Hey, take a look at this! (from BBC-News)
Amazing, exciting stuff!
I saw that story this morning on Reuters. Pretty darn cool.
Yes. Not so much the discovery (really, the assignment) of a new species per se – that’s more about taxonomic lumping and splitting – but the fact that this variety seems to have had “rituals” (broadly defined) regarding their dead – a likely indicator of a more advanced culture than many expected.
Sounds very cool, but if they haven’t even carbon dated yet - I’m holding off in getting excited.
I mean is this being generally accepted by the scientific community?
If so that would be awesome.
Carbon dating won’t help - it is only useful to around 40-50,000 years bp. These remains are alleged to be much older than that (40-50K pb is firmly in modern human territory).
Nice!
Though it bothers me when a scientist says
Makes it sound like we were the plan from the start.
Is it suggested that the cave was as difficult to enter as now when the burials occurred?
Look forward to seeing the dating – without knowing the dates, it’s nearly impossible to fit it onto our evolutionary tree (and whether they might be on or near the main “trunk” that leads to us or just a branch).
That’s an exact point of controversy.
There are contentions that the cave was originally more accessible, or that the bodies were washed into the cave.
As against that, there is no evidence of other debris in the cave (presumably, a more accessible and/or water-deposited corpses would have left other debris in the same place). No evidence of animals gnawing the bones, either.
It will be interesting to see how this story evolves.
They cannot be placed by resemblance to other fossil remains?
Not with much accuracy, from my understanding.
I don’t think there is any good method for dating hominid fossils that are alleged to be three million years old directly. Usually, hominid fossils are found buried in a layer of rock, and the surrounding rock may then be dated by potassium-argon dating.
This find sounds very unusual, in that the bones were found in a cave, basically lying on the floor, without a layer of rock over them. If that is true, they may prove very difficult to date accurately. They are simply too old for carbon-dating the bones directly.
They are an odd mix of traits linking them to both Australopithecus and Homo. They should fall somewhere between A. afarensis (“Lucy”) and H. habilis. But if it turns out they were later than the expected time period, it would also be extraordinary, and would indicate either a later branching or a late survival.
The fossils are well documented and unquestionably very unusual. And that won’t change regardless of what the date is. No matter what the date turns out to be, the fossils are significant.
No rats, no other humanoids in three million years. No earthquakes.
Wow.
Assuming the cave access hasn’t changed, the lack of other hominids visiting isn’t surprising. 
My wife’s reaction to the discovery: ‘some people found those bones while crawling through a narrow crack in the rock deep underground that hadn’t been mapped for fun?’ :eek:
I’m as fascinated by this as anybody, …but I’m gonna rain on the parade , and ask an innocent question: why do these bones show evidence of ancient rituals?
The bones comes from 15 individuals of all ages. But why does that show evidence of burial?
They could have been a single family unit. They are lots of species in nature who live in bands or family units, with several generations and maybe an alpha male.
The bones were found in a cave which today is totally inaccesible. This National Geographic article has a graphic showing a profile of the cave.You can’t even crawl into it–you have to lay on your belly and wriggle like a snake to get to the chamber… And if you want to bury someone as a ritual, you can’t drag another body with you into the chamber, (unless you have ropes and know how to tie knots…using a brain smaller than a chimpanzee.)
So the obvious conclusion is that there must have been another entrance to the cave a million years ago.
Maybe this group of hominids simply walked into the cave together-- to get out of the rain, or to hide from a sabre-toothed tiger, or to watch porn on their smartphones.
Then a disaster happened-- maybe a storm caused a mudslide that blocked the entrance to the cave. Then the entire family just died of thirst within 3 days.
They may be a new species,and they do sorta look like us*–but why do we have to assume that these bodies were intentionally buried in a ritual way?
(yes, I know that there is no evidence of food, tools, other animals, etc, in the cave. So it’s a nice, (and wonderfully intriguing!) idea that the bodies were placed there intentionally after death. But we can’t know.
*If you want to believe the artist who painted the picture at the top of the Nat. Geographic link. I’m sure he drew the bone structure with scientific accuracy , but why does this man/ape have no hair on his body?
The article you linked to addresses some of these questions. In particular, the claim is made (don’t know how it holds up) that the bodies were not from the same incident, but appear to have arrived at different times.
Most likely the access was easier in ancient times - but not too easy, or there would have been all sorts of other stuff there as well.
From the article:
Perhaps someone shot up the post office, and needed a place to dispose of the bodies.
I like the theory that the tunnel was walkable at the time.
While I don’t know the details, it may be that fragmentary remains are intermixed with more intact skeletons in such a way that it implies they had already been fragmented before the more complete remains were dropped in. But that’s a guess.