This is an extremely interesting topic and this bit is nuts:
During a rest, he wedged himself in a creviceand found that his feet didn’t touch the bottom. The crevice, it turned out, led to an absurdly narrow shaft, which descended for 12 meters before opening into a chamber. When Tucker dropped into it, he found bones. He took out his Go-Pro and snapped some shots.
Could any of you wedge yourself into an unknown cavern just to hopefully see some bones? Who the hell "takes a rest" by hopping down a hole in a cave? The find is worth it, so I applaud the ballsy, advernterous SOB for doing it.
It’s a long crack, punctuated by shark-teeth protrusions, says Elliott. I remember looking down and thinking: I’m not sure I made the right decision.
And here I sit, on my ass in my office, mucking about with a computer.
Get outside man! I always thought of Archaeology like a bunch of people slowly chipping away tiny bits of earth, inches at a time. This is a great sounding adventure though.
Without dates, the fossils reveal almost nothing about hominin evolution, beyond supporting the growing realization that there was much more species diversity than previously thought.
So is a timeline the only thing separating certain species from other similar species? If this creature existed a mere 30 thousand years ago, that would put it well outside of our ancestry due to what we already know about H.Sapiens existence during that time? However, if it is found to be 3 million years old, it is more likely to be within our evolutionary timeline?
And their behavior might have been similarly engaging. We have very strong reason to suspect that H.naledi was doing culturally interesting things, and was doing it with a small brain, Hawks adds. What kinds of things? Well, like depositing their bodies in a cave.
This was the first question I had as well. I assumed they were simply curious, then fell and died. That is probably due to anthropomorphising them, though, since that is precisely what our human counterparts were doing. I imagine more basal beings would be more keen on survival than adventure and any remains found would be deliberate. Especially with such limited brain capacity.
Perhaps they took their dead to the cave and dropped them in from the top of the chute.
So would that make this one very small group of a species that lived there for a short period of time? How long does a typical mammalian animal family occupy a certain area? If it were a regular burial site with no other disturbance, wouldn't there be more than 15 bodies? It's a cave, so little would have disturbed it. Think of a tract of land considered to be "bear country" (Alaskan riverbanks full of salmon, for example). How long is it a place known to be frequented by bears? Would there not be a particular spot that had more than 15 bodies if it were a place frequented by the dead of that animal?
Why is dating the specimens not critical?
I had hoped that a yearlong hiatus would return more fruitful results in the form of more in depth discussions, but I see not a damn thing has changed. Excellent submission choice nonetheless, Percy.
Edited by hooah212002, : No reason given.
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