No Sedimentological Evidence for Deliberate Burial by Homo naledi – A Case Study Highlighting the Need for Best Practices in Geochemical Studies Within Archaeology and Paleoanthropology
In mid-2023, a preprint was uploaded by some of the team working at the Rising Star Cave System in South Africa on new finds regarding the hominin Homo naledi. The authors reported what they claim is evidence for deliberate burials by this small-brained species and conducted extensive media engagement presenting this claim to the public, including a Netflix documentary that further amplified the claims made in the preprint. Subsequently, almost unanimously negative publicly available peer-reviews argued that the evidence presented is incomplete and inadequate to support the claims made. The authors are yet to fully address all of the issues raised in the peer-reviews. Here we present a detailed critical assessment and re-analysis of the geochemical and sedimentological data used by the authors as a cornerstone for their assertion. We find that both the theory and experimental design are not supported by the realities of the sedimentary environment and violate all prerequisites for conducting such a study. The authors do not meet minimum reporting standards for their geochemical methods, a problem stretching back to 2015 through the published material from this research team. Based on available information, we surmise that there are likely missteps in data acquisition and quantification leading to inaccurate final data values. We found deep structural issues with data analysis, visualization, and interpretation in addition to mis-characterization and mis-application of statistical methods in assessing data. We show that even if the data provided accurately represent the composition of the samples, when analyzed according to field standards the samedata do not support the interpretations, conclusions, and claims made by the authors. We demonstrate that there is insufficient sampling and structured variation in the datasets to allow detection of any difference between the proposed burial features and the surrounding sediment—indeed, all sample groups fully overlap in composition. We believe that the preprint represents an example of where data analysis has been heavily influenced by a presupposed narrative. In the interest of providing broader utility to the archaeological and paleoanthropological community, we offer here an overview of best practices in geochemical data collection and handling for conducting such a study. In conclusion, we argue that from a sedimentological standpoint there is no evidence of deliberate burial of H. naledi remains.
