imeten elenie elviss

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Matthias Briggs

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Aug 2, 2024, 12:00:00 AM8/2/24

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The footage is amazing. It gives the audience a rare glimpse into an amazing fieldwork process. It lets us listen to the thoughts and reflections of fieldworkers and other researchers. We see the reconstruction of a naledi skeleton. The whole thing is at once exciting and sobering.

Briefly (tl;dr, as the kids would say), there is currently little evidence that the claimed pit burial is actually a pit, and there is little evidence that it is more than a jumble of bones. Of course it could be, but I am not convinced by the published data, and neither are many of my colleagues.

I sympathize with this mystical approach to archaeology to a certain extent, and am not immune to it myself. There are things I know in my heart about some of the sites on which I have worked, and that I will never be able to prove to someone else. I try to be careful to mark those things as speculation when I bring them up in any context, whether in class, in papers, or at a wine and cheese reception.

They were talking about a period of over 30,000 years and there has been water in that cave for all that time as evidenced by the stalagmites. Hominids who are trapped in a cave may die in a fetal position trying to keep warm and be covered over with time. And the time was over 30K years. PLENTY of time.

All good and valid questions. As you point out, the access to the cave might have been different, but also, it could have been just as dangerous and difficult at the time than it is now, which some have suggested could explain that there are bodies down there.