Thanks to Dr. Jamie Hodgkins and Dr. George Leader for a productive conversation. Thanks to Dr. Jason Heaton and Dr. Travis Pickering for getting in touch about the Misgrot Cave parallel. Thanks to Andy Herries for sharing photos. Thanks to Jonida Martini for video editing, visual design, and help with the captions.

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See here for my earlier public peer review of the Homo naledi burial paper:    • Homo Naledi Burial? A Public Peer Rev...  

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The papers being discussed. You can read the papers here as well as the reviews and editor comments. Note that the reviewers were unanimous in the types of issues they raised.

Berger et al. 2023a. "241,000 to 335,000 Years Old Rock Engravings Made by Homo naledi in the Rising Star Cave system, South Africa." https://elifesciences.org/reviewedpr...

Berger, L. et al. 2023b. "Evidence for deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi." https://elifesciences.org/reviewedpr...

Fuentes et al. 2023. "Burials and engravings in a smallbrained hominin, Homo naledi, from the late Pleistocene: contexts and evolutionary implications." https://elifesciences.org/reviewedpr...

Press release by Lee Berger announcing these three papers:    • Lee Berger Announcement of Homo naled...  

For an indepth dive into the peer reviews, see Gutsick Gibbon's video:    • A Deep Dive into the Scathing Homo na...  

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Additional Bibliography and Citations

AlMalabeh. "AlFahda Cave (Jordan): the longest lava cave yet reported from the Arabian Plate." https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

Berger et al. 2015. "Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa." eLife. https://elifesciences.org/articles/09560

Berger, L. 2022. "The Future of Exploration in the Greatest Age of Exploration Dr. Lee R. Berger."    • The Future of Exploration in the Grea...  

Bruxelles et al. 2019. "A multiscale stratigraphic investigation of the context of StW 573 ‘Little Foot’ and Member 2, Sterkfontein Caves, South Africa." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...

Débenath and Dibble 1995. Handbook of Paleolithic Typology: Volume One, Lower and Middle Paleolithic of Europe.

Dirks et al. 2015. "Geological and taphonomic context for the new hominin species Homo naledi from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa." eLife. https://elifesciences.org/articles/09561

Egeland et al. 2018. "Hominin skeletal part abundances and claims of deliberate disposal of corpses in the Middle Pleistocene." PNAS. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas...

HarcourtSmith et al. 2015. The Foot of Homo naledi. Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomm...

Kivell et al. 2015. "The hand of Homo naledi." Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomm...

Nel et al. 2021. "Taphonomic Study of a Modern Baboon Sleeping Site
at Misgrot, South Africa: Implications for LargeBodied Primate Taphonomy in Karstic Deposits." Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology. https://link.springer.com/article/10....

Robbins et al. 2021. "Providing context to the Homo naledi fossils: Constraints from flowstones on the age of sediment deposits in Rising Star Cave, South Africa." Chemical Geology. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...

Robu 2016. "The assessment of the internal architecture of an MIS 3 cave bear bone assemblage. Case study: Urşilor Cave, Western Carpathians, Romania." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...

(keywords: Homo naledi burial, archaeology, Paleolithic, pleistocene, human evolution, behavior, hominid, hominin, taphonomy, geoarchaeology, bioarchaeology, formation processes, Dinaledi, Rising Star Cave, eLife, peer review, Netflix Unknown: Cave of Bones)