Did These Prehistoric Primates Really Bury Just Their Female Dead Deep in a Cave?
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A fossilized Homo naledi skull Hawks et al.
via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 Deep within South Africa’s Rising Star cave system is an open space called the Dinaledi Chamber. It’s accessible only through a rough, vertical passage dubbed the “chute,” which is so narrow that spelunkers can only squeeze through if they hold their breath. In 2013 and 2014, a team of researchers did just that.
Inside the chamber, they found a floor made of bones. The experts published a study in 2015, declaring that the fossilized bones belonged to Homo naledi, a hominin species that lived in South Africa between about 335,000 and 236,000 years ago. In all, they’ve unearthed more than 1,500 bone fossils from the cave, belonging to more than a dozen individuals.
Scientists around the world have hypothesized about how and why the bones came to rest in that dangerous chamber. Now, scientists have found something that further complicates the story. According to a study recently published in the journal Cell, protein fragments from the cave’s fossilized teeth indicate that all the individuals buried there are female.
“When these results came out, there were a lot of quite nervous scientists. This was not what we expected,” says study author Lee Berger, the paleoanthropologist who led the Dinaledi excavations, to CNN’s Katie Hunt. “Two labs ran this data,” he adds.
“We ran it through twice because we didn’t want it to be an internal error.” For the recent study, scientists examined 23 teeth from 20 H. They extracted enamel proteins through “micro-destructive acid etching,” looking for types of amelogenin: AMELY and AMELX. As Science’s Ann Gibbons reports, all hominin species carry AMELX on their X chromosomes, but only males carry AMELY—on the Y chromosome.
The researchers concluded that the H. naledi fossils are homogeneous. They write that “no convincing evidence” supports “the confident identification of male individuals” in the Dinaledi Chamber.
Study co-author Enrico Cappellini is a paleoproteomicist—ancient proteins expert—at the University of Copenhagen’s Globe Institute. As he says in a statement from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, some male humans and Neanderthals have been found to lack the entire AMELY gene.
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