An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge. Proverbs 18:15
"One of the most confusing and enigmatic “ape-man” discoveries of the 21st century has been Homo naledi. Its discoverer was Lee Berger, a controversial American paleoanthropologist working at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Numerous fossils were embedded in sediments in the Dragon’s Back wall through obvious flooding of the cave system. Berger’s initial announcements omitted this highly relevant fact.
They claimed the fossils in the chamber below it, the Dinaledi Chamber, had been intentionally buried—not flood-deposited.
This chamber contained the fossils Berger was most interested in. Berger could not get through the narrow chute to reach it, so he hired a team of six thin, small women to do the fossil excavations....Dinaledi Chamber yielded 1,550 mostly disarticulated bone fragments plus an undisclosed number of rodent and bird fossils, all buried in a shallow layer of clay-rich sediment.
Berger’s team tried to piece together as much of this hodgepodge of bones as they could and claimed that 15 different individuals were represented in total.
These findings supposedly documenting an alleged new hominid species were then published in the lower-tier scientific journal eLife. Berger’s discoveries and new hominid claims also benefited from popular media coverage provided by National Geographic magazine.
However, Berger’s discovery soon became controversial. World-famous hominid paleoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley revealed to the press that the prestigious journal Nature had previously rejected Berger’s paper along with its conclusions.
Another odd twist to the H. naledi story is the incriminating revelation made by Berger in his book that his group had known about another section of the cave system containing more hominid fossils that was much more easily accessible, but they kept it quiet while the H. naledi story was being formulated. Then later, in 2017, Berger’s group published a paper detailing the presence of at least three more H. naledi fossils in this other section in what is now called the Lesedi Chamber.
Many problems surround the myriad of bone fragments and their reconstruction to supposedly reveal 15 new hominids from the Dinaledi Chamber.
We’ll examine three.
The first problem is that of homogeneity—whether all the fossils even belong to the same species. Berger and his researchers initially claimed (and still do) that the bones were homogeneous in their representation of a single almost-human species.
However, the extreme non-homogeneity of the fossils was first noted by Jeffrey Schwartz, a well-known evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, who believed that the huge mix of bone fragments was too varied to represent a single species. He said, “I could show those images to my students and they would say that they’re not the same.”
Schwartz also claimed that one of the skulls looked like it came from an australopith (ape-like creature), as did certain features of the femurs. In a 2018 paper analyzing inner ear bones from the Dinaledi Chamber, Berger and his team state, “The Dinaledi ossicles resemble those of chimpanzees and Paranthropus robustus [an ape] more than they do later members of the genus Homo.”
The most recent attempt to bolster H. naledi as being almost humanH. naledi shared some aspects of human brain organization.”
involved the study of a skull endocast (a cast of the inside of the cranium). This report by Berger’s group claims, “
They are referring to a human-specific brain region called BA45. However, when Shawn Hurst, one of the study authors, consulted with Dean Falk, a neurobiology specialist in hominid paleontology at Florida State University, Falk disagreed:
A second problem concerns the dating of H. naledi. When H.
naledi was first published, there were no official radiometric dates to go along with it—just the evolutionary speculations of Berger and his team.
They stated, “If the fossils prove to be substantially older than 2 million years, H. naledi would be the earliest example of our genus that is more than a single isolated fragment.”2 These evolutionarily optimistic speculations of millions of years were soon to be dashed against the stones of their own old earth-biased radiometric techniques.
A third problem concerns Berger’s contention that the bones were H. naledi, but the ridiculous story originally put forth by Berger and his team for the bones being intentionally and ritually buried has been just as troubling. The companion paper to the original 2015 publication describing the geology at the site stated:
intentionally buried. Not only were the extremely young (by evolutionary standards) dates a severe problem for the embattled
ICR
"One of the most confusing and enigmatic “ape-man” discoveries of the 21st century has been Homo naledi. Its discoverer was Lee Berger, a controversial American paleoanthropologist working at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Numerous fossils were embedded in sediments in the Dragon’s Back wall through obvious flooding of the cave system. Berger’s initial announcements omitted this highly relevant fact.
They claimed the fossils in the chamber below it, the Dinaledi Chamber, had been intentionally buried—not flood-deposited.
This chamber contained the fossils Berger was most interested in. Berger could not get through the narrow chute to reach it, so he hired a team of six thin, small women to do the fossil excavations....Dinaledi Chamber yielded 1,550 mostly disarticulated bone fragments plus an undisclosed number of rodent and bird fossils, all buried in a shallow layer of clay-rich sediment.
Berger’s team tried to piece together as much of this hodgepodge of bones as they could and claimed that 15 different individuals were represented in total.
These findings supposedly documenting an alleged new hominid species were then published in the lower-tier scientific journal eLife. Berger’s discoveries and new hominid claims also benefited from popular media coverage provided by National Geographic magazine.
However, Berger’s discovery soon became controversial. World-famous hominid paleoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley revealed to the press that the prestigious journal Nature had previously rejected Berger’s paper along with its conclusions.
Another odd twist to the H. naledi story is the incriminating revelation made by Berger in his book that his group had known about another section of the cave system containing more hominid fossils that was much more easily accessible, but they kept it quiet while the H. naledi story was being formulated. Then later, in 2017, Berger’s group published a paper detailing the presence of at least three more H. naledi fossils in this other section in what is now called the Lesedi Chamber.
Many problems surround the myriad of bone fragments and their reconstruction to supposedly reveal 15 new hominids from the Dinaledi Chamber.
We’ll examine three.
The first problem is that of homogeneity—whether all the fossils even belong to the same species. Berger and his researchers initially claimed (and still do) that the bones were homogeneous in their representation of a single almost-human species.
However, the extreme non-homogeneity of the fossils was first noted by Jeffrey Schwartz, a well-known evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, who believed that the huge mix of bone fragments was too varied to represent a single species. He said, “I could show those images to my students and they would say that they’re not the same.”
Schwartz also claimed that one of the skulls looked like it came from an australopith (ape-like creature), as did certain features of the femurs. In a 2018 paper analyzing inner ear bones from the Dinaledi Chamber, Berger and his team state, “The Dinaledi ossicles resemble those of chimpanzees and Paranthropus robustus [an ape] more than they do later members of the genus Homo.”
The most recent attempt to bolster H. naledi as being almost humanH. naledi shared some aspects of human brain organization.”
 |
| Lee Berger kisses a skull replica of a Homo naledi, the find that made him rich and famous. |
They are referring to a human-specific brain region called BA45. However, when Shawn Hurst, one of the study authors, consulted with Dean Falk, a neurobiology specialist in hominid paleontology at Florida State University, Falk disagreed:
“We agreed on most of the interpretations,” she says—but not on the presence of a modern BA45….“I’m not seeing BA45,” says Falk. “To me the general shape of the region looks ape-like.”
The Dating ProblemA second problem concerns the dating of H. naledi. When H.
They stated, “If the fossils prove to be substantially older than 2 million years, H. naledi would be the earliest example of our genus that is more than a single isolated fragment.”2 These evolutionarily optimistic speculations of millions of years were soon to be dashed against the stones of their own old earth-biased radiometric techniques.
A third problem concerns Berger’s contention that the bones were H. naledi, but the ridiculous story originally put forth by Berger and his team for the bones being intentionally and ritually buried has been just as troubling. The companion paper to the original 2015 publication describing the geology at the site stated:
The fossils are contained in mostly unconsolidated muddy sediment with clear evidence of a mixed taphonomic signature indicative of repeated cycles of reworking and more than one episode of primary deposition.
So, not only were the fossils completely disarticulated and jumbled up in a muddy deposit, they were also intermixed with various bird and rodent bones."ICR