Every single Homo naledi skeleton in South Africa’s Rising Star Cave is female. That’s not a coincidence — it’s almost certainly evidence of deliberate burial, and possibly even a concept of gender identity in a species with a chimp-sized brain.
Back in 2013, a team led by Lee Berger unearthed remains of more than 20 small-bodied hominins from the Rising Star Cave System. The fossils date between 335,000 and 236,000 years old. Scientists have debated for years whether the bodies ended up there by accident or were placed there intentionally.
Now proteins in the dental enamel have provided an answer. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute analyzed 23 teeth from at least 20 different individuals — babies to older adults. All samples contained amelogenin-X (AMELX), encoded on the X chromosome. Not one contained the male version, AMELY.
“There is no natural explanation,” said paleoanthropologist John Hawks. The odds of flipping a coin 20 times and getting the same result every time? About 0.0000954 percent. “This was no longer chance,” Berger said.
It’s technically possible the AMELY gene was deleted from their DNA, but that’s extremely rare. The far more likely explanation: Homo naledi buried its dead, and specifically females were placed in the cave system.
That’s significant. It suggests deliberate behavior — possibly ritual — in a species whose brain was roughly the size of a chimpanzee’s. And it hints that gender as a concept of individual identity may have mattered to Homo naledi, even in death.
“It is rarely the case that we have such clear evidence of culture as this case is,” Hawks said. “There is no other process that can make this happen.”
