You may have read of the recent discovery of a new human species, Homo naledi, in the Rising Star cave in South Africa. The find has its fascinations. The skeletons were found deep in a cave complex, 200 meters from the cave's mouth and 30 meters underground, by two spelunkers. To get to the resting place, the underground explorers had to traverse claustrophobia-inducing terrain: dark, narrow spaces, stony chutes and ladders, and the wonderfully named Dragon's Back, a rock wall that led to a stalactite-filled chamber where the bodies were interred.
Once there the two cavers found bones. Lots of bones-ultimately bones from at least 15 members of Homo naledi. Archeologists go into states of rapture over the tiniest of skeletal remains. As has been often said, the physical evidence for many of our ancestors could fit comfortably inside a shoebox, with room left over for the shoes. This profusion of skeletal remains is astonishingly rare.
A single finger bone found in a Siberian cave is all that remains of the Denosivan species (partial precursors of modern Melanesians). But Homo naledi is represented by more than 1,550 bones, adults and children: a veritable archeological gold mine, with their resting place not yet fully excavated.
Wonderful Mystery
How those bones got to that crypt is a wonderful mystery. Predators did not carry the bones there, as they lack teeth marks. Nor did some ancient deluge deposit them there, as they lack any surrounding sediment. They are clustered in a small space and wonderfully undisturbed. The archeologists suspect that their own kind carried them there.
The skeletons have not yet been dated, though their anatomic characteristics suggest they might be two million years or more old, somewhere between Australopithecus africanus and Homo habilis. The species itself, while having many modern characteristics, has a tiny braincase, only 560 cc for the males and 465 cc for the females. They must have been a curious sight, their tiny little heads (less than half the size of our own) propped on top of five-foot bodies.
These were not animal kingdom geniuses. Yet somehow, perhaps-and it is just a perhaps, barely even an educated guess-they already thought in terms of placing their kin in a special final resting place.
If this is true, I find it astonishing. Extrapolating motive to two million year-old ancestors is foolhardy-foolhardy beyond belief. Yet I would like to believe that one of the things that makes us human, and perhaps made us human, a part of our earliest intellectual toolkit, right up there beside tool-making, is that we care, and cared, for our dead.
'Mental Time Travel'
Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that an important part of what makes us human is our mental ability to move seamlessly backwards and forwards in time. This "mental time travel" allows us to project and predict; it was a valuable tool for a species on the make.
The other great apes, our closest relatives, do not have it, so it must have evolved at some point in the past few million years. Was a starting point remembering our dead? Caring for old Uncle Fred even after the old man stopped moving? Understanding, in some grim way, the finality of death?
I cannot imagine those ur-humans had much in the way of ceremony. They could not exchange much other than unintelligible grunts, and those small brain cases, with their tiny amounts of RAM, probably did not lend themselves to funeral oratory or even a decent post-burial wake. Indeed, their small brain capacity has led some to question the very idea that their location suggests intentional burial. But they did have the makings of culture. We know that because they passed on tool-making from generation to generation.
On Funerals
I am not a great fan of funerals. As an oncologist I have had too many dead to remember, and too many that I wanted to forget. The few patients' funerals I have attended have all left me in melancholic moods I find hard to shake. The worst have been for those who made that progression from professional client to friend to someone I loved.
But the outpourings of grief that I have experienced at these funerals have convinced me that there is something quite human in our feelings for the dead.
Anthropologists have written weighty tomes on the funeral ceremonies surrounding the dead; ceremonies that have existed in every recorded human culture and which long predated the first written records. Ancient Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis clearly cared for the dead in ways instantly recognizable to us. And now, perhaps, Homo naledi joins their ranks.
So intrinsic is this behavior, such a part of our intellectual and social package, that we see nothing unusual in it, but unusual it is, and not a little bit illogical. A funeral, by definition, serves no obvious Darwinian function. It cannot affect the species' fitness to reproduce. The genetic flow is in the wrong direction. The energy required to bury one's dead, the opportunity cost associated with it, might even have had a negative impact on a peripheral species clawing out its ancient existence in Sub-Saharan Africa.
And yet no civilization in human history has failed to honor their dead. And few things, I suspect, horrify us more than a failure to honor them, and honor them as individuals. I am always made vaguely nauseous, and somewhat horrified, by a picture of a mass burial at a concentration camp, not so much because of the fact of their deaths, as for the wholly anonymous nature of those emaciated, intermingled bodies. In contrast I feel a rightness, even righteousness, in the rows of graves one sees at an Arlington or Gettysburg or Normandy cemetery.
Again, I cannot explain it in rational terms. The dead do not care where they lie, or how I feel about them. But I suspect that these feelings are hard-wired, have deep roots in our shared history, and may have roots that extend back to Homo naledi and beyond. That when I stood by my father's grave, after his long battle with prostate cancer had come to its inevitable end, my grief, my sorrow at never having the chance to talk with him again, the sense of loss that continues to this day, were all part of what makes me human.
Did Homo naledi, like us, feel grief at the passing of their kin? I think it is likely, because grief or something quite like it is common among higher social animals, not just humankind. But if our South African ancestors took the next step, and consciously placed their dead in a specific place, they were doing something new in the history of life on this planet, something transcending mere grief. Perhaps, in that act of remembrance, we see the origins of the mental time travel that so characterizes the human species.
How did they understand death? It is an interesting question, an unanswerable at this remove. Human children, developmentally, do not have an adult's understanding of what death means until around the age of seven, which implies some particular combination of size and development. Was H. naledi as mature as a seven year-old?
John Donne wrote "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." Did they feel diminished by their loss? Or did the burial, in some way, make them feel more involved with what then passed for mankind? Did the opportunity cost of dragging your relative to that underground complex make you feel closer to those who remained behind, the social bonds strengthened?
Perhaps caring for our dead, paying visible testament to their passing, is part of the larger act of caring for each other that represents one of our better qualities. Indeed, it may be the portal through which that which is best in us traverses the generations.
"Naledi" is the Lesotho language's word for "star," so Homo naledi means "star man." Homo naledi, indeed: Star man.