Rock engravings made by Homo Naledi ~300k years ago

[betocmn]

A 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)

[akiselev]

In addition, a timeline of culture & technology:

    Oldowan industry - simple flaked stone tools (~2.9-1.7 million years ago)
    Acheulean industry - advanced tools like hand axes (~1.7 million - ~160,000 years ago)
    Archaic humans in Southeast Asian islands like Indonesia (~1.8-1 million years ago, dating is a bit uncertain on this one)
    First control of fire (~1 million - ~700,000 years ago)
    First archaic humans living in colder climates like Atapuerca, Spain (~800,000 years ago)
    First wooden spears denoting a change in hunting tech (~400,000 years ago)
    Widespread control of fire (~400,000 years ago)
    ==> First homo sapiens <== (~300,000 years ago)
    First neanderthals arrive in Europe (~230,000-150,000 years ago)
    First use of ochre pigment for symbolic purposes (~190,000 years ago)
    Body lice genetically diverge from head lice due to clothing (~170,000 years ago)
    Mousterian industry - points, scrapers, denticulates, notches, and awls (~300,000-40,000 years ago)
    First time eating seafood at Pinnacle Point (~150,000 years ago)
    Humans start collecting and using shell beads (~130,000 years ago)
    First heat treated material - silcrete (~110,000 years ago)
    First compound adhesive leads to tar-hafted tools (~100,000 years ago)
    First bed (~77,000 years ago)
    First bow and arrow in Sibudu (~72,000–60,000 years ago)
    Arrival in Australia (and thus first boat?) (~70,000-65,000 years ago)
    First musical instrument (flute) (~60,000 years ago)
    First burial ritual at Shanidar Cave (~60,000 years ago but controversial)
    First sewing needle (~45,000 years ago)
    Aurignacian industry - true homo sapien tools like microlithics, blades, projectile points, pressure flaking, split-base bone points (~43,000-26,000 years ago)
    Gravettian industry - Bow and arrow, harpoons, and darts come into their own (~33,000-22,000 years ago)
    Solutrean & Magdalenian industry - flint tools, cave art, etc. (~22,000-12,000 years ago)
    

Disclaimer: "First [...]" means "oldest surviving evidence of [...]". I tried my best to select a realistic middle ground age but each one has error bars of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of years and there's a lot of overlap in industries.

This list is so incomplete it's not even funny :)

[AndrewKemendo]

Thank you! Always good to see our family tree when talking about the extremely recent transition to sapiens

[MilStdJunkie]

Lee Berger's announcement video on the find - it's long-ish, but it's very very interesting if you're into this stuff.

https://youtu.be/fFbgQhY4Yxw

Something very evocative is the resemblance to Neanderthal cave engravings (@16:45 in the video) - that same theme of cross hatching, with multiple length verticals. As Lee points out, ascribing meaning to these things is going to be pretty much impossible, but it's very evocative. Could it be a family portrait? A warning? The 300k BC version of a Biohazard sigil? A Homo Sapiens band, hunting them into the depths of the earth? Who knows.

[dekhn]

"Scientists have finally decoded the meaning of the homo naledi engravings... they say the best translation is: 'This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.'"

(IE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin... version of your 300K BC biohazard sigil)

[POiNTx]

Longer video with better resolution of the images and video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4WsgMUtJTU

[jrumbut]

I found it interesting that they appear to interact with these fossils that look a little like parasites on the rocks.

Obviously this is pure imagination but I wonder if that was why they felt the need to scratch the rock or create lines to block it from spreading.

[akiselev]

The news is that homo naledi did these things at the same time as humans despite a much smaller brain size, contradicting the social brain hypothesis somewhat. Their cranial capacity was 465-610 cubic cm compared to about 1,300 for humans [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_naledi

Edit: this was a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36345824 and dang moved it (??)

[irrational]

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?

[jl6]

They’re not terribly sophisticated markings, or obviously social. Even if brain size correlates exactly with capability, doing these at ~40% brain size seems quite plausible.

[vermilingua]

(dang would have moved your comment as title-change comments get pinned to the bottom of the list when resolved, so this gives your useful comment better visibility)

[Kaijo]

You took the trouble to italicize the binomial, but didn't capitalize the generic name, whereas the OP's title failed to not capitalize the species epithet.

[dheera]

I 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 market, but with some kind of "no hominid left behind" program? Or would they be pets and get free food and rent in return for being cute? Or would they have their own hamlets and kingdoms and fight with our high-tech cities and countries?

[AceJohnny2]

Frankly, they'd either be exterminated, or slaves.

Extermination is likely because humans generally don't like competition. Just look at all the other apex predators/megafauna that have disappeared (or practically so) when humans showed up.

Otherwise, humanity's extensive history of slavery of anything we can de-humanize would apply to any survivors.

[cmrdporcupine]

This whole idea of classifying by intellectual ability, or even thinking we can measure it along some single axis... is going to look mighty quaint once our machines truly and fully surpass us on that axis.

Wouldn't it be nice if Neanderthal, Erectus, Denisovan and Naledi was with us today but we didn't see them as "stupider forms of us" but "intelligent in different way"?

My two border collies are clearly less "intelligent" than me on something like the axis I refer to above. But holy crap do they have better physical / situational awareness; their minds are incredibly sharper than mine for what's happening in terms of motion, sound, smell, etc. and they surely get as much or more pleasure/stimulation out of running through my field after a rabbit or frisbee than I do writing Rust or making comments on hackernews...

I was talking to my son in the car last night about this -- in and around the whole world of "races" (elves, dwarves, etc.) in Tolkien-esque fantasy novels, D&D, Dwarf Fortress, etc. In a way this is almost like a fantastical projection of a world where other Hominin species co-exist.

Our yearning for fantastical elves to live along side us might actually be a feeling of loneliness knowing that we are the only species of our kind left.

[neovialogistics]

If you're interested in alternate history and have a login for alternatehistory.com, there's an incomplete but moderately good write-up of exactly this.

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/age-of-near-e...

[AlecSchueler]

Not quite the same but we do actually have populations of people with significantly reduced capacities, such as those with Down's Syndrome. I'm not sure how it is everywhere but in Western Europe there's generally quite a bit of effort put in by families, carers, charities and businesses to give them a sense of life in society.

[mkl]

Harry Turtledove's book of short stories A Different Flesh is based on this idea, though with homo erectus, not homo naledi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Different_Flesh

[booleandilemma]

If I know anything about humans, we'd probably try to have sex with them.

[AbrahamParangi]

If we look at the origins of major groups of animals, the first dinosaurs or at earliest stages of bird evolution, we see often see multiple related groups evolving convergently due to similar pressures. My favorite example of this is that powered flight may have been acquired three or more times in closely related but distinct groups of theropod dinosaurs.

When we think of the other branches of the Human family tree, we often think of them as sort of diverging from our ancestors and then freezing unchanged. However, it would not at all be surprising if the pressures which so aggressively favored increased intelligence in our ancestors also applied to all our "cousins".

[lynguist]

That’s exactly right - I want to give another example: Squamates want to develop a legless body. Snakes have emerges, but there are also legless geckos, legless lizards etc, etc.

The thing is that normally the change happens in the speciesation first and then these traits are used for something distinctive - dinosaurs grew feathers first, and then used them for flight. Humans grew intelligence first, and then used it for civilization. The resource has to be already there to be used. The resource will not be developed by evolution. The lungfish already had limbs and joints (while living purely aquatically), thus it could use it to walk outside the water.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

What is interesting is how thoroughly Homo sapiens sapiens displaced all other hominids.

It seemed in the past, intelligence was more of a gentle curve. Now, you have Homo sapiens sapiens with planes, rockets, global communications, rockets, satellites, and then every other species. The most sophisticated modern non-human primate doesn’t seem to rise to the level of intelligence and sophistication ago even early hominids.

[amanaplanacanal]

Are we only calling Homo Sapiens human? Some how I got the idea that all of Homo was human.

[mcguire]

The Homoninid family tree has gotten fairly confusing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape#Changes_in_taxonomy_and_te...

You will often see mention of Hominin (Homo and Pan (chimpanzees), I think) as well, where you would have once heard Hominid.

[neovialogistics]

According to an archeologist I know the preferred terminology for non-sapiens sapiens members of Homo is "Archaic Humans".

[wsgeorge]

I had the opposite idea: colloquially, "human" is us, homo sapiens, and hominid would be our ancestors and closest relations.

[sys32768]

Maybe that's how they got edges on their tools?

[akiselev]

There's little evidence of ground stone tools until very recently [1], like tens of thousands of years ago. It wasn't until agriculture that the technology became widespread.

Knapping [2] - which has been around for over 3 million years at this point - is much more predictable and efficient than grinding while requiring less intuitive knowledge of the materials. Paleolithic people just didn't have the resources to experiment with enough materials to figure out hardness, grain size, etc. for proper grinding.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_stone

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithic_reduction

[NegativeLatency]

If you look at the video some of the patterns are very regular and geometric, not what I'd expect for a regular sharpening of a tool. It's possible they sharpened tools artfully but then that's just a different way of creating the inscriptions.

https://youtu.be/fFbgQhY4Yxw?t=769

[pbj1968]

That’s exactly what it looks like to me, too.

[polishdude20]

Can they just be doodles? Sometimes I just draw crosshatch lines and stuff especially when I was in college.

[ethanbond]

Potentially but like… that’s very very hard rock, so those would be some very effortful doodles.

Maybe they had more boring classes than we do today though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[thegabriele]

What 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.

[tdaltonc]

Bees can communicate a kind of "map" to other bees, but they don't have anything like a proper language.

I'm not aware of anyone teaching rodents to learn from maps, but I'd bet they could.

[psiops]

It seems likely to me that meaning-making, like consciousness, is on a sliding scale across all life. So trying to find the first homonids that "had it" seems futile.

[willmeyers]

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.

[rajeshp1986]

I wonder if it could be Homo Naledi counting something.

[iskander]

Lots of cross-hatch patterns!

[womitt]

Could be some kind of map

[tdaltonc]

Discovered more than a century ago, many cave paintings are being reinterpreted game calendars. Recording which animals can be found where and when.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeolog...

[lovemenot]

If so, it must be a symbolic map like the London Underground. Since geography doesn't have so many straight lines.

[greatpostman]

The big secret:

“Homo sapiens” are hybrid combinations of different species that have long disappeared. “Non human hominids” are frequently groups that mixed with Homo sapiens. Large variances in human populations come from different hybrid compositions

[shrubble]

Are you referring to those with Denisovan vs those with Neanderthal vs those with neither?

[revicon]

The statement "Large variances in human populations come from different hybrid compositions" seems a particularly provocative statement. Is there a source where this comes from?

[mjhay]

In light of recent news, this is an extremely misleading choice of title, given that the orginal was "241,000 to 335,000 Years Old Rock Engravings Made by Homo naledi in the Rising Star Cave system, South Africa".

It's not news that non- homo sapien sapiens had things like art, music, an mortuary practices.

[dang]

Ok, we've changed the title to be more precise. Submitted title was "Engravings Made by Non-Human Hominids ~300K Years Ago".

[famouswaffles]

Non homo sapiens sapiens can still be humans. Neanderthals are considered humans.