Cool! No expert, but I love this kind of stuff. Some form of early territoriality? Those marks don't look distinguished enough to be symbolic.
Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago
61–70 of 103 posts
Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago
#62I wonder how society would behave if those homonids were still around today. A lot of society norms are based on our intelligence levels being remarkably approximately equal across all of our species. What if there existed a bunch of beings on Earth that were somewhere in-between a human and a monkey in intelligence, cognitive, and language abilities? Would they go to school and be a part of the economy and job marke…
If I know anything about humans, we'd probably try to have sex with them.
Or eat them. Or both.
Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago
#63Cool! No expert, but I love this kind of stuff. Some form of early territoriality? Those marks don't look distinguished enough to be symbolic.
I wonder if it could be Homo Naledi counting something.
Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
If humans were around at the same time as homo naledi, how do they know that it was homo naledi? Couldn't a random human just wander in one afternoon and make the marks?
They can't know that for certain! See Lee Berger's announcement video [1] for a discussion. Paraphrasing the slide: There is no evidence of *homo sapiens* use or presence beyond the light zone of the cavern system Cultural context: there are *homo nadeli* graves in the cave system with the drawings Access to the cavern system has not changed and would have been much easier for the smaller *homo nadeli* (Lee Berger ha…
I still don't understand how burials indicate how it was Homo Nadeli who made the marks. All it would take is a single human (maybe some teenagers) wandering down one afternoon on a lark and making the marks.
Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
They can't know that for certain! See Lee Berger's announcement video [1] for a discussion. Paraphrasing the slide: There is no evidence of *homo sapiens* use or presence beyond the light zone of the cavern system Cultural context: there are *homo nadeli* graves in the cave system with the drawings Access to the cavern system has not changed and would have been much easier for the smaller *homo nadeli* (Lee Berger ha…
I still don't understand how burials indicate how it was Homo Nadeli who made the marks. All it would take is a single human (maybe some teenagers) wandering down one afternoon on a lark and making the marks.
Plausible but
The burials and drawings were made over a long period of time,Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you referring to those with Denisovan vs those with Neanderthal vs those with neither?
There’s other unidentified populations. They just can’t find bones to isolate the dna
I found this abstract maybe : https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1109300108
"(...)an unusual segment of DNA that extends for >31 kb on chromosome 4 seems to have introgressed into modern Africans from a now-extinct taxon that may have lived in central Africa"
Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago
#67A Hominins timeline to help put things in perspective:
7-6 million years ago: Possible divergence of the lineage leading to humans from the lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos (our closest living relatives).
Ardipithecus kadabba (~5.8-5.2 million years ago)
Ardipithecus ramidus (~4.4 million years ago)
Australopithecus anamensis (~4.2-3.9 million years ago)
Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) (~3.9-2.9 million years ago)
Kenyanthropus platyops (~3.5 million years ago)
Australopithecus africanus (~3.3-2.1 million years ago)
Paranthropus aethiopicus (~2.7-2.3 million years ago)
Australopithecus garhi (~2.5 million years ago)
Paranthropus robustus (~2-1.2 million years ago)
Homo habilis (~2.1-1.5 million years ago)
Homo rudolfensis (~1.9 million years ago)
Homo ergaster/Homo erectus (~1.9 million years ago - ~143,000 years ago)
Paranthropus boisei (~1.7-1.1 million years ago)
Homo heidelbergensis (~700,000-300,000 years ago)
Homo naledi (~335,000-236,000 years ago)
Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals) (~400,000-40,000 years ago)
Denisovans (around 300,000-50,000 years ago)
Homo sapiens (modern humans) (~300,000 years ago to present)Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago
#68What kind of language did they have?
The signs could be just signpost for a location "look for the rocks with the straight incisions"...but they would need some way to comunicate that to each others.
Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago
#69Maybe that's how they got edges on their tools?
That’s exactly what it looks like to me, too.
Re: Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't understand how burials indicate how it was Homo Nadeli who made the marks. All it would take is a single human (maybe some teenagers) wandering down one afternoon on a lark and making the marks.
Plausible but The burials and drawings were made over a long period of time,
That makes it even more likely it could have been humans, doesn’t it? Over a long period of time, probably lots of humans wandered deeper into the cave.