Did <i>Homo naledi</i> dispose of their dead in the Rising Star Cave system?

Abstract

Significance:

Human treatment of the dead is one of the most visible and important aspects of our behavioural evolution. Until recently, the deliberate movement of corpses to specific places in the landscape and their deposition there was thought to emerge very late in human evolution, perhaps with the advent of burial by Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals. The remains of Homo naledi in South Africa’s Rising Star Cave system potentially revolutionalises that belief: did a small-bodied, small-brained hominin drag parts of corpses into the depths of the cave, and if so, what does this reveal about their cognition? How convincing is the case?