Homo Sapiens

Who were they anyway?

250 thousand years ago (give or take a few millennia) a family in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind carried a loved one into a cave. The entrance to the cave looks ordinary, however, this was not an ordinary place to this family; it was a sacred place, adorned with symbolic art, a place of burial. 

Carrying the body into this deep and hazardous place required crawling through long, tiny openings with no light other than fire. One can only wonder at how they might have kept the fire burning as they slithered through the tight places.

It was a child’s body they took to a safe burial place away from the elements and foraging animals. They also carried a stone tool she would need in the after life.

This is an image of the cave where the family buried their child. The entrance on the far right is where they started a harrowing descent to the room on the far left where the child was buried.

There is something dramatically wrong with this story.

• We have long believed that we, Homo sapiens, are the first and only species that buries our dead.

• The species name given to the family in the story is Homo naledi …not Homo sapiens. Smaller than us with a brain 1/3 of the size of ours.

• Plus art. The oldest known cave painting is a red hand stencil in Maltravieso cave, Cáceres, Spain, dated to older than 64,000 years and was made by a Neanderthal. However, an even older example of symbolic art dates back to 120,000 years ago discovered on a bone fragment at the Middle Paleolithic site of Nesher Ramla in Israel as reported by Smithsonian Magazine.

The Rising Star Cave System, dating to 250 million years ago is adorned with symbolic art … art made a by a pre-human species.

The most exciting telling of this remarkable exploration comes from Lee Berger’s book and his talk at Explorer’s Club YouTube. I fell in love with him and his view on the myth of human exceptionalism. We’ve long thought that humans were special, unique, the cream of the evolutionary crop. However, archaeological findings keep complicating the picture, making us question just what it is that makes us “human.”

By many measures, we humans are the smartest of our bunch, but are we wiser? What other species has deliberately and continuously destroyed its habitat?

Are we more spiritual? The thought of that family squeezing through those claustrophobic channels in order to place their dead child in a safe place with the tools necessary for a coming life feels makes me think they had more faith and more dedication than I’ve experienced here in my human form.

Knowing that we are in the midst of ever-present evolution makes me wonder if somewhere on this currently-green planet there is a species evolving that is wiser, kinder, and more spiritual. A species that may someday look back on the bones of our species and say,

“They had a long run, too bad they were so blind.”

Reflection: I am an only child: alone, disconnected. That was my story and I stuck by it for several decades. I didn’t know my paternal lineage and my maternal line was poor and largely undereducated. My mother escaped their orbit early, just I escaped hers. When it came to ancestors, I assumed we were recent arrivals in the new world, part of the unlanded and unwashed. It was a surprise to find that both sides of my tree arrived in the relatively early 1700s. Should I want to, I could claim ties to Colonial America.

On a retreat discussion about ancestors, I asked how “ancestors” was defined; the answer given was pretty open-ended. That left me free to drift back to the beginning. By definition, because I am alive, it would be possible to track my roots back to the first single cell. That’s a bit more than my imagination could handle so I’ve somewhat limited myself to thinking about my ancestors as Homo Sapiens and, because I was educated in the Western tradition, focused primarily on European ancestors.

The story of the Naledi pulled my thinking about ancestors further back, made me wonder about their thinking, their beliefs, their willingness to brave extreme circumstances in order to bury their loved ones with the tools needed for the after life. While there is little likelihood that I carry Homo Naledi genes, I am adding them to my ancestry line up. Somewhere back there, we share a common ancestor, so we must be cousins and maybe there’s a bit of their wisdom running through my being.

More on the Cave of Bones:

This book is a great snippet of the adventure and a fascinating children’s story about scientists recovering the bones, created by PBS as the first in a series of stories for children 6 and up. PBS, click here.

*** See the Netflix documentary here.

The Netflix documentary is wonderful but the above talk by the discover of this cave is even more exciting and worth every minute of its hour and sixteen minutes.

*** When Did Human Ancestors Start Burying Their Dead? History.com