This is a great discovery & fantastic excavation, but professor Berger's interpretations (deliberate burial, human ancestor, distance running, tool making) are anthropocentric fantasies: from a comparative viewpoint, Homo or Australopithecus naledi isnot unexpected (in fact predicted, e.g. Trends Ecol Evol 17, 212, 2002, google: aquarboreal).
Obviously, naledi were bonobo-like forest-swamp or wetland waders - like bonobos or lowland gorillas but much more frequently - feeding on aquatic herbaceous vegetation (AHV): papyrus sedges, frogbit, waterlilies etc., google: bonobo wading.underground eroded away (cave formation), a few cms every 1000 years.
- They fossilised in stagnant water (mud-stone).
- The curved hand-bones are for vertical climbing in the branches (above the swamp).
- The long thumbs were not for tool-making, but for collecting floating AHV & surface-swimming.
- The broad pelvises (iliac flaring & long femoral necks) were for sideward movements of the legs (femoral abduction): for climbing or swimming, not for running.
- The flat humanlike forefeet are more flamingo- than ostrich-like: for wading or swimming, not for running.
- The small front teeth & large cheekteeth can be expected with a wetland diet of AHV (+ hard-shelled invertebrates?).
Lowland gorillas often wade on 2 legs in forest swamps for AHV, but naledi apparently exploited this special niche habitually: no wonder there were no other macro-fauna near the naledi fossils, google illustrations: gorilla bai.
It was no deliberate burial of course (ape-sized brains!), but natural processes: the remarkably complete skeletons show that when they died they got almost immediately covered by (oxygen-poor) mud. Afterwards the mudstone slid side- & downwards as the
The more humanlike forefeet are no argument for placing naledi within Homo: S.Coon already noticed that prenatal chimps have more humanlike feet + longer & more adducted big toes, which later become chimp-like, and A.Schultz noticed that female lowlandgorillas keep these into adulthood: the early hominids (Pan-Homo-Gorilla + fosil relatives) were parttime bipedal swamp waders with flat feet & non- or poorly opposable big toes. The African apes Pan // Gorilla evolved knuckle-walking in parallel (google:
Concl.:likely a close relative of Pan than of Homo.
A.naledi - in spite of some primitive-hominid Homo-like features in hands, feet & dentition - was one of the many species of australopiths (= fossil relatives of Pan & Gorilla), and remarkably bonobo-like in nearly all the rest of its anatomy: more
There's no need for anthropocentric fantasies of deliberate burial etc.
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