Were small-brained early humans intelligent? Row erupts over scientists’ claim

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/22/small-brained-early-humans-homo-naledi-cleverer-storm

by pg_1234 • 3 years ago

84 164 3 years ago

theguardian.com

mellosouls• 3 years ago

Discussion here a month ago on one of the contested papers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36344397

sidlls• 3 years ago

Is this article journalistic dramatization or do we have actual PIs in a field saying nonsense like "be careful what you wish for?" Was that taken out of context somehow? Maybe it's just the difference between physics and this field, but I'd never dare to respond to "your evidence is insufficient, and there seem to be problems with your methodology" with a statement like, "oh yeah? I'll show you evidence, be careful what you wish for." As if the ask is somehow unreasonable or unprecendented.

thevagrant• 3 years ago

I agree, it does seem like an arrogant response. The kind that comes from one who drinks the kool-aid.

Possibly they have more evidence and findings to be published?

kergonath2• 3 years ago

It’s also very childish. As if not talking about something would make it not happening.

Mistletoe• 3 years ago

When I read that he said that and that he had a Netflix show about this my spidey senses were raised.

DiogenesKynikos• 3 years ago

"Be careful what you wish for" is a bizarre response.

The reviewers asked for more evidence. The authors say they will provide more evidence. Great, that's exactly what the reviewers want. "Be careful what you wish for" implies that getting more evidence would somehow be a bad thing.

ImAnAmateur• 3 years ago

At first I was really wowed by this. But when I learned that another inteligent human species was around (I can't recall if that was specifically Homo Sapiens or another.) it suddenly felt far too believable that this could have been done by someone else.

The find is real and they have great footage of it, but for their presentation to ignore evidence against them and/or alternate explanations is disappointing.

rolph2• 3 years ago

alternate explanations, such as these were domesticated pets, cherished by thier owners and given full respects after death.

lumost• 3 years ago

A good hypothesis to test, however why wouldn’t we observe human burials in the same (massive) cave system?

It would seem odd to develop a ritualistic burial for pets and skip the burial for humans. Reaching the burial spot is extremely difficult for human bodies.

dopu• 3 years ago

The relevant peer-reviewed preprint, from eLife [0]. It is worth reading the peer reviews (spoiler: they're brutal) [1].

[0] https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106 [1]: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106/reviews#t...

pmckenna• 3 years ago

Appreciate the note to check peer reviews, it certainly does cast these findings in a new light.

contravariant• 3 years ago

An analysis also needs to start by testing a null hypothesis, not deciding on the conclusion and setting out to "prove" it.
I do not think that in its present form, the evidence presented in this study is as robust as it should be.
the manuscript in its current condition is deemed incomplete and inadequate, and should not be viewed as finalized scholarship.

I mean they sound polite, but if you strip back the polite language and understatements they're pretty much calling the authors quacks.

koheripbal• 3 years ago

Which is fair. Scratch marks around the cave were said to be attempts at art. The fact that the bones were in a cave made them conclude that they were "burying" their dead rather than the more plausible conclusion that they died in the cave as a result of some water or gas flooding.

The original paper is just garbage

zeroCalories• 3 years ago

Tried reading the paper and it was surprisingly hard to understand, probably because I don't know anything about the field. That said, I think the critiques make sense. Still, both the peer review and the response in the articles seem so extreme, I wonder if there is something else going on here. Is there some political or ideological divide in this field?

dilawar• 3 years ago

Kudos to eLife for pioneering publishing peer review along with paper.

SCAQTony• 3 years ago

I think parrots, crows and Octopus have demonstrated a small brain can still create and execute intelligent ideas. YMMV

pierat• 3 years ago

To be fair, I've seen large brained mammals exhibit (homo walmartus) completely inane and stupid behavior.

I have a feeling many others here have also witnessed those actions in their natural environment.

kristopolous11• 3 years ago

It honestly astonishes me that some people still think "more brain = more smart" or a similar reductionist belief. It's so Victorian - like believing human flight will happen by furtively flapping ones arms connected to giant canvas wings.

rramadass14• 3 years ago

You will like this : https://karger.com/bbe/article/96/2/64/821534/Decreases-in-B...

gerdesj• 3 years ago

A blue whale's brain weighs in at around 15lbs. Mine is roughly 3.3lbs. I suspect size isn't everything. You are unlikely to receive a response from a blue whale. Can you imagine trying to type on a keyboard with

As you say, corvids, octopi and others have recently been interacted with in such a way as to be shown to demonstrate unexpectedly complex behaviour. Brain size doesn't seem to be quite as important as you might think.

Note my brain is about a fifth the size of a blue whale's brain. Now I am absolutely useless at living within the sea and I have no idea how complicated it is but I suspect that based on our relative brain size, that it can be very complicated compared to what we land lubbers get up to. Evolution doesn't leave rubbish lying around unless it does not impair things.

BurningFrog• 3 years ago

I think most of the brain manages the physical body. This is why it's size is roughly proportional to the body weight.

I don'y know how much of the brain is used for "thinking", and I suspect science doesn't either.

stevenwoo• 3 years ago

Also the way octopi can adapt their camouflage and topography of octopi brains/nerve cells suggest their brains may not work like ours, and that Pitt, et al paper about frog vision https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4065609 strongly hints our first intuitive assumptions about how things work may not be correct.

Legend24403• 3 years ago

I suspect what makes humans special is our combination of intelligence and communication. Society is kind of like a superorganism, we get to learn from the sum of all human knowledge.

Most of the things I know came from other humans who died long before I was born. I get to benefit from all their brainpower indirectly. I'd be much dumber on my own.

User2311• 3 years ago

Brain size correlates to cognitive ability quite well within a species. Outside of species, it gets much murkier on account of glial:neuron ratios among other confounds. As for whale brains, well who knows. Evolution isn't an optimizing force as you appear to believe, rather it is the tyranny of the merely adequate. The oceans are full of remarkably stupid creatures that haven't changed in hundreds of millions of years on account of having a lot of teeth and swimming well has proved sufficient.

And of course there's the interesting question of size efficiency. Vacuum tubes are considerably bigger than transistors, which in turn are considerably bigger than ICs. Perhaps raw size isn't really an interesting metric for cross-architectural brains either?

Legend24403• 3 years ago

I'd say that "intelligent or not" isn't a binary threshold. Every form of life shows varying amounts of intelligence - even slime molds can solve mazes.

I think the whole discussion around intelligence suffers from a lack of clear definitions. And people often tie it to other ideas like consciousness or moral personhood, which only muddies the water further.

QuantumG• 3 years ago

Size of the neurons matter, but ultimately we don't know enough about biological cognition to say anything about existing animals, let alone long extinct ones.

nemo44x• 3 years ago

The Rising Cave research is not just the work of one or two scientists but is backed by dozens of researchers. “Their scientific opinions should not be outweighed by two or three or four reviewers. That is not the way it works,” Berger said.

Actually yes it is the way it works. If a single person has a worthy conflicting opinion or evidence or skepticism it very well can bring the whole thing down.

Science is not a democratic exercise. It’s the search for truth and any claim to truth that can’t stand up to scrutiny isn’t worth a dime even if 99% of scientists want it to be true.

elif• 3 years ago

Human understanding of consciousness/intelligence is so full of bias due to all of our scientific knowledge being derived from human consciousness. We have set an impossible bar for animal and AI intelligence not on objective ontological premises, but largely on human primacy hubris. Hubris which considers the concentration and usurpation of resources more intelligent than the communal or even universal or natural distribution. Hubris which considers survival at all costs more intelligent than self sacrifice for the collective. Hubris which says, yeah, chimps can effortlessly remember way longer sequences than humans, but is that useful memory? Afterall they haven't tricked themselves into spending most of their waking hours staring at a blinking box.

osigurdson• 3 years ago

The problem is, self sacrifice for the "collective" is usually self sacrifice for some dude who has all of the power.

FranzFerdiNaN• 3 years ago

Farming and settling were big mistakes. Should have killed the first person who planted stuff.

rf15• 3 years ago

yeah, despite popular views, intelligence is a gradient. Also you have to distinguish between memory, reflective reach and other skills which can vary drastically in their proportions across species.

ChatGTP• 3 years ago

I think there is certainly some truth to this. I think the same when I watch dolphins play, it truly makes me wonder about “intelligence”. My opinion is that it’s really just a tool to help life become enjoyable and to help the body protect itself. Kind of like the immune system, but…it’s not operating correctly in us because we’re using it to destroy and not necessarily to thrive, hence climate change.

Boffins like Kurzweil seem to think it’s the end goal but even if you had an IQ of 500, or wouldn’t necessarily mean you enjoy life more by default.

Edit: Kurzweil also emphasis that love is an amazing thing, which is cool, I think the guy means well. I just wonder if we and people like him overemphasize it's importance.

ETH_start• 3 years ago

You're defining intelligence as a moral good. That is not part of its definition. So your criticism is misplaced. The conventional measures of intelligence are perfectly appropriate, as they are not seeking to determine what traits have the most universal utility, i.e. are the most morally good.

somenameforme2• 3 years ago

There's this perception of Earth itself as a beautiful and perpetual utopia, because we live such absurdly brief lives. But this planet is brutal, and has killed most of everything living on it - repeatedly. [1] This will continue to happen endlessly in the future until the Sun itself extinguishes all life on the planet, permanently. Earth is essentially a bunch of short term 'surprise' death traps, and one very long term final death trap which we can at least see coming.

And there is no escape, except through intelligence of a certain sort, which happens to be the exact sort humans have developed, which will enable our species to eventually spread beyond just this one planet. The awesome thing about human intelligence though is not only will we ultimately use our intelligence to ensure our own perpetuation, but I suspect there's no doubt we'll have a "Noah's Ark" working to perpetuate the lives of many of our cohabitants who will literally all go extinct, permanently, without us - or without some unbelievably revolutionary change in their own intelligences.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#The_%22Big_Fi...

godelski4• 3 years ago

Earth itself as a beautiful ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶p̶e̶t̶u̶a̶l̶ ̶u̶t̶o̶p̶i̶a̶, ... But this planet is brutal, and has killed most of everything living on it

Why do these have to be in contention? I honestly find our world beautiful, same with space and the universe. Same with blackholes and quasars. But a grizzly bear can be majestic and beautiful while still capable, and likely, to rip you to shreds. Awe is probably a more apt word. Maybe the more archaic definition of awful or awesome.

sgu999• 3 years ago

Humans as a necessary evil to make a small Noah's ark of some of what's on earth_ That's a very positive view, thanks for sharing.

cookiengineer3• 3 years ago

which happens to be the exact sort humans have developed

I disagree. Climate crisis, pure ignorance for destruction of nature, and not even a backup colony of our moon.

If we really were that intelligent as a species, we would value the survival of our own much more than a fictive self-invented imaginary value called "money" which actually has no meaning at all in the universe.

mcmoor• 3 years ago

Everything is relative. We have seen thousands of other planets (And millions of other stellar objects) and this planet is a hell of a heaven compared to every single one of them. According to our observations so far anyway (to the chagrin of ufo lovers).

eru3• 3 years ago

This will continue to happen endlessly in the future until the Sun itself extinguishes all life on the planet, permanently.

Btw, we can conceivable move the earth or keep the sun from going red giant.

The means for these two are currently beyond our technology, but not beyond our science. (Basically, for the latter you need to remove non-hydrogen elements from the sun. Red dwarf stars can last trillion of years, and they are smaller than the sun. So removing the right material from the sun should get us there.

The project would be a gigantic undertaking, but we'd also have tens or even hundreds of millions of years to do it.)

If humanity survives long enough, we are bound to become extremely powerful as science and technology march on.

mandmandam• 3 years ago

this planet is brutal

There isn't a nicer spot around for untold light years.

Earth is a beautiful utopia, without measure or equal. Shatner saw that clearly, on his trip off planet.

... when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

- https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldl...

We're the worst thing to happen to this planet in 65 million years. On that list of extinctions you posted, the only one caused by an 'intelligent' agent is the one we're in now; the one caused by us. And we're still doing it.

If ever a Noah's ark is sent into space, it's vastly more likely to be because we fucked up the planet somehow.

godelski4• 3 years ago

We have set an impossible bar for animal and AI intelligence not on objective ontological premises

I'm not saying you're not wrong, but also what is an objective ontological premise with respect to intelligence. We've really been unable to define intelligence for thousands of years and I'm willing to claim that this definition is more complex than that of life.

theonlybutlet• 3 years ago

That's his point we've been unable to define it as any prospective definition is disputed. We keep raising the bar to ensure human primacy in it's measurement, obviously it's the case that many of these measures were not factoring in something important, intelligence is on a gradient line (as said by rf15) but many humans are not comfortable without humans sitting on the top of the gradient without a wide chasm between us humans and whatever else.

kazinator2• 3 years ago

Hubris which considers the concentration and usurpation of resources more intelligent than the communal or even universal or natural distribution.

You're making this up. There were/are human (as in homo sapiens) societies based on communal distribution; we don't think of those humans as less intelligent. No serious intellectual in the humanities or sciences does.

Hubris which considers survival at all costs more intelligent than self sacrifice for the collective.

"Self-sacrifice for the collective" has been an earmark of some societies, believed by their thinkers. Explicitly articulated in words that way, it's squarely a human idea. Just like it's a human idea that self-sacrifice for the collective is just idiotic group-think; the individual is supreme.

yterdy• 3 years ago

we don't think of those humans as less intelligent. No serious intellectual in the humanities or sciences does.

Feels like No True Scotsman. Much of Western colonial policy for half a millennium was based on this very assumption, and their effects echo in their unreformed and unreparated posterity.

moffkalast• 3 years ago

consciousness/intelligence

intelligence (noun)

(1) the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations, the skilled use of reason

(2) the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)

(3) mental acuteness, shrewdness

consciousness (noun)

(1) the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself

(2) the state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought

(3) the totality of conscious states of an individual

These two things are very different and entirely separate concepts. Thinking about them as the same thing has caused immeasurable amounts of confusion when trying to classify LLMs recently. Animals can be intelligent, plants can be too, even single celled organisms, or a single if statement as long as it encodes a decision based on reasoning. It has nothing to do with consciousness which is so loosely defined that it can't even be measured. And it's also the term that should've been used in the title, of couse any hominid or living being for that matter obviously makes intelligent decisions constantly to get food and evade predators.

I suppose it is a result of thinking in an anthropocentric way as you mention because humans typically make intelligent decisions using consciousness, but it's far from a universal requirement. People always assume that AI stands for 'artificial consciousness' and it drives me up the wall.

cookiengineer3• 3 years ago

Most people don't know that forests are actually a vast network of underground fungi "highways" that communicate, analyse and distribute resources across the whole forest.

Dying trees literally distribute their resources to healthy ones, and trees that lack nitrogen get it from other trees whose roots and bacteria produce too much.

Bacteria use those highways to distribute themselves, where bacteria is needed for fertilization.

Plant life and natural intelligence is right in front of us, we are just too stubborn to admit it.

The more you research about fungi, the more you see how nature really works.

concordDance6• 3 years ago

analyse and distribute resources across the whole forest
Dying trees literally distribute their resources to healthy ones,

I'm struggling to imagine how such genes could possibly reach fixation.

Want to explain?

simonh2• 3 years ago

These “we all think this, we all do that” arguments are cartoonish nonsense. Just because you can find some people that think X and Y that doesn’t mean we, the human species, think X and Y.

Do ‘we’ as a species think that centralisation do resources is more intelligent than ‘natural’ distribution, really? Do ‘we’ really think that personal survival is more intelligent than self sacrifice? Are alternative view and philosophies of life really not found in human society? You seem to have no problem articulating them.

You’re not even arguing for any particular view, just complaining that some extreme caricatures of opposing views do, or have ever existed by presenting them as the universal default. It’s just nonsense. There’s nothing to get any intellectual traction on here.

Panzer04• 3 years ago

I don't think anyone thinks collective self-sacrifice necessarily unintelligent. But in the context of human psyche and society, seriously advocating for such a thing could only occur if the people making the decisions did not know if they were committing themselves to self sacrifice or not. It's oh so easy to send a million soldiers to the front when the one making the decision knows they need not bear the risk of that decision.

slackfan• 3 years ago

It sure aint no corvid court

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

It is not easy to do this research, or research on animal intelligence, without pissing on the Third Rail of Race and Intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

DropInIn• 3 years ago

Well at some point in our evolution we had to be less intelligent, or were arguing every primate and in fact every species is equal to humans, no?

And if so.... well our food system is evil beyond measure....

jb19912• 3 years ago

Why is it so hard to believe that early humans possess these qualities? After all, nonhuman animals like elephants possess many of the qualities we assume to be unique to human spirituality, like making long journeys to remember and mourn their dead even years after the fact. Or anyone who has witnessed the astounding behavior that dogs are capable of would certainly consider them intelligent in many of the same ways. So why can’t a primitive human also demonstrate these qualities?

Ozzie_osman• 3 years ago

My take on this is that the uproar is less about the conclusion and more about the way the conclusion was reached.

rramadass14• 3 years ago

Right!

kaycebasques• 3 years ago

The evidence does indeed seem quite flimsy for such grand conclusions:

It was unclear how their remains got deep into the cave system, however. There were no signs that predatorsbrought them into the chamber or that underground streams swept them there. So Berger’s team concluded that the bones had been deliberately placed

godelski4• 3 years ago

Or anyone who has witnessed the astounding behavior that dogs are capable of would certainly consider them intelligent in many of the same ways

Interestingly enough, even in the 60's people thought humans were the only animals with intelligence and emotions. Here's an excerpt from Jane Goodall's PIMA interview[0]

GOODALL: Yes. And when these Cambridge professors told me that only humans had personalities, minds, and emotions, I knew they were totally wrong because I had this great teacher when I was a child. That was my dog, Rusty. You can’t share your life in a meaningful way with a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a horse, a bird, and not know that we are not the only beings on this planet who are sentient and sapient.

Later...

GOODALL: When I started in 1960, nobody had studied chimps in the wild. No scientist, that is. If, at that time you had gone into some of the indigenous people living deep in the rainforest, they would’ve told you chimpanzees used to make tools. They knew it. But, of course, now we are back on the scientific bandwagon. ... But there’s a wonderful book written by a psychologist, called The Mentality of Apes, Wolfgang Köhler, and he studied this colony of captive apes, and he described so many innovative uses of objects. But at that time, the scientific community said, “Oh, well, these were chimpanzees in captivity. Therefore, our human characteristics had rubbed off onto them. It’s nothing to do with what they, as wild individuals, would be capable of.” ...

Even now there are a lot of people who believe that there is a certain magic when discussing brains. Quite a lot of people think it would be impossible to build one, theoretically. I'll say it loud and clear, unless there's magic, there's no reason we can't -- theoretically -- build a brain. It must follow the same principles of physics that the rest of the universe does. I'll also say that a fuck ton of life is intelligent, even my idiot cat. Just look at how they dream, you can tell that tiny dumb brain can simulate its environment (or else they wouldn't try to eat, run in their sleep, or wake up to nightmares). I know AI can do a lot of things right now, but boy is it not close to this incredible thing that the smallest and stupidest mammal is doing with magnitudes lower computational budget. It really is quite impressive. But this is also why AI research should be so interesting, because there's still so much left that we haven't even scratched the surface of. It is possible to be highly critical in one hand and hold curiosity in the other. The details are important though and we must not be tricked by statistics. But the area we're moving into now is going to get murky really fast and I'd warn anyone from trusting metrics as a way to measure performance more than a guide, because there's a lot we don't know. But that's the fun of it all, the puzzle, the draw to research in the first place.

[0] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/jane-goodall-changed-the-wa...

xvilka2• 3 years ago

Dogs are clearly intelligent but as with people some are incredibly stupid and some are pure geniuses. Same applies for cats. Different cognitive abilities, different characters, different personalities.

jb19912• 3 years ago

I'll say it loud and clear, unless there's magic, there's no reason we can't -- theoretically -- build a brain.

I don't believe there is magic, but I do believe that the amount we do not know about the brain dwarfs by a magnificent margin that which we think we know. I'd be surprised if our understanding of the brain is even at 0.0001% of what it is actually doing.

muskmusk• 3 years ago

Exactly, also 3year olds are capable of language.

How do you prove that something that lived 300.000 years ago could communicate?

simonh2• 3 years ago

Proof is tough, but there are approaches to reasoning about it. One is statistical models of phoneme development which indicates that languages in Africa started diversifying up to about 150,000 years ago.

However I think it seems likely that our cognitive ability to reason about linguistic structures is an adaptation of our ability to reason about making and using tools. Tools leave physical evidence, so if we can figure out an evolutionary relationship with language development we might make traction that way.

IshKebab• 3 years ago

With difficulty, but that's not really relevant to the issue here is it? Nobody is arguing that early humans couldn't have communicated.

stinos3• 3 years ago

Why is it so hard to believe that early humans possess these qualities?

I's not. I don't think any of the involved scientists reject the idea right away. But that is besides the point. The point is to try and prove it in a scientific process so that we can know it, not merely believe.

mcpackieh3• 3 years ago

The problem I see with this is that although not assuming something until you have strong evidence to 'prove' it is good policy for scientists, it's often not good policy for people in the general case.

A scientist may struggle to rigorously define nebulous concepts like 'love' in an empirical manner, and will particularly resist applying such terms to the behavior of non-human animals. They call doing so anthropomorphism, and rail against it. It's not scientific to assume dogs have human emotions, so they need to be careful about incorporating such assumptions into their scientific work. But then you get laymen picking up on this and saying things like "love is a human emotion and dogs aren't human. what seems to be love to you is merely food-seeking behavior." But this is not the appropriate way for dog owners to think about their dogs. In everyday contexts, people should be making these sort of intuitive assumptions about the way other people and animals feel, even though they aren't necessarily scientific beliefs.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 years ago

"Large brains mean intelligence" is one of those ideas from the Eugenics-and-phrenology era of science that we just can't seem to get rid of.

So if their brains are, you know, only eleventy times the size of a crows, how could they possibly have mastered the supreme technology of "broken sharp rocks" or "sometimes you can keep a fire going from embers and use it to burn shit"? Our best geniuses with IQs of 140+ can barely manage those tricks.

The assumption should be, going forward, that if you deem them closely enough related to our own species that you're putting them in the same genus, they were probably at least as intelligent as the bottom quintile of H. sapiens, with exceptional individuals up above that. Anything else is just bizarre prejudice.

kazinator2• 3 years ago

Two-year-olds qualify as early small-brained-humans; many can talk and count.

The relationship between brain size and intelligence it tenuous. The human brain is not the largest.

The smallest (known) woman in the world, Jyoti Amge, isn't noted for any intellectual disability. Her head is obviously tiny compared to the average adult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyoti_Amge

rich_sasha• 3 years ago

I started watching this documentary. First 5 minutes is mind-blowing, stating that they found deliberate burials in these inaccessible caves.

Thereafter, it's just speculation. "We can imagine h. naledi has fire since other early humans did". They start a small fire in the cave to show what it may have looked like. Plenty of animations of what the scientists imagine may have happened there. Speculation how most societies have some kind of religious or spiritual leader so h. naledi, perhaps, definitely had one too.

The dark spots which were definitely maybe fire were also there.

Even for popular science it felt very flakey.

throwawaycities• 3 years ago

The documentary felt a bit staged & had that modern anti-mainstream academia vibe (i.e. our findings are so revolutionary they rewrite history and so we wish they weren’t so revolutionary because we will not be taken serious and will become the enemy of mainstream science).

That said, unless the site is somehow staged or wildly misinterpreted, I think there is more evidence of potential use of fire than:

"We can imagine h. naledi has fire since other early humans did".

Even without finding evidence of fire in the cave, assuming the body was intentionally placed (big assumption) light would have been required to access that part of the cave.

The only alternatives I can think of are the species had more sensitive optics than modern human enabling them to see in a dark cave, or much more likely the body wasn’t placed there as part of a burial ritual but died down there.

Part of the problem is, if the evidence pointed to the later, they give off the vibe they would have created another spectacular narrative like this was evidence of an early legal system where someone was tried of a crime and sentenced to confinement in the cave, the “tool” and scratches in the cave wall being the first evidence of an attempted jail escape, demonstrating early hominids desire to be “free” just like modern humans.

rozab• 3 years ago

Light could have been provided by phosphorescent organisms in the caves

louky• 3 years ago

determining if "dark spots" are actually a hearth is a known process, nobody ran the chemical composition before publishing? dark spots indeed.

bigbacaloa• 3 years ago

It is a good rule of thumb to have serious doubts about any science reported in mia stream media. Serious scientists don't promote their research in the media that way.

Were small-brained early humans intelligent? Row erupts over scientists’ claim

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