Search results
Leopold III: marriage and offspring. Leopold was the founder of the branch of the dynasty from which all the Habsburgs of the Early Modern era were to trace their descent. In 1365 at the age of fourteen his brother Rudolf arranged for him to be married to Viridis Visconti, who was about his own age. The Visconti ruled over the extremely wealthy ...
Jun 6, 2023 · Scientists claim remarkable evidence that ancient human relatives buried their dead 240,000 years ago. ... The team said a number of symbols had also been found on the cave walls, some of them ...
- CBS News
- 5 min
Discover life events, stories and photos about Herzogin Viridis Visconti (1352–1414) of Milano, Milan, Lombardy, Italy.
Jun 21, 2021 · Cambridge Archaeological Unit. Conventional wisdom has long held that victims of the Black Death —a terrifyingly contagious disease that claimed the lives of some 40 to 60 percent of 14th ...
- Overview
- The ‘peculiar’ primate
- Writing on the wall?
- A 'global human conversation'
If the claims are true, the behavior by Homo naledi—a baffling, small-brained member of the human family tree—would pre-date the earliest known burials by at least 100,000 years.
An Homo naledi group carry one of their dead into Rising Star cave in this artist's depiction. New evidence that these small-brained hominins may have practiced deliberate burial throws a curve into current thinking on human evolution.
An extinct human species that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago may have deliberately buried its dead and carved meaningful symbols deep in a South African cave—advanced behaviors generally deemed unique to Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens. If confirmed, the burials would be the earliest yet known by at least 100,000 years.
The claims, made today in two research papers uploaded to the preprint server bioRxiv, were also announced by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger at a conference at Stony Brook University in New York.
The publications come eight years after Berger first reported the discovery of a new hominin species inside the Rising Star cave system 25 miles northwest of Johannesburg. Named Homo naledi, the species is characterized by its small size—including a brain roughly a third the size of today’s humans—and a baffling mix of very old and relatively modern anatomical features.
The skeletal remains discovered in the cave are concentrated in a single, hard-to-reach subsystem and are dated to between 335,000 and 241,000 years ago—a period when modern humans were just beginning to emerge in Africa.
Arguments around deliberate interment of the dead often hinge on differences between what scientists call mortuary behavior and funerary behavior, says André Gonçalves, who studies how animals interact with the dead. Chimps and elephants, for example, display mortuary behavior when they keep watch over a dead body or physically interact with it expecting it to come back to life.
Funerary behavior, by contrast, involves intentional social acts by beings capable of complex thought who understand themselves to be separate from the natural world and who recognize the significance of the deceased. Until now, the earliest recorded evidence for funerary behavior and intentional burial among hominin species—including both modern humans and Neanderthals—was at least 100,000 years after Homo naledi.
“Humans are really peculiar as a primate because we bury our dead,” Gonçalves says. “No other primate seems to do it.”
External experts who reviewed the papers for National Geographic raised a variety of concerns around the evidence for deliberate burial. Some still maintain that water could have washed the bone fragments into natural depressions in the cave floor, which then filled with sediment over the years.
But, says anthropologist John Hawks, a Rising Star team member and co-author of the papers, “The strongest evidence we have is that the burials disrupt the existing stratigraphy in the cave.”
Another critique involves the state of the bones, most of which are dispersed and disconnected. “Most of the displacements can’t be explained by the natural course of decomposition,” says paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres, who studied the oldest-known human burial in Africa.
In a second paper, researchers describe another new discovery: abstract shapes and patterns etched into the cave walls near the presumed burials. The inscribed surfaces appear to have been prepared with a substance and smoothed, and some of the markings seem to have been erased and engraved over, indicating that they were made over a period of time.
The nature of the cave’s dolomitic limestone walls make dating very difficult, and researchers concede that it will be “challenging to assess whether the engravings are contemporary with the Homo naledi burial evidence from only a few meters away.”
Archaeologist Curtis Marean notes that the particular cross-hatch designs that appear on the cave walls are “very similar” to designs found in later Homo sapiens sites in the region, as well as indigenous Khoi-San imagery.
While the researchers caution that further study is needed to identify and analyze all the engravings, they point out that the production of designs—whether painted, etched, or engraved—on cave walls or other surfaces is recognized “as a major cognitive step in human evolution.”
Left: A series of engravings and etchings of geometric figures such as squares, ladders, triangles, and crosses were discovered on the cave walls in 2022. Whether they're related to nearby burials has yet to be determined.
Photograph by Berger et al., 2023b
The research team’s decision to go public with their extraordinary claims without first publishing in a peer-reviewed journal is a source of frustration for some paleoanthropologists, but Berger defends the decision. The papers will eventually appear in the online journal eLife, alongside reviews and an editorial summary, making the process “transparent,” he says.
“Your readers will be able to watch as the authors—our large team—interact with reviewers and editors as part of the open access policy,” Berger explains. The authors then have the choice to keep the papers as they are, or to incorporate comments from reviewers and other scientists. “Effectively, we're letting people in to watch the review process and the way peer review works.”
Experts who reviewed the papers agree that paleoanthropology is entering a new era with a growing awareness that there are other human species who have behaviors that until quite recently we thought were uniquely “modern human.”
With it come expectations of more discoveries of how Homo naledi lived, and how they’re related to us—or not. “If this species was adapted to living in caves and going deep into caves, which is the implication in Rising Star, then there must be more evidence of it in many other sites in South Africa,” notes Stringer.
Jun 9, 2023 · A study claiming that human ancestors living between 240,000 and 500,000 years ago may have intentionally buried their dead, raises the question of when this behavior began. Along with fishing ...
6 days ago · A fourth body has been discovered in a 50-foot deep well in Baja California, Mexico where an American and two Australian surfers were found dead, authorities revealed. Meanwhile, one of the three ...
