drainage are not in any source read for this article, and neither is the time a primate carcass stays afloat, which a flotation calculation would need. What can be said is that on the excavators' data and on McLain's creationist analysis alike, the washed-in reading is contradicted by evidence that was in print before it was proposed, and nobody on that side has answered the articulated limbs.

Testing the burial reading. It has three holes, and the same three on both sides. Whether a pit was dug is disputed: one of the two reviewers who returned in 2025 is persuaded, the two who asked in 2023 for a demonstrated pit and reproducible chemistry have not reviewed the revision, and the features are still unexcavated.¹²⁸ No paper has yet shown any light. And the question O'Micks asked in 2016, and Martinón-Torres in 2024, "Why would H. naledi take the effort to bury the bodies in an already deep and supposedly hardly accessible location?",¹⁶ has no answer from the creationist burial camp either, and the Lesedi Chamber sharpens it. Two further points cut against the strong version. The 2017 reassignment of all hominin sediment to one sub-unit removed the excavators' own evidence for repeated use over a long period, which was also Wise's minimum of "months or years".⁶ And the all-female-or-no-male result is not what a community's burial ground looks like. The authors of the proteome paper write that a single-sex bias like this one "has not been documented in ancient and modern Homo populations", and that the closest cases they could find, two Neolithic burial sites in Iberia, run at about two women to one man.¹ What the sex result does favour is selection, and selection favours placement over accident. A cemetery for one sex, or a lineage with a fixed Y deletion, is a strange thing on every reading, and no model has yet made it its own.

Keep the two inferences apart. The burial camp argues "buried, therefore human". The ape camp argues "ape, therefore not buried". Both are circular if the burial evidence is used on both sides. The taphonomy verdict here stands on the sediments and bone surfaces alone, which is how McLain argues it: deliberate disposal of some kind by something is the best reading of the Dinaledi data; burial in a dug pit is not shown; and neither verdict says what the something was.

Objections and responses

"If naledi was human, why the australopith brain, shoulder and pelvis?" The creationist answers on record are inbreeding and starvation in an isolated post-Babel group, Rupe and Sanford's reading, and iodine-deficiency cretinism, Line's. The 2026 proteome is consistent with the first half of the first answer, a small inbred population. It cannot test the second, because iodine deficiency is not inherited; what counts against cretinism is that the skeletons are so alike. No creationist source has yet shown that inbreeding alone produces a 465 cc brain on a 45 kg body, and this article does not claim it. That is a real open question, and the Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis articles carry the same one.

"The whole deposit is a post-Flood flood deposit." The excavators agree that the chamber's mud settled out of flood water. They deny that water carried the bones, and so does the creationist palaeontologist who checked their sedimentology. The model has not answered the articulated limbs, the missing bones of other animals or the sex result, and it cannot be priced from published data because the chamber's volume and drainage are unpublished.

"No stone tool has ever been found with naledi, so it cannot be human." True that none has: the only candidate is a dolomite rock still in a plaster jacket, and the excavators' 2017 suggestion that naledi might have made Acheulean tools rests on no artefact.²² But a burial chamber is not a camp, and absence there is weak evidence either way.

"The single-sex result refutes Wise's family." Madupe and colleagues do say a single family is unlikely, because the remains are up to 145 m apart and, on their dating, were not deposited at once. Wise's "family" is a few generations of one small lineage, and Rupe and Sanford's is "several generations"; the result fits that as well as it fits anything. One of Wise's assumptions has been overtaken: he wrote that the bones came "from both genders", and the proteome found no male.⁶ What it does not fit is a large, long-lived population, which is the mainstream's model.

"Why not just stay undecided about whether naledi was human?" That is a defensible place to stand, on one named ground. But a reader who stands there should know the evidence is not evenly balanced: both sides' methods say human, the one dissent has been answered, and the molecules point to a small inbred group rather than a large and varied species.

The objections about the date and about the burial, engraving and fire claims are answered in Homo naledi: The Date and Homo naledi: Burial, Engravings, and Fire.

Issues and unanswered questions

The body of Robbins et al. 2021 has not been read. Its abstract supplies the 241 thousand year floor and the route through the Postbox Chamber. The sentence about climbing "a ~5 m high sill", on which the surviving access objection rests, is known only as eLife's reviewer quotes it, though the 2025 burial appendix and Wiersma's thesis both confirm that the sill exists.
The light argument has not been treated. Francis Thackeray asked in 2016 whether dark spots on the bones were left by lichen, which needs light, and the team replied in the same journal. Neither paper was read for this article, and nor was Val's point about snails and beetles below. If the bones saw light, an opening nearer the chamber existed, and every reading of the access changes.
Val 2016 has not been read. The first published critique, with the 10.8 percent bone-survival figure and the point that the snails and beetles that marked the bones do not live in total darkness, is known here only through Pettitt, McLain and O'Micks.
The AMELY question is open: all female, or a fixed deletion. A creationist founder model predicts the deletion as easily as the mainstream does, and nobody has computed the expected enamel diversity for founder groups of ten, fifty and five hundred against the paper's own resampling.
Naledi's skeleton has been scored only once, in Wood and Brummel's 2023 matrix of 14 taxa, with mixed results.⁵ An analysis aimed at the shoulder, trunk and pelvis, which naledi's 1,550 specimens make possible, would answer O'Micks directly, and that is the axis on which the "human" verdict is weakest.
Why this place? Neither burial camp has answered it.
The team's 2025 access preprint was read only as an abstract. Its host no longer resolves, so the survey that redefines the Chute as a "labyrinth" could not be weighed against the 2021 flowstone paper.
Delezene et al. 2024, the tooth-size paper that first suggested a female-biased sample, was not read; it is cited here through the proteome paper.

The open questions on the date and on the 2023 claims are listed in Homo naledi: The Date and Homo naledi: Burial, Engravings, and Fire.

Verdict

Homo naledi is probably human. The mainstream puts it in Homo; the creationist baraminology puts it in the human holobaramin at +0.49 and rejects the alternative at −0.49; the single creationist dissent is postcranial and has been answered in print; and the enamel proteome, which did not settle the classification, points to a small, isolated or inbred population of the kind Wise and Rupe and Sanford predicted from bones. The caveat is real: the dissent aims at the skeleton, and when Wood and Brummel scored the skeleton in 2023 the result was mixed.

The date and the 2023 claims have their own verdicts, in Homo naledi: The Date and Homo naledi: Burial, Engravings, and Fire. In short: the 241 to 335 thousand year range is a model-dependent bracket, every mainstream alternative to it is far older than any young-earth chronology, and none of the five creationist answers has yet engaged its uranium-thorium ages; burial, engraving and fire are unproven, the last two undated, and no scientific paper has reported the fire evidence.

How the bodies got there, on the evidence: probably not by flowing water, by carnivores or by a hard fall, since the excavators' data count against all three. Deliberate placement is the best reading of what is left, though the excavators' own 2015 paper kept a death trap open. The creationist burial camp reads the data correctly and still owes a light source and a reason for the place; the creationist flood camp contradicts the data and owes an answer to the articulated limbs and the missing men. The one test that would move all of this is a dated hearth or sealed soot in the Dinaledi Subsystem, and the team holds the samples.

Sources

1.
Madupe, Palesa P. et al. “Proteomic analysis of dental enamel from 20 Homo naledi individuals shows no male markers.” Cell 189(14):4415–4424.e11. Jun 24, 2026. Enamel proteins recovered from 23 teeth of at least 20 naledi individuals from several parts of the cave system, including the Lesedi skeleton. The author list ends with John Hawks, Lee Berger and Enrico Cappellini, so it is the excavating team's own result. Mirror: PMC ↩
1. 1a.
  Section Highlights: “Out of 20 H. naledi individuals screened, no male individuals were confidently identified”. “There is no variation in the protein sequences recovered”. ↩ ↩
2. 1b.
  Section Results: “Of the 20 H. naledi individuals, 19 were confidently identified as females with a probability above 95% (Pr(Female [F]) > 0.95), while the signal from the remaining individual was consistent with a female attribution with a probability between 50% and 95%”. ↩
3. 1c.
  Section Discussion: “Our results show no conclusive evidence supporting amelogenin heterozygosity, nor the reliable identification of any male, in a relatively large set of H. naledi individuals that also includes U.W. 102a (nicknamed “Neo”), so far considered a likely adult male due to its relative robusticity and cranial capacity.” ↩
4. 1d.
  Section Discussion: “the H. naledi specimens we analyzed do not carry the conventional male-specific AMELY markers, either because they exclusively originate from female individuals, or because of a deletion or mutation present in all the male H. naledi individuals we may have possibly sampled.” “While our results are compatible with the hypothesis that all the specimens analyzed belong to female individuals (Table 1), it is also possible, though unlikely, that our sample set includes male H. naledi individuals whose AMELY gene was mutated or deleted.” ↩
5. 1e.
  Section Discussion: “Given a sample set of 20 distinct individuals, and assuming a population sex ratio of 1:1, the odds of finding all female individuals are extremely low and represent 0.0000954%.” ↩
6. 1f.
  Section Discussion: “The sample includes 10 juvenile individuals at or prior to second molar eruption, an age range for which the body size of neither sex would exceed adult female body size.” “Single-sex accumulation could be compatible with the possibility that H. naledi adopted cultural mortuary practices, as previously proposed. This reconstruction, however, has been challenged, and further evidence may test the hypothesis of the deliberate burial of the dead by H. naledi.” ↩
7. 1g.
  Section Discussion: “Proteomics-based single-sex bias, like the one observed in H. naledi has not been documented in ancient and modern Homo populations. The closest known dominance of female human remains, observed at the Edcoural Cave, Montemor-o-Novo (Portugal), shows a 1:0.5 (F: M) ratio and is hypothesized to be due to socio-cultural factors, possibly related to funerary practices. Similarly, female dominance in Iberian megalithic societies is also observed from burial sites of Panoría populations, with the highest ratio being 1:0.42 (F:M), due to funerary practices based on matrilineal descent. However, these examples refer to Neolithic human populations, which may have operated very differently from H. naledi or from other mid-to-late Pleistocene Homo species.” "Edcoural" is the paper's spelling of Escoural. ↩
8. 1h.
  Section Discussion: “this mutation is population-dependent and very rare, occurring with a frequency ranging from 0.018% in an Austrian population to 8% in a Pakistani population.” The paper adds that the deletion has been observed in a Neanderthal individual. ↩ ↩
9. 1i.
  Section Results: “Accordingly, the clonality of all the proteome sequences retrieved appears inconsistent with a sample of a large and diverse population. A less diverse population could support this result, but even then, the probability of sampling no variation in present-day human populations is low (1%–12%, depending on the population). Other explanations, such as prolonged isolation and/or inbreeding, affecting the H. naledi individuals analyzed here, may also be consistent with these results.” ↩
10. 1j.
  Section Results: “the remains come from different locations in the cave system, separated by as much as 145 m, and were not deposited at a single time, making it unlikely that they are a single-family group.” ↩
11. 1k.
  Section Results: “We observe a total of 18 confidently identified informative single amino acid polymorphisms (SAPs) for Hominidae (Table S3). Two of these SAPs differentiate H. naledi from present-day humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans.” “P635 represents the ancestral allelic state displayed in extant non-human primates (Figure 3B). In contrast, H. sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans carry the derived state alanine (A) 635. This site has not been covered so far in H. antecessor, H. erectus, and A. africanus, while the ancestral P635 state was also observed in two P. robustus individuals.” The other substitution, AMELX F141, is unique to naledi among the hominins sampled. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
12. 1l.
  Section Results: “Due to the limited length of the reconstructed partial protein sequences and the number of informative sites observed, the derived phylogenetic analysis of H. naledi should be considered tentative”. ↩ ↩
13. 1m.
  Section Summary: “from 23 H. naledi specimens belonging to a minimum of 20 individuals”. Section Limitations of the study: “The specimens sampled in this study, much larger in number than in any other previous paleoproteomic study on Pleistocene hominins, cover all the known H. naledi individuals excavated so far, except for those for which no teeth are preserved; we cannot exclude the presence of male individuals in the latter group.” ↩
2.
Berger, Lee R. et al. “Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa.” eLife 4:e09560. 2015. The type description, by the excavating team. Describes 1,550 specimens from the Dinaledi Chamber and names the species. Mirror: PMC
1. 2a.
  Section Abstract: “Representing at least 15 individuals with most skeletal elements repeated multiple times, this is the largest assemblage of a single species of hominins yet discovered in Africa.” The count of 1,550 specimens and 737 partial or complete elements is in the paper's inventory. ↩ ↩
2. 2b.
  Section Description: “H. naledi has a range of body mass similar to small-bodied modern human populations”. Endocranial volumes of about 560 and 465 cc for the two composite crania; body mass 39.7 to 55.8 kg from eight femoral subtrochanteric diameters; stature about 144.5 to 147.8 cm from one tibia, a range the paper prints as "mm", an evident misprint. The paper lists the cranial shape and teeth as resembling early Homo, the hand, wrist, foot and lower limb as human-like, the finger bones as more curved than any australopith's, and the shoulder, trunk, pelvis and upper femur as australopith-like, and notes that within Homo only the smallest H. habilis, one H. erectus and H. floresiensis overlap the brain volumes. ↩ ↩ ↩
3.
Hawks, John et al. “New fossil remains of Homo naledi from the Lesedi Chamber, South Africa.” eLife 6:e24232. 2017. Describes the second naledi site, 131 hominin specimens from at least three individuals, including the partial skeleton with a nearly complete skull that was nicknamed "Neo", and its access route. Mirror: PMC
1. 3a.
  Section Abstract: “Further exploration led to the discovery of hominin material, now comprising 131 hominin specimens, within a second chamber, the Lesedi Chamber. … The most significant specimen is the near-complete cranium of a large individual, designated LES1, with an endocranial volume of approximately 610 ml and associated postcranial remains.” Section Introduction: “Additional fossil hominin material was subsequently discovered in the Lesedi Chamber of the cave system in November 2013 by Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker.” Section Discussion: “duplication of elements and age-at-death indicators combine to produce a MNI of three: two adults and one immature individual”. The lay digest that eLife prints with the paper gives the count as 133 fossils; the authors' abstract and introduction both give 131. ↩ ↩
2. 3b.
  Section Results, Location of the Lesedi Chamber: “There is no straight-line route between the Dinaledi and Lesedi Chambers, and the shortest traversable route between the two areas is almost 145 m. There are currently four access routes from the surface to the Lesedi Chamber. The most accessible of these currently follows an 86 m downward-sloping path with several narrow passages and short climbs, but only one squeeze and no significant crawls.” ↩ ↩
4.
Sinclair, P., and Todd C. Wood. “Revising Hominin Baraminology with Medoid Partitioning and Fuzzy Analysis.” Answers Research Journal 14:451–462. 2021. Re-runs the hominin baraminology with medoid partitioning, fuzzy analysis and Jaccard distances after a creationist critic argued the earlier statistic was untested.
1. 4a.
  Section Discussion: “Our intention is not to render a final judgment on the human holobaramin.” “the human holobaramin consists of the well-characterized human forms of H. sapiens, Neandertals, and H. erectus and probably includes the more fragmentary H. heidelbergensis, H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, H. naledi, and Au. sediba.” “Finally, O’Micks (2016a) has asserted that postcranial characters ought to be included in baraminological evaluations. He is unquestionably correct on this point.” ↩ ↩
2. 4b.
  Section Results: “For this two-cluster partition, Au. sediba had an individual silhouette width of 0.40, and H. naledi had a silhouette width of 0.49.” Moving naledi to the non-human cluster gives −0.49; giving it a cluster of its own gives an average silhouette width of 0.16. ↩ ↩
5.
Wood, Todd Charles, and P. S. Brummel. “Hominin Baraminology Reconsidered with Postcranial Characters.” Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism, 251–266. Edited by J. H. Whitmore. 2023. The first young-earth sorting of the hominins to use the skeleton below the skull: 239 new characters for 14 taxa, analysed alone and with skull characters. It is the postcranial analysis O'Micks asked for, run by the method's own author, and it left naledi's place less clear than the skull data had. ↩
1. 5a.
  Page 260: “For three clusters, fuzzy analysis broke up the Homo taxa to make a cluster of H. floresiensis, H. naledi, H. habilis, and all three Australopithecus taxa for simple matching distances and a cluster of H. habilis, H. naledi, H. floresiensis, and Au. sediba for Jaccard distances.” From the results for the 239 skeleton characters alone. Page 263: “The status of the Australopithecus taxa and H. naledi, H. floresiensis, and H. habilis are less clear.” “Distance correlation supports placing Homo naledi with other members of Homo, which is confirmed by cluster analysis.” “With H. naledi and Au. sediba so different from the others postcranially, questions persist about their human status.” ↩ ↩ ↩
2. 5b.
  Page 263: “In the case of Homo naledi, cultural evidence of body disposal (Dirks et al. 2010) tentatively confirms their status as human, but with Au. sediba, no such supplemental evidence exists and legitimate uncertainty remains.” ↩
6.
Wise, Kurt P. “Paleontological Note on Homo naledi.” Journal of Creation Theology and Science Series B: Life Sciences 6:9–13. 2016. The most careful young-earth reading of the 2015 taphonomy paper, by a Harvard-trained palaeontologist. Written before any date existed. Mirror: Archive.org
1. 6a.
  Page 9: “representing nearly every bone in the human body and at least fifteen different individuals from both genders and a wide range of ages”. “The best explanation for how the bodies got there is that humans, using artificial light, carried the bodies along challenging cave passage to deliberately deposit them there. Small CVs, combined with the uniformity of variable and unusual morphological characters suggest that all the H. naledi were probably from one family. The naledi are probably a family unit recently dispersed from Babel, who used this isolated cave passage as a burial chamber for the duration of their residence in the region.” ↩ ↩
2. 6b.
  Page 10: “Dirks et al. have not provided enough information to determine how long that has to be, and attempts to date the flowstone with uranium series dating has been frustrated by the dirtiness of the flowstone. The time involved depends much upon water flow rates in the cave, but at the very least H. naledi deposition has to be spread over some months or years of time.” ↩
3. 6c.
  Page 11: “It is unlikely, for example, that a flood event either killed the H. naledi or washed their bodies into the Dinaledi Chamber after their death.” ↩
4. 6d.
  Page 11: “this is not a ‘life assemblage’ (formed by the mass death of a population), but is actually a ‘death assemblage’ – an accumulation of a population’s dead over a prolonged period of time.” ↩
5. 6e.
  Page 12: “In the case of H. naledi, Berger et al. reports three CVs – a body mass CV of 9%, a lower first molar CV of 3.2% (n ≥7), and an upper first molar CV of 2% (n≥7). This suggests that not only are the H. naledi specimens of the same species, they are from the same population of humans, and probably the same close family.” ↩ ↩
7.
Rupe, Christopher, and John Sanford. Contested Bones. FMS Publications. 2017. A young-earth survey of the hominin fossils. Chapter 10 treats naledi as an inbred human population and the chamber as a ritual burial place; a section of chapter 12 answers the 2017 date. Page numbers are those of the 2017 first edition; the 2019 printing is paginated differently.
1. 7a.
  Page 208: “It is increasingly realized that many generations of inbreeding, and long-term starvation produces human populations that will display pathologies, dramatically reduced body size, and very dramatically reduced brain size. Naledi appears to be an example of this process happening within an Erectus (fully human) population.” ↩ ↩
2. 7b.
  Page 224: “The evidence further indicates Naledi had ritualistically buried their dead over several generations.” ↩
8.
Berger, Lee R. et al. “Evidence for deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi.” eLife 12:RP89106. Sep 1, 2025. The version of record of the burial paper, about 50,000 words with appendices, revised after the 2023 reviews. Reviewed preprint 12 July 2023; revised 28 March 2025; version of record 1 September 2025. Places are its section and appendix headings.
1. 8a.
  Section Appendix 2.1, Entrances to the cave system: “This passage from Dragon’s Back to the Hill Antechamber became known as the Chute, and it cannot be traversed by humans who cannot fit their bodies through a squeeze of less than 18 cm.” Section Introduction, The Rising Star cave system and Homo naledi localities: “The Hill Antechamber leads via narrow (<50 cm wide) passages approximately 7 m long into the Dinaledi Chamber.” ↩
2. 8b.
  Section Appendix 2.1, Entrances to the cave system: “From such an entrance, the distance from the surface to the Dinaledi Subsystem would be reduced by up to 20 m, making it around 80 m in total.” “H. naledi localities all are located a minimum of 86 m from the nearest identifiable current entrance into the cave system, and one hypothesized past entrance may reduce this minimum to approximately 80 m. All localities are accessible only through narrow passages that include vertical descents of at least 30 m, sharp turns, and squeezes of less than 25 cm and remain the case for any hypothesized past entrance.” ↩
3. 8c.
  Section Appendix 2.2, Water transport and burial by fluvial action: “The Dinaledi Subsystem is separated from the adjacent Dragon’s Back Chamber by a~5 m sill of dolomite that has been in place throughout the time of formation of Unit 3 (Robbins et al., 2021).” Section Appendix 2.1, Entrances to the cave system: “Robbins et al., 2021 suggest that passage beneath this block may have been possible prior to its displacement. However, this displaced block alone does not form the separation between the Dragon’s Back Chamber and the Hill Antechamber. These areas were connected prior to the block displacement as they are today: only through various small passages of a fissure network in the dolomite bedrock. The displaced block does not define the vertical descent that today provides the most common access into the Dinaledi Subsystem via this fissure. Passage beneath the block prior to its displacement may have provided greater access into this fissure network, but the extent to which this may have affected ingress into the Dinaledi Subsystem is not evident.” The paper prints "a~5 m" with no space. ↩ ↩
4. 8d.
  Section Appendix 2.2, Water transport and burial by fluvial action: “As discussed above, the sediments of sub-unit 3b within the Dinaledi Subsystem did not form in flowing water or with saturation sufficient to round the shape of LORM clasts and angular clay fragments which comprise this sub-unit (Dirks et al., 2015; Wiersma et al., 2020). … This has prevented the movement of sediment directly into the Dinaledi Subsystem from Dragon’s Back or other areas nearer to surface entrances and explains the sedimentological contrasts between the two chambers (Dirks et al., 2015). This leaves no possibility for bodies or bones to have been transported into Dinaledi by water flow.” LORM is the paper's abbreviation for laminated orange-red mud. ↩
5. 8e.
  Section Results, Hill Antechamber Feature, General description: “The Hill Antechamber Feature (Figure 5) was uncovered during excavations conducted in 2017 and 2018. … the team encountered a localized accumulation of bone fragments and skeletal elements across a roughly triangular space some 45 cm by 55 cm. … the team separated the feature into one larger and two smaller subsections, each of which was encased within a plaster jacket for removal.” Section Materials and methods, Hill Antechamber: “At present, the material remains in these plaster jackets in order to protect them and allow the application of technology to examine them in situ.” Section Results, Dinaledi Chamber Feature 1, General description: “The exposed area of the feature measures 50 cm in total length and 30 cm in breadth. … At this point of recognition, we ceased excavation to study the remains in place and leave witness sections for future hypothesis testing.” Dinaledi Feature 1 was uncovered in 2018. The paper's third line of evidence is a re-analysis of the 2013 to 2014 excavation pit, the "Puzzle Box". ↩ ↩ ↩
6. 8f.
  Section Appendix 3, Description of the Hill Antechamber artifact 1: “Within the Hill Antechamber Feature is a rock of 138.5 mm length which is located within 20 mm of a group of bones interpreted as anatomically associated metacarpals and phalanges of a right hand. … At this writing, HAA1 still remains within the larger plaster jacket containing most of the Hill Antechamber Feature.” “We cannot determine the type of stone unambiguously from scan data, but we hypothesize based on its surface characteristics that it is likely composed of dolomite, and there is no evidence that the rock is exogenous to the cave system.” ↩
7. 8g.
  Section Appendix 2.1, Entrances to the cave system: “Present evidence shows that some H. naledi remains entered the Dinaledi Subsystem between 335,000 and 241,000 years ago (Dirks et al., 2017; Robbins et al., 2021). No geochronological estimate yet exists for the Lesedi Chamber material, and the Dinaledi Subsystem results do not exclude the possibility that some individuals may represent a broader time range.” ↩ ↩
9.
Dirks, Paul H. G. M. et al. “The age of Homo naledi and associated sediments in the Rising Star Cave, South Africa.” eLife 6:e24231. 2017. The dating paper, twenty authors, six methods. eLife publishes its decision letter and the authors' response with the paper, and several quotations here are from that exchange. The paper has no page numbers; places are its section headings. Mirror: PMC
1. 9a.
  Section Abstract: “By combining the US-ESR maximum age estimate obtained from the teeth, with the U-Th age for the oldest flowstone overlying Homo naledi fossils, we have constrained the depositional age of Homo naledi to a period between 236 ka and 335 ka.” ↩
2. 9b.
  Section Results, U-Th dating of flowstones: “Flowstone samples that overlie sub-unit 3b, which contains the H. naledi fossils, yield age estimates that fall within four distinct time periods: ~242 ka (RS18 = 242 ± 5 ka [JCU] and 242.9 ± 6.6 ka [UoM]) for Flowstone 1c; 88–106 ka (RS1, RS8, RS13-17); 50 ka (RS6); and 24–32 ka (RS10, RS19-21) for Flowstone Group 2 deposits. The results for RS18 provide a minimum age for the H. naledi fossils in this part of the cave.” The still-growing stalagmite RS11 gave 9.05 ± 0.06 ka at JCU and 9.95 ± 0.06 ka at UoM; the oldest flowstone samples gave about 478 to 502 ka. ↩
3. 9c.
  Section Discussion, U-Th results: “In particular, the effects of possible post-depositional U uptake, which would result in apparent ages that are younger than the true age, can be assessed with textural analyses (e.g., Pickering et al., 2010), and the use of initial ^234U/238U ratios (Tables 2 and 3; Kronfeld et al., 1994). Most of the analysed flowstones display similar initial ^234U/238U ratios (1.8 to 2.4), with two notable exceptions in samples RS18 (243 ± 7 ka) and RS5 (290 ± 6 ka) that record ^234U/238U ratios of 3 to 4. These are two of the oldest samples analysed, and both display evidence for recrystallization and secondary dissolution. Considering that the groundwater reservoir in the CoH has high (i.e., >7) initial ^234U/238U ratios (Kronfeld et al., 1994) it is likely that the elevated ^234U/238U ratios in samples RS5 and RS18 are due to U uptake during interaction with groundwater after flowstone deposition. In this case, these two age results should be viewed as minimum age estimates for the flowstones.” ↩
4. 9d.
  Section Discussion, Age estimates for H. naledi and implications for hominin evolution: “The maximum age limit of 335 ka for the H. naledi fossils relies on 80% Rn loss throughout the burial history of the fossils and is probably an over-estimate.” ↩
5. 9e.
  Section Author response, opening statement: “For ESR we have now standardized the modelling input parameters for the ESR models. Originally the results provided by the two labs varied significantly, largely because each lab had made different à priori model assumptions (as a result of this being a double blind experiment), which would have been hard to spot by any non-specialist. To allow for more objective comparisons of the two different data sets, we have now based all ESR modelling on mutually agreed to in-put parameters for the environmental dose rates”. ↩
6. 9f.
  Section Author response, Reviewer #4: “In other words, the reassignment of lithological units to their appropriate chronostratigraphic position was firstly based on the new age results.” “The reviewer is correct in assuming that we altered the unit assignment after the dates came in as is usual in the stratigraphic allocations of sediments to units when chronostratigraphic constraints are acquired (as explained above). The real reason for the mix-up, however, is that an older version of the table was sent in by accident.” “Corrected. Also, getting an age to establish stratigraphy is a normal process in stratigraphy.” ↩
7. 9g.
  Section Discussion, An updated stratigraphy for the Dinaledi Chamber: “Flowstone 1c returns an age of ~243 ka (Table 1), suggesting that the sediments below Flowstones 1b-e are significantly younger than Unit 2 sediments below Flowstone 1a … Therefore, we reinterpret the H. naledi-bearing sediments below Flowstones 1b-e as part of Unit 3 (sub-unit 3b)”. ↩
8. 9h.
  Section Results, Radiocarbon dating: “Three weathered bone fragments of H. naledi were analysed via radiocarbon dating at Beta Analytic Inc. (Florida, USA). Analyses indicated that no collagen was present in any of the samples and that the bone appeared possibly cremated. This was investigated with a bone carbonate extraction technique. Tests did not support cremation and indicated that extensive secondary CaCO3 replacement had occurred, providing ages of 33.0 ± 0.2 ka and 35.50 ± 0.16 ka for two of the fragments. We interpret these ages to relate to late calcite precipitation in the bones that may reflect a wet period in the cave.” The three fragments were a tibia shaft, a femur shaft and a hand or foot bone shaft, collected from the surface of Unit 3 near the excavation pit. ↩ ↩
9. 9i.
  Section Decision letter, Reviewer #5: “1) The dating is correct. H. naledi originated at some unknown time, perhaps 1-3 Ma, and survived until the Middle Pleistocene … However, this hypothesis conflicts with the evolutionary assumption that more primitive species cannot compete with more advanced … 2) The dating is correct but the fossils are reworked from some other deposit. … 3) The dating has been done with great precision and care, but there is a factor of which the analysts were unaware, or perhaps that could not be measured.” ↩
10. 9j.
  Section Introduction, Lithologic and stratigraphic context for dating: “Unit 3 sediments are dynamic in the sense that they are poorly lithified in most places and actively slump towards, and erode into, floor drains that occur in parts of the chamber where sediment is being washed down to deeper levels in the cave (likely as a result of fluctuations in the ground water level).” Section Introduction, The distribution of fossils, units, and flowstones: “Flowstone dissolution occurred during time periods when the water table was elevated and the chamber was filled with standing water.” ↩
11. 9k.
  Section Results, US-ESR dating: “Combined US-ESR ages for the baboon tooth (sample 1841) determined by SCU using scenario 1 and 2 conditions are 723 ± 181 ka and 635 ± 148 ka respectively.” “The age results provide an upper age limit for the deposition of the H. naledi bearing layer”. Section Methods, Tooth samples for ESR dating: “The specimen was recovered from a sediment sample taken at a depth of 55–60 cm below the original ground surface of the cave floor near the base of the sondage dug in the centre of the excavation pit (Figures 1b, 2d and 4). This tooth occurs in sub-unit 3a, ~40 cm below the stratigraphically lowest occurrence of partly articulated remains of H. naledi, and represents the only non-hominin macrofossil recovered from Unit 3.” Table 4: The mean uranium-thorium age of the tooth's enamel is 115.6 ± 3.8 ka. ↩ ↩
10.
Arithmetic for this article. Hardy and Carter's Flood dates⁵² in years before 2026: 3386 BC is 5,411 years ago, 2600 BC is 4,625, 2300 BC is 4,325 and 2256 BC is 4,281. Dividing 33,000 by these gives 6.1, 7.1, 7.6 and 7.7. Dividing 241,000 by them gives 45, 52, 56 and 56. A young-earth model puts the bones after the Flood, so each ratio is a minimum. The 33,000 is a radiocarbon age and the 241,000 a uranium-thorium age; a young-earth reading takes neither as a calendar date, and the ratios are given to show scale. ↩ ↩
11.
eLife. “eLife assessment and public reviews of "Evidence for deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi", reviewed preprint version 1.” eLife. Jul 12, 2023. The editors' assessment and four anonymous reviews of the first version of the burial paper. eLife publishes its reviews and assessment with the preprint whatever the authors wish, which is why this exchange is on the record. Senior editor George H. Perry.
1. 11a.
  Section eLife assessment: States that demonstrating the earliest known intentional funerary practice by a small-brained hominin. “would be a landmark finding”. but that. “the evidence for these claims is considered inadequate in the current version of the study”. and records that the four reviewers were. “in strong consensus that the methods, data, and analyses do not support the primary conclusions”. that without full excavations the study lacks crucial geoarchaeology and taphonomic work, and that the null hypothesis must be that the skeletons accumulated naturally. ↩ ↩
12.
eLife. “eLife assessment, public reviews and author response for "Evidence for deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi", version of record.” eLife. Sep 1, 2025. The final assessment, the reports of the two reviewers who returned for the revision, numbered #1 and #2 as in 2023, and the authors' response. Reviewers #3 and #4 of 2023 did not review the revision. All four texts were first published with the revised preprint on 28 March 2025 and stand word for word the same beside the version of record of 1 September 2025.
1. 12a.
  Section eLife assessment: “The authors have revised their manuscript extensively in light of the reviews of their initial submission, with improved illustration, context, discussion, and theoretical frameworks, leading to an improved case supporting their conclusion that Homo naledi intentionally buried their dead. One of the reviewers concludes that the findings convincingly demonstrate intentional burial practices, while another considers evidence for such an unambiguous conclusion to be incomplete given a lack of definitive knowledge around how the hominins got into the chamber. … The editors note that the authors' response repeatedly invokes precedent from previous publications to help justify the conclusions in this paper. While doing so is helpful, the editors also note that scientific norms and knowledge are constantly evolving, and that any study has to rest on its own scientific merit.” The assessment's terms are significance "landmark" and two strength terms, "convincing" and "incomplete". ↩ ↩
2. 12b.
  Section Reviewer #2: “the findings now convincingly demonstrate not only clear evidence of intentional burial practices by Homo naledi but also compelling indications of post-depositional reworking.” “Importantly, the authors remain cautious in their interpretation of the evidence, explicitly refraining from inferring "symbolic" behavior or complex cognitive motivations behind these burials.” ↩
3. 12c.
  Section Reviewer #1: The reviewer quotes section 6.3 of Robbins et al. 2021 in Chemical Geology as follows: “Prior to the collapse of the Dragon's Back, sometime before 241 ka (new minimum age for H. naledi from RS68), the cave could be entered by H. naledi via a shaft in the roof of the Postbox Chamber. From there H. naledi could walk along a straight passage that follows a gently descending, SW trending fracture into the Dragon's Back Chamber and, with the Dragon's Back block still attached to the roof, would have only needed to climb over a ~5 m high sill to access the Dinaledi Subsystem behind it. … it would have been a more accessible route than that today.” The reviewer also writes that the opening would have shortened the route by 80 m; the paper's appendix says by up to 20 m. ↩
4. 12d.
  Section Author response: “We note that the accessibility of the subsystem is not strictly relevant to the hypothesis of cultural burial”. ↩
13.
Searched on 10 October 2026 for any paper, preprint, conference abstract or dataset reporting hearths, charcoal, soot, burnt bone or a date on them from the Rising Star cave. Crossref returned 106 records matching "naledi" from June 2022 onward, none on fire except one news item. OpenAlex was searched by title, abstract and full text, and its full list of works by Lee Berger, John Hawks and Keneiloe Molopyane from October 2022 onward, 66 items, has none. DataCite, which registers PaleoAnthropology and the preprint servers Crossref misses, and Europe PMC's full-text search returned none. None of the three 2025 eLife papers cites one; the only fire reference among them is the news report.³⁷ John Hawks's later posts on naledi, through June 2026, do not mention fire. A search can miss a paper, so this is a statement of what was found and when. ↩ ↩
14.
Dirks, Paul H. G. M. et al. “Geological and taphonomic context for the new hominin species Homo naledi from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa.” eLife 4:e09561. 2015. The excavating team's first account of the chamber, its access route, its sediments and the bone surfaces, and the origin of the "deliberate body disposal" reading. It placed the hominin bones in two of its three stratigraphic units, Units 2 and 3; the 2017 dating paper moved the loose, bone-bearing sediment under Flowstones 1b to 1e from Unit 2 to Unit 3, which put all the hominin bones in one sub-unit. Mirror: PMC
1. 14a.
  Section The Rising Star cave system: “The fossil-bearing chamber … is ∼30 m below surface and ∼80 m, in a straight line, away from the present, nearest entrance to the cave (Figure 2B). … The only identified access point into the Dinaledi Chamber involves an exposed, ∼15 m climb from the bottom of a large ante-chamber (the Dragon's Back Chamber), up the side of a sharp-edged dolomite block that has dislodged from the roof (the Dragon's Back; Figure 2B). From the top of the Dragon's Back, the Dinaledi Chamber is accessed via a narrow, northeast-oriented vertical fissure, and involves a ∼12 m vertical climb down, with squeezes as tight as ∼20 cm, to reach the floor”. ↩ ↩
2. 14b.
  Section The Rising Star cave system: “route 1, along an east-northeast trending passage that follows a fracture for a horizontal distance of ∼50 m past a narrow access point called the ‘postbox’; and route 2, along a more complicated set of broadly east-trending passages … for ∼120 m, and past a narrow access point called ‘superman crawl’.” ↩
3. 14c.
  Section Bone material and its spatial distribution: “a 0.8 × 0.8 m pit, ∼20–25 cm deep”. The pit yielded "approximately 1250 specimens"; the rest were collected from the surface. ↩
4. 14d.
  Section Skeletal part representation: “With the exception of six avian bones and isolated non-diagnostic rodent elements, all identifiable, macro-skeletal specimens recovered to date from the Dinaledi Chamber are clearly hominin”. ↩
5. 14e.
  Section Skeletal part representation: “Likewise, all morphologically informative bone specimens are clearly hominin. In all cases where multiple examples are present, they exhibit little variability, consistent with a single population sample.” ↩
6. 14f.
  Section Mass fatality or death trap: “3 infants, 3 young juveniles, 1 old juvenile, 1 sub-adult, 4 young adults and 1 old adult”. ↩
7. 14g.
  Section Mass fatality or death trap: “We found no significant result when comparing the currently available distribution to either catastrophic or attritional mortality profiles, and therefore a mass death scenario involving some sort of calamity or death trap cannot be completely excluded”. ↩
8. 14h.
  Section Transportation: “We therefore preclude transportation by water as a major taphonomic factor associated with the delivery of skeletal elements into, or within the cave system.” ↩ ↩ ↩
9. 14i.
  Section Surface modifications and vertebrate–bone interactions: “No evidence is noted of vertebrate modifications such as those caused by carnivores, rodents or other hominins. … There is no evidence of stone tool inflicted cuts, scrapes, impact or chop marks (White, 2014). … None of the specimens are burnt (Stiner et al., 1995) or shows signs of trampling other than limited incidental recent breakage by cavers”. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
10. 14j.
  Section Surface modifications and invertebrate–bone interactions: “The collection bears clear traces of invertebrate activity, with most of the bones (n = 553) exhibiting microscopic removal of the bone surface, and evenly spaced, multiple parallel striations (35%) associated with smooth-based pits (34%), a pattern consistent with damage made to bone by modern gastropods. Sixty-two specimens (10%) record large individual, variably arrow-shaped and randomly oriented striations, consistent with those made by modern beetles”. ↩
11. 14k.
  Section Fractures: “Significantly, no examples of spiral (green) fractures have been documented (Supplementary file 2), which indicates that post-depositional processes are the primary agents of skeletal damage.” Section Environmental constraints in the Dinaledi Chamber based on taphonomy: “The lack of green fractures on any of the elements in the assemblage suggests that the bodies did not enter the chamber due to catastrophic accident such as falling into the chamber or due to flooding”. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
12. 14l.
  Section Depositional scenarios for the burial of H. naledi: “Flowstone formation continues today (Flowstone 3), changing the morphology of cave passages. This makes it possible that a more direct access-way or easier passage may have existed when hominins entered.” The same paper's account of the cave system says the search "failed to find any other plausible access points into the Dinaledi Chamber, and there is no evidence to suggest that an older, now sealed, entrance to the chamber ever existed", and the paragraph quoted here goes on to say that any alternate route "did not involve vertical access shafts that connected directly to surface". ↩
13. 14m.
  Section Water transport: “The cave has been inundated in the past by rising water tables, but there is no evidence within the Dinaledi Chamber of depositional processes that involved high-energy transport mechanisms capable of transporting the large hominin bones, let alone do so in a uniquely selective manner. The high abundance and diversity of predominantly non-hominin fossil remains preserved throughout the adjacent Dragon's Back Chamber not only refute sediment transport by water flow between the two chambers, but also indicates that a considerable barrier between the two chambers was in place at time of deposition of H. naledi, and indeed throughout the history of the Dinaledi Chamber. The Dinaledi Chamber has been a closed depositional system for a long time, and did not allow the sudden ingress of water and sediment; only fine-grained muddy sediment accumulated, which accessed the chamber through narrow cracks that filtered out coarser material. Thus, the accumulation of the hominin remains in the chamber does not fit the pattern of a flood or fluvial event”. ↩ ↩
14. 14n.
  Section Predator accumulation: “Despite abundant fossil material available for taphonomic study, we have, thus far, found no trace of carnivore damage on the Dinaledi remains. Nor have we found any trace of carnivore remains or the remains of other likely prey animals. … We consider this very unlikely.” ↩ ↩
15. 14o.
  Section Deliberate disposal: “None of the bone elements studied shows evidence of green fracture (Supplementary file 2), indicating lack of trauma. Therefore, if bodies were dropped down the entrance, it is unlikely that they would have fallen rapidly, or landed with any force; perhaps because the entry is too irregular and narrow to allow a body to freefall and gain speed, or perhaps because a pile of soft muddy sediment had accumulated below the entry way, breaking the momentum of any falling object.” ↩
16. 14p.
  Section Bone material and its spatial distribution: “Articulated elements appear more common in the lower 10 cm of the excavation and include critical elements such as a hand, ankle and foot … a nearly complete and articulated lower limb of a child (including articulated tibia, fibula and talus), in turn underlain by a fully articulated hand of an adult.” Section Sedimentation processes in the Dinaledi Chamber and deposition of H. naledi: “Unit 2 accumulated near the entrance to the chamber, that is, ∼11 m away from the pit (Figure 2C)”. Section Deliberate disposal: “the presence of delicate, articulated remains in the excavation pit, deep in the chamber, well away from the entrance point, on the other side of floor drains”. The 11 m is the distance from the sediment pile below the entry shaft to the excavation pit. ↩ ↩
17. 14q.
  Section Deliberate disposal: “Both the mass mortality or death trap scenario (although possibly not involving a single event) and deliberate disposal hypothesis are considered plausible interpretations and require additional investigation. Based on current evidence, our preferred explanation for the accumulation of H. naledi fossils in the Dinaledi Chamber is deliberate body disposal”. ↩ ↩
15.
Wood, Todd C. “Taxon Sample Size in Hominin Baraminology: A Response to O'Micks.” Answers Research Journal 9:369–372. 2016. Wood's reply to O'Micks's postcranial re-analysis, on how taxon sampling affects the result. ↩
1. 15a.
  Page 371: “The evidence of intentional burial or “body disposal” (Dirks et al. 2015; Randolph-Quinney et al. 2016) also supports recognizing Homo naledi as human (Wise 2016).” ↩
16.
Martinón-Torres, María et al. “No scientific evidence that Homo naledi buried their dead and produced rock art.” Journal of Human Evolution 195:103464. 2024. A commentary written against the unrevised 2023 preprints by the leader of the team that published Africa's oldest accepted burial at Panga ya Saidi, a rock-art specialist, a Cradle of Humankind geochronologist who co-authored the 2017 dating paper, and Michael Petraglia. Places are the section numbers of the accepted manuscript, which has no journal pagination. Mirror: Opal.latrobe.edu.au
1. 16a.
  Section 2.1: States that. “Dirks et al. (2015, 2017) document significant water flow through these deposits and into drains in the floor”. Dirks et al. 2015 preclude water transport "as a major taphonomic factor" and describe a chamber inundated by rising water tables, with sediment slumping toward floor drains. ↩
2. 16b.
  Section 2.4, Fire evidence: “More importantly, no scientific evidence (e.g., Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, micromorphology, archaeomagnetism) has been presented to indicate the occurrence of in situ burnt material, let alone hearths. Previously acquired radiocarbon dates obtained by the site investigators on one of the apparent hearths resulted in very young dates (Lee Berger, unpublished data), questioning its association to H. naledi. Moreover, the occurrence of charcoal is also common in caves, including in South African landscapes, where there are frequent wildfires (Weij et al., 2022) … the possibility of use of fire by H. naledi cannot be minimally considered and remains entirely speculative.” The manuscript misnumbers this section "1.1". ↩
3. 16c.
  Section 4: “The Rising Star Cave system, also known as Empire of Westminster Cave, has been used by cavers since the 1960s for recreational caving, and the occurrence of survey pegs and arrangement of bone in the chamber indicates that an unknown number of unknown cavers had been into the Dinaledi and related chambers previously (Dirks et al., 2015). … It therefore cannot be ruled out that any potential engravings or fire-use evidence are the work of recent humans in the system.” ↩
4. 16d.
  Section 4: “this research (Robbins et al., 2021) implies that prior to 241 ka and the collapse of the Dragon’s Back block hominins and other species could have more easily entered the cave via the Post Box Chamber and beneath the Dragon’s Back Block before it fell.” ↩
5. 16e.
  Section 5: “Why would H. naledi take the effort to bury the bodies in an already deep and supposedly hardly accessible location?” ↩
17.
Kruger, Ashley, and Shaw Badenhorst. “Remains of a barn owl (Tyto alba) from the Dinaledi Chamber, Rising Star Cave, South Africa.” South African Journal of Science 114(11/12):5152. Nov 27, 2018. The formal description of the bird bones collected from the chamber floor in 2013, by a member of the excavating team and a zooarchaeologist. The 2015 taphonomy paper counted six bird bones; this paper describes four.
1. 17a.
  Page 1: “Four bird bones were collected from the surface of the Dinaledi Chamber during the first phase of the initial excavations. Although mentioned in the initial geological and taphonomic reports, the bird remains have not been formally identified and described until now. Here we identify these remains as the extant barn owl (Tyto alba)”. Page 4: “the remains had apparently been picked up and placed on a rock in the distal section of the Dinaledi Chamber (Figure 5b) by one or more cavers prior to the exploration of the Chamber by our scientific team. As noted by Dirks et al., the owl remains are taphonomically distinct from the rest of the hominin assemblage as they lack surface modification and stain patterns seen on the hominin remains; in addition, they are covered in an adhesion of a thin film of calcite crystals. … We favour one of the first two hypotheses as the most likely origin of this material in the position of their discovery: the owl became lost in the system and found its way either into the Dinaledi Chamber, or to the top of the chute, before perishing.” ↩ ↩
18.
Elliott, Marina C. et al. “Expanded Explorations of the Dinaledi Subsystem, Rising Star Cave System, South Africa.” PaleoAnthropology 2021(1):15–22. 2021. The excavating team's survey of the fissures and side chambers around the Dinaledi Chamber, with the first report of a baboon deeper in the subsystem.
1. 18a.
  Page 20: “Six fragments of what has been preliminarily identified as a juvenile baboon (Papio sp.) were collected from the surface in this locality, including femoral fragments, a partial os coxae, and a left-side portion of mandible with dentition.” The locality, U.W. 109, is reached by climbing up and over the fallen dolomite blocks in Chaos Chamber and dropping into a narrow shaft. ↩ ↩
2. 18b.
  Page 16: “Despite its confines, geological and speleological investigations both on the surface and underground have failed to find another entry into the area and several lines of evidence suggest that the Chute was the only viable access point during the time that the hominin material accumulated, and thereafter.” Page 21: “These fractures are parallel, and in close proximity to the Chute, but average less than 25cm wide.” ↩
19.
Geoscience Research Institute. “Homo naledi: An update.” Geoscience Research Institute. Jul 11, 2017. A short notice from the Seventh-day Adventist research institute, written two months after the 2017 papers.
1. 19a.
  “This is a significant correction, because in the original paper the H. naledi remains were described as coming from two separate layers. This evidence had been used to imply repeated events of “disposal” of carcasses and to exclude the mass mortality/death trap scenario.” ↩
20.
Thackeray, J. Francis. “Estimating the age and affinities of Homo naledi.” South African Journal of Science 111(11/12):a0124. Nov 2015. A two-page scientific correspondence by a palaeoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand. It compares mean skull measurements of naledi with those of 12 other hominin species by pairwise regression and dates naledi by the species it most resembles.
1. 20a.
  Page 1: “Without assuming that log sem values can provide accurate dates, the results presented in Table 1 may be used to provide an estimate for the age of H. naledi, here considered to be in the order of 2 million years (+/- 0.5 years)”. "0.5 years" is the journal's slip for 0.5 million years; the table caption gives "2 (+/- 0.5) mya". ↩
21.
Dembo, Mana et al. “The evolutionary relationships and age of Homo naledi: An assessment using dated Bayesian phylogenetic methods.” Journal of Human Evolution 97:17–26. Aug 2016. A dated Bayesian analysis of a large matrix of skull and tooth characters, which estimates a fossil's age from how far its anatomy has changed. Several authors are members of the Rising Star team. The mirror is the authors' accepted manuscript, which has section numbers and no journal page numbers. Mirror: Aura.abdn.ac.uk
1. 21a.
  Section Abstract: “According to the dated Bayesian analysis, the most likely age for H. naledi is 912 ka. This age estimate was supported by the resampling analysis.” Section 3.5 Estimating the age of H. naledi: “Using the “7.24 Ma to present” prior, the dated Bayesian analysis placed the age of H. naledi at 912 ka (thousands of years ago), with a 95% high posterior density (HPD) interval between 0.000 and 2.388 Ma (Table 1).” Section 4 Discussion: “This age estimate is considerably younger than has been proposed by Thackeray (2015) on the basis of the cranial characteristics of H. naledi. While our morphological clock date has to be treated with caution, there are interesting implications if H. naledi is indeed less than one million years old.” The second and third quotations are from the accepted manuscript. ↩
22.
Berger, Lee R. et al. “Homo naledi and Pleistocene hominin evolution in subequatorial Africa.” eLife 6:e24234. 2017. The excavators' essay on what the 2017 date means for the hominin record. Mirror: PMC
1. 22a.
  Section Implications for the fossil record: “Until now, palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists have generally assumed that morphologically primitive hominins such as H. naledi did not survive into the later parts of the Pleistocene in Africa. This assumption has guided the interpretation of fossil discoveries with poor geological or stratigraphic context … in the absence of in situ association, anthropologists often rely upon a fossil’s morphology as an indicator of its age.” ↩
2. 22b.
  Section Abstract: “H. naledi casts the fossil and archaeological records into a new light, as we cannot exclude that this lineage was responsible for the production of Acheulean or Middle Stone Age tool industries.” No stone tool has been reported from any naledi locality. ↩
23.
Pettitt, Paul, and Bernard Wood. “What we know and do not know after the first decade of Homo naledi.” Nature Ecology & Evolution 8(9):1579–1583. 2024. A ten-year review by the Durham archaeologist of burial and the senior hominin taxonomist at George Washington University. Page numbers below are those of the accepted manuscript, which runs from 1 to 10 and is headed with a working title, "Making sense of the first decade of Homo naledi", and the authors in the other order. Mirror: Archive.org
1. 23a.
  Page 3 of the accepted manuscript: “The minimum age for the capping flowstones is 242±5 ka BP (sample RS18), and the researchers’ best estimate of the age of H. naledi is the maximum US-ESR age, which is 253 +82/-70 ka (Dirks et al., 2017), with a more recent study suggesting the age of the H. naledi remains is between 335 ka and 241 ka (Robbins et al., 2021). But many of these dates are minimum ages, both OSL and US-ESR can be unreliable, and dates for the formation of flowstones in the chamber suggest ages ranging from 500 ka BP to older than 780 ka. This current imprecision seriously impedes understanding of the evolutionary position of H. naledi.” ↩
2. 23b.
  Page 4 of the accepted manuscript: “There is no obvious precursor to H. naledi, and no evidence of any later descendant taxon.” ↩
24.
Wood, Todd C. “An Evaluation of Homo naledi and "Early" Homo from a Young-Age Creationist Perspective.” Journal of Creation Theology and Science Series B: Life Sciences 6:14–30. 2016. Wood's supermatrix baraminology of all named hominins, which places both "early" Homo and H. naledi in the human holobaramin. Mirror: Archive.org ↩
25.
O'Micks, J. “Preliminary baraminological analysis of Homo naledi and its place within the human baramin.” Journal of Creation Theology and Science Series B: Life Sciences 6:31–39. 2016. O'Micks's first paper, on craniodental characters alone. It placed naledi in the human baramin; he reversed the conclusion later the same year. Mirror: Archive.org
1. 25a.
  Page 31: “Neither data set was sufficient to demonstrate discontinuity among clusters conclusively. However, in both analyses Homo naledi appears continuous with and fits well within the cluster of Homo species, despite some Australopithecus-like characteristics. … Placement of H. naledi in the human baramin is supported. Since this is one of the first morphological dataset available for H. naledi and it includes only craniodental characteristics, further baraminological analysis is warranted.” ↩
26.
O'Micks, J. “Homo naledi Probably Not Part of the Human Holobaramin Based on Baraminic Re-Analysis Including Postcranial Evidence.” Answers Research Journal 9:263–272. 2016. Re-runs the baraminic analysis with postcranial characters added. The first of O'Micks's five papers arguing that naledi is not human. ↩
27.
O'Micks, J. “Reply to "Taxon Sample in Hominin Baraminology: A Response to O'Micks".” Answers Research Journal 9:373–375. 2016. O'Micks's reply to Wood, which also sets out his first objections to the burial reading. ↩
1. 27a.
  Page 374: “Why would H. naledi choose the most difficult part of the cave to reach when they could have buried their dead closer to the entrance? We also know that the Genesis Flood caused massive fossil graveyards all over the world, so fossils from 15 individuals, possibly not from the same species found in a hard to reach part of a cave system raises this possibility.” ↩ ↩
28.
O'Micks, J. “Rebuttal to "Reply to O'Micks Concerning the Geology and Taphonomy of the Homo naledi Site" and "Identifying Humans in the Fossil Record: A Further Response to O'Micks".” Answers Research Journal 10:63–70. 2017. O'Micks's answer to McLain and to Wood. Mirror: Answersresearchjournal.org ↩
1. 28a.
  Page 63: “just because these fossil remains were not deposited by the Genesis Flood, it doesn’t necessarily follow logically that they could only have been buried intentionally.” “the tunnel system leading from the surface to the Dinaledi Chamber is highly convoluted, and only 20 cm (7.8 in) across at some points, making it hard to carry fire along with the corpse of H. naledi.” ↩
2. 28b.
  Page 64: “The percent of bone survival is only 10.8% (Val 2016) which is very fragmented, and not what you would expect if the remains were intentionally buried. This also argues for possible carnivorous animals having chewed on the bones.” ↩
29.
O'Micks, J. “Further Evidence That Homo naledi Is Not a Member of the Human Holobaramin Based on Measurements of Vertebrae and Ribs.” Answers Research Journal 10:103–113. 2017. The fourth of O'Micks's five papers arguing that naledi is not human, on the vertebrae and ribs, with a closing section on the 2017 date. ↩
1. 29a.
  Page 112: “A new review of the geological reports of the Rising Star Cave suggests that the bone-bearing sediments could have been deposited simultaneously, and that the H. naledi remains could have been deposited in multiple, closely spaced flooding events (Clarey 2017). Flooding is not excluded by even those who discovered the remains (Berger 2017b)”. ↩
2. 29b.
  Page 112: “The fact that the bones were buried neither in an extended posture, nor lying on their side (which are characteristic of human burial) (Byers 2002) also suggest that H. naledi was not human.” ↩
30.
O'Micks, J. “Likely Discontinuity Between Humans and Non-Human Hominins Based on Endocranial Volume and Body Mass With a Special Focus on Homo naledi: A Short Analysis.” Answers Research Journal 10:241–243. 2017. The fifth paper. It clusters hominin species by brain volume against body mass and puts naledi and H. habilis with the australopiths. ↩
31.
McLain, Matthew. “Reply to O'Micks Concerning the Geology and Taphonomy of the Homo naledi Site.” Answers Research Journal 10:55–56. 2017. A young-earth palaeontologist answers O'Micks from the excavators' sedimentology and taphonomy. ↩
1. 31a.
  Page 55: “a close examination of the sedimentology and taphonomy of the site reveals data that are inconsistent with rapid, hydrodynamic deposition. As it stands, the best hypothesis for the origin of the H. naledi assemblage in the Dinaledi Chamber is still intentional burial/disposal by other H. naledi, which implies that H. naledi is human.” ↩
2. 31b.
  Page 55: “Many young-earth creationist geologists consider Pliocene-Pleistocene sediments to be post-Flood (e.g., Austin et al. 1994; Brand 2009; Ross 2012; Snelling 2009) which rules out the possibility that the H. naledi remains could have been deposited by the Genesis Flood. Even if the Flood did include Pliocene and/or Pleistocene sediments, the H. naledi specimens could not have been deposited in a flood or by any kind of energetic hydrodynamic processes.” Page 56: “Included among those sediments are angular mud clasts that would be unlikely to survive high energy transport”. ↩
3. 31c.
  Page 56: “The best explanation for the H. naledi assemblage that takes into account all of the sedimentological and taphonomic data currently known is that these individuals were placed into this chamber intentionally by other H. naledi. Intentional burial lends credence to the hypothesis that H. naledi is a human being.” ↩
32.
Line, Peter. “Making sense of Homo naledi.” Creation 40(4):36–38. 2018. A magazine summary of Line's position.
1. 32a.
  “These were post-Fall descendants of Adam, perhaps erectus-like post-Babel humans … A number of them suffered from a developmental pathology, cretinism, as suggested by the region’s history of endemic iodine deficiency.” ↩
33.
Arithmetic for this article, from standard neutral theory. A variant on the Y chromosome is inherited only through males, so for drift the relevant population is the number of breeding males. A neutral variant present in one of m breeding males fixes with probability 1/m and otherwise is lost; for a founding group with five breeding males that is one chance in five, and the expected time to fixation when it happens is of the order of 2m generations, about ten generations in that case. The AMELY deletion is harmless in living men,¹ so there is no selection against it. The same arithmetic applies to a founder group a few generations from Babel and to a relict Pleistocene population; it does not distinguish the two. Madupe and colleagues' 0.5^20 = 0.0000954 percent is the probability of twenty females by chance at a 1:1 sex ratio, and it is why the deletion reading is not an idle alternative. ↩
34.
Hawks, John. “Finding ancient fire use in the Rising Star cave system.” John Hawks, johnhawks.net. Dec 7, 2022. A blog post by a co-leader of the excavations, dated six days after Lee Berger announced the fire evidence in a public lecture on 1 December 2022. It locates the hearths and explains why the team has not simply radiocarbon-dated the charcoal.
1. 34a.
  Paragraph 2: “The team identified charcoal, burned bone, or other evidence of fire in at least four chambers, widespread from each other in deep parts of the system. Some of this evidence is from excavations led by Dr. Keneiloe Molopyane in the Dragon's Back Chamber, including concentrations of well-preserved charcoal, ash, and discolored clay that appear to be small hearths. The excavations also turned up many fragments of animal bone.” ↩
2. 34b.
  Paragraph 18: “Data that we reported in our 2017 paper helps show why finding a few recent dates doesn't make things easy at all. Two naledi bones yielded radiocarbon dates between 36,000 and 33,000 BP. We very much considered whether these naledi bones may actually be this young, and today I still would not categorically rule this out. However other methods including direct U-series-ESR ages on naledi teeth made the radiocarbon results stand out as inconsistent. To explain the inconsistency, the team hypothesized that the radiocarbon results reflect contamination by carbon from outside the bones.” ↩
35.
Berger, Lee R. et al. “An initial report of circa 241,000- to 335,000-year-old rock engravings and their relation to Homo naledi in the Rising Star cave system, South Africa.” eLife 12:RP89102. Jul 22, 2025. The version of record of the engravings paper, with the final eLife assessment, two reviews and the authors' response published alongside it. The 2023 version was titled "241,000 to 335,000 Years Old Rock Engravings Made by Homo naledi"; the title was softened for the revision. No dating of the marks was attempted.
1. 35a.
  Section eLife assessment: “This report concerns preliminary findings, and as it stands the study is incomplete, with further work needed in the future to support the claims about the anthropogenic nature, age, and author of the engravings.” Significance "important", strength "incomplete", the same strength term as in 2023. ↩
36.
eLife editors and peer reviewers. “Fuentes et al. on the evolutionary implications of Homo naledi meaning-making behaviour.” eLife reviewed preprint RP89125. Jul 11, 2023. The public reviews and editorial assessment that eLife published with the preprint by Fuentes et al. on what Homo naledi would mean for the evolution of behaviour if the claimed burials and engravings are real. That study relies entirely on two related preprints by Berger et al., which the reviewers judged incomplete. The article uses the assessment for the point that this interpretive paper rests on evidence the assessment calls incomplete. ↩
1. 36a.
  It notes that the evidence in the two related submissions on which the study entirely relies. “is incomplete at this stage.” ↩
37.
Fuentes, Agustín et al. “Meaning-making behavior in a small-brained hominin, Homo naledi, from the late Pleistocene: contexts and evolutionary implications.” eLife 12:RP89125. Sep 4, 2025. An interpretive short report by members of the Rising Star team that takes burial, engraving and fire as given by the companion papers. It is the only one of the three peer-reviewed papers that mentions fire, and it cites a news report for it.
1. 37a.
  Section Rising star evidence and context: “There is reported evidence of fire use (hearths and charcoal and smoke scarring of surfaces) in the Dinaledi system (see Bower, 2022, but also see Martinón-Torres et al., 2023), but the age of these occurrences has not been reported yet, so its association with H. naledi is currently correlational. However, the correlational support is a reasonable hypothesis given there is no evidence across the last decade of investigation of any habitual activity by ancient or recent Homo sapiens in the Dinaledi Subsystem”. The reference list gives "Bower, 2022" as the Science News article of 2 December 2022. ↩ ↩
38.
Pettitt, Paul. “Did Homo naledi dispose of their dead in the Rising Star Cave system?” South African Journal of Science 118(11/12):15140. Nov 30, 2022. A three-page commentary by the Durham archaeologist who wrote The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial; sympathetic to the disposal reading and sets three tests for it.
1. 38a.
  Page 2: “Although Elliott et al. refer to the fact that all but one of the newly mapped fissures are non-navigable (less than 25 cm in width), this would presumably be no obstacle while they were clear of fill, given that the team have been capable of descending The Chute, which narrows to 20 cm in places. The possibility would presumably be easier still for the relatively smaller bodies of Homo naledi as for a baboon and owl.” ↩
2. 38b.
  Page 1: “there was a lack of any animal remains other than microfauna, a partial juvenile baboon and partial owl in a cave yielding >1500 remains of Homo naledi”. ↩
39.
Robbins, Jessie L. et al. “Providing context to the Homo naledi fossils: Constraints from flowstones on the age of sediment deposits in Rising Star Cave, South Africa.” Chemical Geology 567:120108. Apr 20, 2021. The excavating team's second dating paper: 29 new flowstone dates from the chambers along the route to the Dinaledi Chamber, and the source of the 241 thousand year floor. The quotations here are from its abstract. A 2022 erratum in the same journal replaced its Table 2. Mirror: Researchonline.jcu.edu.au
1. 39a.
  Section Abstract: “Depositional and erosional events changed the internal morphology of the cave chambers over time, and thereby changed the access route into the Dinaledi Chamber where the bulk of the H. naledi fossils were found. … These flowstones and sands were removed between 290 ka and 225 ka, with sediment transported to deeper parts of the cave via erosion channels characterised by massive orange sands (MOS). In this period of time, the access route into the Dinaledi Chamber may have further changed due to the collapse of the Dragon's Back block. … H. naledi would probably have entered the cave through an access point in the roof of the Postbox Chamber and made its way along a SW trending fracture towards the Dragon's Back and Dinaledi Chambers.” ↩
40.
Van Rooyen, Lambert et al. “Interpreting access to the Dinaledi Subsystem by Homo naledi: redefining the "Chute" as a labyrinth.” AfricArXiv. Apr 3, 2025. A preprint by members of the Rising Star team, not peer reviewed. Only its abstract is cited here.
1. 40a.
  Section Abstract: “This area was named the “Chute” and was described and illustrated in simplified form as a ~12 m vertical passage that gives direct access from the entry point into the chamber itself. However, due to the very constrained nature of the fissure network, previous descriptions of this space have not been based on detailed survey. … While some changes have occurred in the last 335 ka, these did not change the access from the rest of the cave into the Dinaledi Subsystem.” ↩
41.
Line, Peter. “Den of ape-men or chambers of the sickly? An update of Homo naledi.” Creation Ministries International, creation.com. May 23, 2017. Line's response to the 2017 dating and Lesedi papers.
1. 41a.
  “However, the truth of how the fossils got there is still very much a mystery.” ↩
42.
Line, Peter. “The puzzling Homo naledi: a case of variation or pathology in Homo erectus?” Creation Ministries International, creation.com. Nov 19, 2015. Line's first treatment, printed in the Journal of Creation in 2016 as "The mysterious Rising Star fossils". Proposes that the individuals were cretins and offers three guesses at how they reached the chamber.
1. 42a.
  “What if the Homo naledi individuals, being different because they were cretins, became vilified by, or ostracized from, their community because of their disease, perhaps blamed for some misfortune by a superstitious community? As a result, they could have been forced into the chamber, and left there to die.” “Perhaps there was another way in, but that entry and exit point collapsed or was blocked, leaving them trapped inside the chamber.” “This is strongly indicative of cannibalism … This could indicate that the Dinaledi chamber was used as some sort of garbage disposal area, where human remains were disposed of after cannibalistic feasts or rituals elsewhere.” “The above scenarios are very speculative, and one could invent more scenarios … but the truth is that no one really knows what happened.” ↩
43.
Clarey, Timothy L. “Disposal of Homo naledi in a possible deathtrap or mass mortality scenario.” Journal of Creation 31(2):61–70. 2017. The Institute for Creation Research geologist's model: the bones were floated into the chambers by post-Flood flash floods, and naledi was an ape.
1. 43a.
  Page 65: “Transport by water does not necessitate abrasion.” ↩
2. 43b.
  Page 67: “However, their conclusion only considered water flow along the bottom of the cave system, not suspended, mud-rich sediments and floating H. naledi remains. It is only the suspended material (clay-rich faction and floating partial remains) that seems to have made it through the tight opening and into the Dinaledi Chamber. All the coarser, sand-rich deposits were left at the base of the Dragon’s Back Chamber.” The spelling "faction" is the original's. ↩
3. 43c.
  Page 67: “Both of these bone chamber deposits likely occurred in the Ice Age, a time when the climate was likely experiencing more rainfall from the effects of the recent global Flood. It is therefore possible that flash-flooding of the Dragon’s Back Chamber transported either previously deceased or H. naledi taking refuge in the cave entrance, ultimately dismembering the bodies and floating the partial remains to the Dinaledi and Lesedi Chambers of the cave system”. ↩
44.
Clarey, Timothy L. “How Did Homo naledi Get in That Cave?” Acts & Facts. Sep 29, 2017. Clarey's magazine summary of his flood model for the Institute for Creation Research.
1. 44a.
  “Exactly what the bones represent remains unclear, but they are certainly not human.” “Why place bodies in the Dinaledi Chamber, with its tortuous and narrow passages that can take an hour to traverse, if other H. naledi were being disposed of nearly simultaneously and in the same system in a chamber much easier to reach?” ↩
45.
Clarey, Timothy L. “Homo naledi Bones Not Ritually Buried.” Institute for Creation Research, Creation Science Update. May 17, 2018. Presents Egeland et al. 2018 as support for the flood model, and quotes its caveat that the results "do not refute outright a hominin origin". That paper proposes no flood.
1. 45a.
  “Homo naledi was an ape—evidence from all sides points to this. And the bones in the Dinaledi Chamber and other chambers in the cave system represent assemblages of apes caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.” ↩
46.
Clarey, Timothy L. “Homo naledi Didn't Behave Like Humans.” Institute for Creation Research, Creation Science Update. Dec 18, 2023. Clarey's response to the Martinón-Torres critique of the 2023 claims.
1. 46a.
  “A better explanation for these scattered bones is that they were simply washed into the cave system during a post-Flood (possibly Ice Age) catastrophic flood event.” ↩
47.
Ham, Ken. “Did Homo Naledi Create Art and Start Fires?” Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham Blog. Jun 15, 2023. Answers in Genesis's response to the 2023 preprints.
1. 47a.
  “Humans—the only beings known to bury their dead with rituals, carve meaningful symbols, and use fire—might have left behind all these “carvings” and burned-out fires.” The post calls naledi "just a variety of ape". ↩
48.
Rana, Fazale. “Does Homo naledi Undermine the Case for Human Exceptionalism?” Reasons to Believe. Jul 18, 2023. An old-earth creationist response that accepts the date, treats naledi as a non-human hominin, and doubts the burial evidence. ↩
49.
Wiersma, Jelle Pouwel. Cave sedimentation processes in the Homo naledi-bearing Rising Star Cave, Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. James Cook University. 2021. A doctoral thesis by a member of the excavating team and a co-author of its 2017 dating paper, on where the cave's sediments came from and how they were laid down.
1. 49a.
  Page 140: “Sediment-laden flood waters may have spilled into the cave through the roof of the Postbox Chamber and flowed largely unimpeded via cave passages into the Dragon’s Back Chamber. But here these waters would have pooled, and they could only flow into the Dinaledi Chamber and beyond, through narrow fractures that filtered coarse sediment and stopped strong water flow. Thus, only suspension load could enter the Dinaledi Chamber resulting in the clay-rich nature of the LORM sediments there (Dirks et al., 2015; Wiersma et al., 2020).” Page 119: “No clastic sediment coarser than sand washed directly from the Dragon’s Back Chamber into the Dinaledi Chamber due to the presence of a 5 m high sill that consists of in situ dolomite, which blocked high energy water flow”. ↩
50.
Egeland, Charles P. et al. “Hominin skeletal part abundances and claims of deliberate disposal of corpses in the Middle Pleistocene.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(18):4601–4606. 2018. Machine-learning classification of which bones survive at Sima de los Huesos and the Dinaledi Chamber against fourteen reference assemblages, including deliberate burials, scavenged human corpses and leopard-eaten baboons. Mirror: PMC
1. 50a.
  Section Abstract: “Our results indicate that nonanthropogenic agents and abiotic processes cannot yet be ruled out as significant contributors to the ultimate condition of both collections. This finding does not falsify hypotheses of deliberate disposal for the SH and DC corpses, but does indicate that the data also support partially or completely nonanthropogenic formational histories.” ↩
51.
Berger, Lee, and John Hawks. Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story. National Geographic. 2017. The excavators' popular account of the discovery, written before any fire evidence was claimed.
1. 51a.
  Page 215: “There were no teeth marks on the fossils, so we know they had not been chewed or left there by carnivores. … they could not have been washed into the Chamber.” O'Micks cites this book, with no page, for the statement that the discoverers do not exclude flooding. ↩
52.
Hardy, Chris, and Robert Carter. “The biblical minimum and maximum age of the earth.” Journal of Creation 28(2):89–96. 2014. A young-earth paper in Creation Ministries International's journal that works out the earliest and latest dates the biblical numbers allow for creation and the Flood, across the Masoretic, Samaritan and Septuagint texts and a long or short sojourn in Egypt.
1. 52a.
  Page 96: “The Flood probably occurred between 2600 bc and 2300 bc, but certainly between 3386 bc and 2256 bc (table 5).” ↩