Ancient Cave Found Packed With Only Female Human Remains Baffles Scientists

Scientists have spent more than a decade trying to explain why dozens of Homo naledi skeletons wound up deep inside South Africa’s Rising Star cave system. Now, according to new research published in Cell and reported by Live Science, research conducted on the bodies has taken a weird turn toward the mysterious.

Homo naledi is an extinct species of ancient human first discovered in South Africa’s Rising Star Cave system in 2013. Researchers analyzed the specimens’ ancient proteins preserved in the enamel of 23 fossil teeth from 20 individuals dating between roughly 236,000 and 335,000 years ago. One of the many things they look out for is AMELY, a protein linked to the Y chromosome that’s commonly used to identify biological males.

They didn’t find it once.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the cave is an ancient all-female cemetery or that there were no males present. Scientists suspect that it’s possible H. naledi lost the gene at some point, or that researchers are seeing some bizarre biological attribute unique to the species. Keep in mind that, after having only been discovered in 2013, we’re still in the early stages of our knowledge of H. naledi.

The All-Female Graveyard Could Change What We Know About Burial Rituals

We’re still firmly in the “no wrong answers” kind of stage, as demonstrated by Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, who led the excavations and believes the findings support his claim that H. naledi intentionally buried its dead and may even have separated males and females in death.

It may not sound controversial to you, but in the paleontological community, it is because, if true, that would push organized burial rituals back more than 100,000 years before the earliest widely accepted evidence from Neanderthals.

It’s just a theory, and a lot of researchers out there are unconvinced. For starters, H. naledi brains were only slightly larger than those of chimpanzees, meaning they may not have been intelligent enough, and there is no definitive evidence that the bodies were deliberately buried instead of accumulating naturally inside the cave. Other critics point out that sex specific burial practices don’t start appearing in the archaeological record until much more recently.

It may take some time before the mystery is finally solved, but for now, as bioarchaeologist Elizabeth Sawchuk told Live Science, “The key thing to remember is that failure to detect evidence of AMELY does not mean there are no males in the sample—it just means that none were detected.”

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