Cave of Bones — The Ego of Brief Lives
Homo naledi had a brain about a third the size of ours — closer to a chimpanzee’s than to a modern human’s — and yet, according to a team led by the paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, some of them may have carried their dead into the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, laid them out with what looks like intention, and possibly scratched geometric marks into the surrounding rock. The claim, restaged for a wide audience in the 2023 documentary Unknown: Cave of Bones, is still contested — peer reviewers have called the physical evidence for deliberate burial inadequate in its present form, and the debate has not settled. What has settled is the arithmetic around it. Those bones are somewhere between 236,000 and 335,000 years old. A human life, at generous best, is a hundred. The documentary does not insult the ego. It does something worse: it makes the ego statistically irrelevant. …