Old LSS friend Homo Naledi is back-with another puzzle

Back in the long-ago days of Covid lockdown, we set you a puzzle: what to make of the enigmatic remains of Homo Naledi from the Rising Star Caves in South Africa. It was very much in the spirit of brain teasers like crosswords or computer chess, and there was no right answer. But the material found, with its curious mix of primitive and advanced features, is certainly intriguing. It’s as if Rolls Royce had tried to build a car using combining bits of a 1923 Silver Ghost with its 2023 descendent.

Which is why we are not surprised to find a bit of push back against some of the claims made for naledi. As Nature Briefings so presciently observes:

Archaeologists wowed viewers of a documentary — released last week — with stunning scenes of a cave crammed with bone fossils that, they argue, are the remains of the earliest-known burial by humans or their extinct relative Homo naledi. But days earlier, four scientists who peer-reviewed the paper making those claims called the supporting evidence “inadequate” in the open-access journal eLife. The study is a high-profile test of the journal’s innovative publishing model: it no longer formally accepts papers, but instead publishes them alongside peer reviewers’ reports.Nature | 6 min read

As so often happens in Paleontology, as in other sciences, as soon as someone makes a big claim, someone else comes along to assert the opposite. We won’t go into a pseudo-philosophical riff on Hegel and the dialectic here-we want people to enjoy this blog-but it does reflect a deeper truth which we’ve alluded to once or twice in these pages. Data is one thing and interpretation quite another. In this case, we don’t know which side is right, but in the last resort it’s only a few old fossils, and being scientists, they will all settle their differences without gunfire.

But it illustrates a deeper truth Because it’s not just about science but life in general, as the recent case of Andrew Malkinson [1] demonstrates. Where the consequences of confusing interpretation with facts can be very grave indeed. Perhaps there would be less miscarriages of justice, and fewer bad referendum results, if people thought more and believed less.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-66323436?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA

#evolution #data ##andrew malkinson #miscarriage of justice