 Friday, I'll bring you to the next slide. I think it's possible to study the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Apparently, they did their PhD in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. And that's when she really began her interest in the human Roni Elvis, which we'll talk a little bit about today. But to be very interested, look at the evolution of childbirth and things of public anatomy, particularly in the editorial females, and the different methods that we need to estimate both biological sex and public anatomy, and how they differ from non-humans and the consequences of that. More recently, she's been working on a large collaborative team that has analyzed a new fossil comedy, the Apollo Delay, which we're going to talk about for us today. That was discovered in the Ryder Lake Star King System in South Africa. And these were, of course, very well known fossils announced last September. The first analysis that Caroline also has published with on Eli, the fossil of itself is, of course, exciting and controversial for lots of reasons, apart from the kind of crazy, pain-complicated system in context that they were founded and plundered in. She'll talk about that with us today. But also, because of the mixed morphology of the fossil it's part of some of the interest that everyone has. So I won't keep you, I want you all to have her. So our talk today is, of course, all introducing home movies. So thank you for coming. That's your director. That doesn't help you. It's like, why are you laughing? It's not like, what are you laughing at? OK. I'm going to turn this off because it's actually just acting. There we are. Well, thanks for coming out in the rain. I appreciate it. As Sabrina said in her introduction, I'm Caroline Vansical. This is actually me at the announcement at the Maripeng Museum outside of Johannesburg in South Africa on the day when the E-Life article came out with the Pomona Leti. But as she mentioned in her introduction for me, I am a post-doctoral fellow. Even though I am a paleoanthropologist, I'm technically right now affiliated with the Gender Women's Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin. And I do feminist biology, which means that I'm looking at how to take a feminist perspective on doing paleoanthropology. How do we look at what do we mean when we talk about sex? What are we basing sex on? In the fossil record, what kind of gender roles are we placing on the past? Those sorts of things. And while that is not the focus of my talk today and not actually something I'm going to talk about for the rest of this talk, it is something I'm happy to talk with people about afterwards if that's something that they're interested in. So I'm here giving this talk on Pomona Leti because I was one of the like 60-odd researchers who are part of the team who came up with the fact that these fossils from the Rising Star Cave system are a new species. And in particular, because of my work on sexual dimorphism in humans and fossil ancestors, which led me to look at pelvic anatomy in fossils and particularly very fragmentary pelvic anatomy of female Neanderthals from Indicitation, I was brought in to be the lead researcher on the pelvis team for Pomona Leti and we are in the process of revising our submission or our manuscript for that. So soon hopefully there will be a paper specifically on the pelvis of Pomona Leti but that was my part of the research. So September 10th, 2015, so just last September, this paper went live online. This is the E-Life journal that we published in announcing that we found a new species, Pomona Leti. It's open access so anyone who has an internet connection can download this paper, look at our figures, look at our table. All of that sort of thing. And it turns out a lot of people have done this. I assume most of those are academics and researchers but I'm hopeful that some of them are actually not academics and that some of the public interest in this topic of human evolution is coming out as well. So as of this morning when I took the screenshot, the paper has been viewed online 279,000 times, which is pretty cool. The day it came out, it was also all over the internet in terms of news stories and as someone who grew up in Kansas where I didn't get to learn about human evolution in my high school biology class, it's really heartening to me to know that there is still public interest in human evolution. And so this is really cool that there are, that there's so much interest in what we found and this is true not just for our story but for lots of stories when we find new species of hominids. Now, of course, not all of the responses on back in September were positive. Here at Berkeley, we had some dissenters which is really cool actually. I want to make it clear that this is not a sign that we are antagonists, it's a sign that we're scientists. I would expect other scientists to be skeptical of our work. I know that as we were going through the project, we were skeptical of our work. We kept double checking and asking each other, wait, are you sure that's what you're seeing? Show this to me again, what is your evidence for this? Because that's part of the scientific method and it's great because I'm looking forward to how other scientists interact with this data and the fossils and what comes out of this in the peer-reviewed literature for the conversation as it moves forward. These are the fossils. This is about 300 of the best fossils, but we found over 1,500 fossils in this cave system. They represent at least 15 individuals and those individuals range from infants, literally infants, to individuals who are so old that their molars have worn down suggesting that they were pretty old age. Exactly what that is in years, not as clear. We see an unexpected combination of traits and this is the main reason why we think this is a new species and that's what I'm going to talk about today, is that this combination of traits, it's unlike anything that we have seen before. And so, we got together and we named this Homo naledi. This is the Jhangirchi reconstruction of what he thinks Homo naledi might have looked like. So today I'm going to go through the story of how these fossils were found and how they were analyzed and studied by the scientists and what we ended up and how we came to our conclusions. The story starts with Lee Berger. He's a paleoanthropologist who works at the University of the Wittvatersrand in South Africa and he is known previously for being the father of the guy who discovered the Australopithecus sediba fossils and organizing that whole trip. But he works, so he's in Johannesburg and around Johannesburg there's this area called the cradle of humankind where there's a whole bunch of fossil sites. This map only shows Rising Star Cave in Malapa but there's also storkfontein and storkcrands and things like that. And so, there's a lot of Hominin history in this area that's just like a two hour drive from his house basically depending on traffic. Johannesburg traffic is kind of crazy sometimes. And what Lee did was after finding Malapa and going through the Australopithecus sediba find, he thought, you know, there's probably more fossils out there. We need to get away of actually looking for these kind of systematically. So he recruited some local spelunkers, people who go caving for fun on the weekends. And this was in September of 2013 and said, hey, it would be really cool if we got a team together of people who are going into these caves anyway who were willing to look around and record whether or not they see anything that looks like a Hominin. If they see a Hominin, they should come talk to me. And if they don't, then we know which cave systems have been looked at already. And he thought, you know, maybe in the next five years we might find one site, maybe. A month later in October of 2013, these two gentlemen right here, this is Steve Tucker in red and Rick Hunter in black, we're going through a cave system called Rising Star. And they were going in because Rick wanted to show, Steve, this very beautiful area right here in the cave. And they thought, hey, you know, we'll kind of explore around and be part of Lee's team for this and mark this cave off as one that probably doesn't have Hominins in it. Well, getting into the cave, you start up here, I'll do this, and you go down this area here, down this tunnel. This part's all pretty relatively easy, I'm told, for spelunkers. And you get to this little tight squeeze here and it's less than 10 inches high as this says and it's called Superman's Crawl because literally to fit through you have to kind of outstretch your arms like this and pull yourself through while your feet are kind of pushing through. Now, if you're shorter, I'm told it's actually possible to get enough elbow room where you can kind of army crawl through there. My colleague, Galea Gortov, prefers that method, but for most people it requires kind of a Superman pose so that's why it gets called Superman's Crawl. And then you're in this chamber here, which is a big pretty one that they wanted to show off. And it has this feature called Dragon's Back which literally from the pictures looks like something out of the Hobbit in the sense that it is an uneven ridge that is very narrow, sheer drop on either side. At the top it's about 15 feet tall I believe. And so it's not an easy climb but it's a challenging climb and the spelunkers really got into that. So the story goes that Steve climbed up to the top of it and Rick was following him and the top is very narrow and so Steve needed to get out of the way so that Rick could get to the top. And so he found a cubby space that he kind of wedged himself into. And so he got to the top of it and he realizes this cubby space actually keeps going. In fact there's a small hole here that drops down. And so seeing a small crevice that is completely dark and he hasn't been into and he doesn't know if anybody else has been into, he does the completely logical thing that I'm sure we would all do in the same situation and sees if he can fit. So he wedges himself down here, gets to the drop part on the other side there, doesn't know how deep it goes, doesn't know if it's going to get too narrow for him to fit or anything like this. But at this point it has rock against his back, rock against his front and just kind of like goes down like this until he gets to this part which is about 12 feet or something still above the ground level where he actually had to find like footholds and things to climb down the rest of the rock surface. And he tells his friend, you should come down here. This is a really fun climb. Okay. So they get into this chamber and they turn around and they have their headlamps and they actually have GoPro cameras with them and they look around and they see a mandible. They see a jawbone. And they're like, that looks vaguely human. And they're not paleoanthropologists. They couldn't tell you what species it is or anything like that. But they think, this is something we should tell that guy Lee Berger about. This is what he was talking about. So they take some video of the cave floor. There's bones all over it. They climb back out. The climb takes about 20 minutes. The first time when they were doing this it might have taken a tad longer. And they go and knock on Lee's door. They go to his house that night. And it's nighttime. And they're like, we know we're waking you up or it's right before bed but you want to let us in. And they show Lee these videos. And so a few hours later he's on the phone with National Geographic who he already has some partnerships with and says, I have something. You're going to want to fund this. And at the time he thought maybe there's a partial skeleton down there of one individual. But that's worth organizing all of my resources and getting this excavation to happen. So Lee being a bit of an odd individual who goes about things in a different manner puts up this Facebook ad. And the joke that I heard from the vice president of South Africa when he was announcing the new species back in September was that he goes, we put up this Facebook ad. He's requesting a person who is skinny, preferably small, not claustrophobic. They must fit. They must have some caving experience. They have to have climbing experiences if possible. And willing to work in cramp quarters and have a good attitude and be a team player. He puts this ad up. He asks people to email, not him, but actually his administrative assistant Wilma who he does not tell about this at all. And Wilma comes into the office on Monday morning and has 20 emails or so from people, mostly women, saying, I'm five foot two and I weighed this much and I think this caving experience and she's like, what on earth is this? But they ended up with 57 applicants. Lee skyped with the top applicants from that and put together a team of six women who were going to be the excavators. Now the cavers who went into, Rick and Steve who found the chamber, they had the caving experience but they didn't know how to do a hominin excavation. There's a lot that goes into that where you have to make sure that you're doing it systematically, carefully so you don't break the fossils themselves. And so this team is made up of women who have that experience, who are experienced in the ability to actually do the excavation. And just as a shout out to my friend, Leah here who's also at the University of Wisconsin. She actually snuck on to the team without any experience caving prior to this and learned it all as she went along but she's really good at excavating so that worked out well. So by November of 2013 this moved very quickly. They were at the site in South Africa. This is the entrance to the cave. You walk down this little hill there's like a sheer drop here of like 20 feet so you've got to be careful there and into this area. When you enter the cave it looks like this. It's very pretty. My friend Marina here is one of the excavators and she told me that this shot took about 30 minutes to take and the whole time the National Geographic people who were taking the shot kept throwing dirt in the air toward her so that they could get the pretty shafts of sunlight. So we have a professional photography team you get photos like this from inside the cave. When you're taking selfies on your phone you get blurry photos like this in the cave because I've been in this part here. I did not go beyond this point but this little opening right here is that tunnel I showed you that they then crawl down and spend the next 20 minutes squeezing through various tight holes and then climbing up a dragon's back ridge in order to get to the chamber itself which is not very big. They worked in teams of two and they actually very quickly realized that the ground was so soft that they were in danger of possibly stepping on and breaking some of the fossils and so they went to a barefoot excavation where they basically the idea was that hopefully they would feel a bone before they put all their weight down so they would be able to avoid breaking on anything. So they started out they collected all of the bones from the surface that was about 300 bones total and then they focused in on an area where they saw part of a cranium and they're like, okay we're going to excavate this part first because that looks like a cranium and that could be really useful. So they did the excavation and the area that they focused on is called the puzzle box it's about one yard square by like eight inches deep so it's not very much space and the bones are just kind of stacked like pickup sticks where as soon as you try to move one you're realizing you're disturbing another and so it was a very slow tedious excavation for that and the ground is soft it's like dirt so they're using brushes they're using plastic spoons in the case here toothpicks things like that to just very carefully get everything apart and you'll notice that this video is on a computer screen because this is what the people who didn't fit into the cave were able to watch while they were doing this because with the help of those same spelongers who had volunteered to look for hominin fossils they were able to wire up the cave so that there are lights there's a communication system where they had a phone down in the chamber itself where they could talk to people up top if there was a problem or if they had a question about something and there was a video so that they could actually kind of refer to things of like okay we're going to go after this bone next what do you think what technique do you think we should use and get advice as needed of course the people on the surface this is what they're doing they're in the tent staring avidly at these videos much like the one you just watched to see what is going on and be very excited as they are bringing these bones out they bring the bones out wrapped in bubble wrap placed in a plastic container wrapped in bubble wrap again multiple containers placed in a lunchbox and then that lunchbox was done to someone while they climbed back out through and they had volunteer cavers throughout the cave partially there as a safety precaution so people who were more experienced with the caving side of things than some of the executors were in case something went wrong but also to help kind of carry these things carefully throughout the cave so that it wasn't just one person who was responsible for these very very fragile things and they were lucky none of them actually seemed to break in that process of transition some of them were broken once they got up to the top of or out of the cave they went to the science tent here's Peter Spitt trying to figure out what something is I can't actually see what he has in the sand there but everything was photographed labeled given an accession number they cleaned it up they because the bone itself was kind of soft it ends up having a texture almost like dried wood it's like so not particularly stone like you would expect a fossil to be and so some of it is very fragile and so some of the pieces have to be coated with different sort of substances to keep them from breaking apart but they keep track of all of this and then the bones go into a safe that exists in another tent at the site because South Africa has very strict rules that how many fossils have to be under locking key even when they're in a tent and so this whole time I was not involved with the project I was actually adjunct in Georgia and following all of this on Twitter because they were tweeting about this as it was happening and I was thinking this is so cool I don't know any of these people yet but they are excavating and they're tweeting about what they're finding and I remember the day that Lee tweeted we have to send back to vits for more for more safes because they'd filled up the ones that they brought with them because they kept they got done with this and it was a three-week excavation they sent the fossils to the vault at the University of Itfatter's Man the newly renovated and built vault I should mention and I like this picture because it shows you the big thick bank vault door that is on this room and then beyond this room there is just shelves lining the walls that were mostly empty and so Lee was thinking well we have the two shells that take up the Malapa find the shells for the stuff that we had found at Cirque Frontaine and some other sites before this it's you know this vault will last us forever it's going to take us forever to fill this up well now the vault is pretty much full because they filled it up with Rising Star after another Facebook ad Lee put together a team of early career researchers including myself to come to the vault spend five weeks in Johannesburg studying these day long every day while we were there so I'm right here not looking at the camera but this is most of the group we actually didn't think to take a group photo until the very very end of the track and at that point some people had already started to leave but this is a large group this is a large representation of the people who were working on this project while we were there and so we did we spent five weeks in the actually five and a half weeks I should say in the conversation right here you can tell because there's a pelvis with the bones out we had casts from all sorts of different hominin sites some of which were already there in the vault some of which we brought with us from our various institutions so that we had a good representation of casts from other hominin material to compare to and we split up into groups based on skeletal area so I was the pelvis team and the spine and rib cage behind me so behind where this group is sitting there was the team working on the foot and then the team working on the cranium the team working on the arm the lower limb all of this kind of stuff and so we had so many bones from each area that it was important to get a large group together to do this because it would have taken decades for one or two people to go through all of these materials in the way that is necessary for us to do a scientific analysis so we were able to do it a little more quickly now don't get me wrong we still spent all of our time doing this we all stayed at the same hotel we would shuttle to the campus together in the morning spend all day in the lab looking at these bones talking to each other over lunch about them coming back to the lab looking at the bones again taking measurements making scans discussing different analyses that we could do then we'd shuttle back to the hotel there was like one or two restaurants around that area that we would all go and eat that in different groups so we'd spend all of our time together and so of course dinner conversation was nothing but what do you think it is well I can get this well how do you think they got in the cave well maybe it's this and so that was like all we did and then we were actually sharing rooms with you it was two people to a room and so even as you got ready for bed you were still talking to your roommate about this and thinking about it as you fell asleep only to wake up the next morning have breakfast with everyone and shuttle to campus again and do it all over again so we spent so what on earth are these rising star fossils and how how can we figure it out so I'm going to go through the anatomy the comparisons that we made and what we ended up just figuring out well when we look at the brain size for Homo Naledi it's about 560 cubic centimeters and that's the large estimate there's other individuals that are a little smaller in the 400 range to give you a comparison humans we ever drawn 1400 cubic centimeters so this is a really small brain creature this is not a human not even close we also have multiple crania that we can look at cranial shape and the cranial shape for Homo Naledi shown by the best four here is not one that is that is long front to back and short top to bottom it's more globular more circular than that and so it's different than what we see in some early Homo species we have tons of teeth some of them are beautiful and in mandibles like this some of them most of them are not in mandibles and they're just isolated teeth but we've been able to actually go through and figure out which teeth go together to come up with individuals I'm very glad I was not on the tooth team that had to solve that puzzle because that sounded tedious to no end really post-cranial person but the teeth for Homo Naledi they all look very similar so there's not a lot of variation between different individuals of the species and when we compare them so this is in Dmini C211 so Homo erectus specimen something to note is that the cuss pattern on the molars is a lot simpler in Homo Naledi these aren't the teeth of Homo erectus we move down the body to the shoulder here's some examples of we have multiple humori I could actually have more scapula but I know we have more scapula than that but I like having the skeleton here which is an artist reconstruction done by National Geographic so it is by no means 100% accurate but I like how they do the shoulders here because it kind of gets at what the shoulders of Homo Naledi look like they were hunched like this which basically means that they had shoulders that looked more chimpanzee like they were more primitive they were able to be more flexible in terms of being able to move by their cromial process and so it's something that is going to make it so that by having a more flexible shoulder it's a potential adaptation for climbing that at least still exists in this species now that doesn't guarantee that they were climbing although they did apparently climb into the cave but they had bad ability which really puts them looking more like an Australopithecus than something in the genus Homo when we looked at the hands the areas the hands that aren't human like the phalanges of the fingers are curved slightly so again this is something that we see in like a chimpanzee or a very primitive feature in Australopithecus suggesting that they would be better adapted to be able to hold on to things like tree branches or my own pet theory rock ledges and caves because I keep pushing for they were adapted to living in caves but the hands are this mixture of both primitive and derived features and the thumb has this weird thing going on so this is the first metatarsal so the metatarsal sorry metacarpal can't speak today metacarpal in the thumb going to the thumb and this picture looks like it's upside down it's not it is actually thicker at the part where the thumbs actually branches often starts and it is at the base where the wrist is and that's something unusual we don't see that ever in anything this is a pretty unique feature and so it's got this weird weird trait that if we had only found one first metacarpal we would think okay well this individual was weird and maybe had pathology going on but we have a whole bunch of these we have this for multiple individuals and they all look like this so we have like this weird derived feature that is derived from these going on in the thumb the spine we don't have a ton represented from the spine but what we do have is enough to know that they were small they were like Lucy sized they still had fairly large vertebral I can't think of words today sorry openings there and so the spine we don't know much about like what the curvature looked like how many lumbar vertebrae they had because we really don't have enough so we can't say a ton about that except that at first glance they do seem to look more Australopithecus like at least in terms of body size the rib cage okay I don't know why I did that okay so I actually don't have a good picture of our reconstruction of the rib cage because this hasn't been published yet and this artist's reconstruction is absolutely terrible and looks nothing like it but what it ends up looking like it ends up looking like Lucy the reconstruction that they were from there that make it possible to throw it into a model to see what to predict what we think the rib cage would look like and it's cone shaped it looks like something that Lucy would have had which again this is all very primitive features that we've got here and then we get to the pelvis my baby so there's like three slides on this bear with me so we have 41 pieces of the Homo naledi pelvis and this is they're very fragmentary it's hard at first glance to get any idea of what we're even looking at I spent two weeks arguing with people about whether or not I was looking at pieces of scapula or fragments of scapula or fragments of the pelvis because some of them it was hard to tell but there's a few pieces here that are useful for morphological comparisons to other species so I was able to do a few things I was able to look at the ilium so we're looking at the top part and we have this great piece here 1100 and so here it is in front of you here it is in top view and this angle kind of represents iliac flair and it's something that because we don't have the pubis for Homo naledi we're measuring it at the greater sciatic notch and then going to the iliac crest right where the iliac pillar actually terminates because all of that is preserved and what we can tell from this is that it is very very flair this angle looks way more like lucy than it does a recent human and if you my analogy for this is a few picture the top of the pelvis is being kind of a bowl it's kind of bowl shaped in humans where we have this very steep walls for the ilium lucy is different it's more of a saucer where it's not so steep it's more plate like a lot more like lucy we also have a whole bunch of issue preserved and so there's not a lot to be said about the ilium but we can look at this feature right here the tubular acetabular sulcus there we go which is the distance between the acetabular and where the leg attaches and the ischial tuberosity where whole bunch of muscles attach and this is something that in humans can see so it's something that seems based on a couple of data points to be something that gets shorter over time over hominin evolution and in Homo naledi it's pretty short and again because I have multiple individuals preserved for this I know that this isn't some weird aberration or pathological individual this is all of Homo naledi seems to have I can go on and on about the pelvis I won't we'll end there but feel free to ask me more questions about it moving down the body to the lower limb the long bones are long they're these were not short individuals I think our high dense estimates are between like four foot nine and five foot three so you know these aren't like tiny long bones so this is actually just one tibia rotated in four directions although we do have multiple tibia to show and they're very narrow so they weren't supporting a lot of body weight for the femur the top of the femur head sorry not the top of the femur head the femur neck is basically squished anterior posteriorly so from front to back and it's elongated and that allows to attach to this femur it has to stick out a little bit more but once you get down to the knee and it's better represented from the tibia than this femur although we have a couple of distal femur pieces here this is looking completely like human anatomy except they're very narrow bones we get to the foot it looks completely human these are as human as you or I the only thing is that they seem to be small footed you know palest shoes or something they would probably have to shop in the older kids section as opposed to the adult section but they have the inline big toe they've got an arch it's not quite as great as us but you have to remember these people probably weren't actually wearing shoes so that's going to affect arch shape some but otherwise the foot looks pretty much like ours and we have this foot with individuals it was actually really annoying because I'm good friends with a guy who was with some of the people who were on the foot team and they were at the table right next to mine basically and I'm sitting there trying to figure out what am I going to do with these 41 tiny fragments of broken pelvis and they're like this is another complete phalanx this is another one we found talking about locomotion and things and what we come up with is that Homo naledi's locomotion was probably very similar to ours with the exception of the hip maybe needing to swing around a little more because it seems to be extra flared so how do we know this is a new species well it's because of the morphology it's not like we can use the biological species concept here unless we have a time machine that they have to go on so what we did was we compared the skeletal morphology of Homo naledi which represents really the entire skeleton and we compared it to every other hominin species that have been found and we looked for differences and this is a slide I made very quickly this morning it is not an exhaustive list but we basically each team was going through every hominin species and testing the null difference between the rising sarphosals and this species that we're looking at and we did this for each part of the body and in every case there was at least one usually multiple parts of the body that didn't match up with any of the previously known hominin species and again not exhaustive at all I'm sure I left many parts of the body out of here and I wasn't able to fit all of the species that I wanted to or the null hypotheses were all rejected this was different than every other hominin species so we had to name it a new species based on the cranium the hands the feet we decided that it would probably fit better in the genus Homo than it did in the genus Sustralopithecus if I love this so we have a new morpho species using the morphological species concept that's what we were able to do we weren't really talking to the other groups as much yet I was convinced that we'd found an australopithecus because of course I had this very lucy flair pelvis and I was sitting next to the guys who were telling me that had a very cone shaped rib cage and I thought this is definitely something australopithecus boy was I wrong so we have this again another artist reconstruction of what australopithecus afarensis as the two the artist chose to picture here so morph based just on the anatomy we know we're looking at a different species now I get to tell you my joke so why was Homo naledi so grumpy because he couldn't get a date I know really bad sorry this is the thing on fossils for five and a half weeks straight so one of our colleagues found that the homo naledi reconstruction by Grachie looks very similar to the popular internet meme grumpy cat and the date thing is actually true we don't have a date for this material it's not really unusual for South Africa it's really hard to get dates in South Africa and some other places but that really just gives us a very broad cap and right now we can only reach the top one we can't reach the bottom yet because we haven't finished excavating because there's a lot of bones there there's no other animal or faunal remains in the cave to give us any idea of faunal sending them out to labs outside of South Africa which involved a lot of red tape and so that is in progress right now and I hope we will soon have at least a somewhat range for this that is better than you know well it's younger than 6 million years ago but we don't really know anything on past that very soon but the thing with the date is when if Homo Naledi was way back here something very early possibly earlier than any other than Australopithecus before we even get to genotomo type stuff it's weird one because we wouldn't expect to see something in genotomo that early and two because we have a practically human foot a practically human hand and a cranial features that are not matching up in the period that would be really strange and kind of mess up how we think about human evolution there if it falls in the same time span as currently known early Homo assessments it's also going to be weird because again it has these really modern looking features like the feet but then it has these really primitive looking features like the hip that other features if this is something that is living at the time of neanderthals or something like that so wherever it falls in the timeline it's going to be weird and I can't wait to get into the academic debate of what exactly this means once we do have some data estimates the other weird thing about Homo naledi is that it was found in this weird chamber that's hard to get to any other explanation for this for how they got into this cave and what they were doing there and we were able to reject a lot of hypotheses the one we couldn't reject was that they purposely put their dead in this cave we don't know culturally what that means like I said these are small brain creatures that are not human so we don't know what their motivation was for doing this but we do know there were no other different times they're based on how the bodies are deposited in this cave system these are not deposited in the way where this was all one group that died in there and that was it this happened multiple times so it was a recurring thing there's no signs of carnivore bites or anything that they were dragged into this cave by another animal and we are you know even if that is absence of evidence is an evidence of that there's also the fact that we didn't find any other faunal remains in here and so it's a little far-fetched to think that we are looking at a carnivore dragging in just hominins because that's the only thing they were eating at least we don't see that anywhere else in the fossil record there are no other animals present so it's not like they got washed into this cave or anything like that there's no evidence of fire or that they were living in the cave and this is deep in the dark zone that you have you can still get some daylight there's still some openings and things but after that you spend 15 minutes in an area where you can only the only source of light is what you bring with you and so why on earth would any creature want to do this clearly it's not very popular because we don't find other animal bones in there in the first place and so this rejects most of the other reasons on why we would usually think we were finding hominins in a cave that's the hypothesis I'm a little skeptical of that it was intentional deposition but right now that's the best hypothesis we have and we're excited to hear other scientists tell us why that might be wrong because if we can reject that then that means that we have to look for something new and this is how science is going to progress so I want you to think about what you think of this and the reason I want you to think about this is because there's a bunch of things that are not really common and there's plans to eventually scan more but it's kind of slow and there's bureaucracy and that and just getting the people power in terms of actually getting people to do the scans and get them online takes a while but there's 89 scans and you can analyze them with free software on your computer and analyze them and decide what you think these fossils look like if you have a 3D printer you can do 3D printouts this is a picture of Christina Kilgrove who's a bioarcheologist in Florida posted the day that the site went live where she immediately printed out the maxilla and so I hope that other scientists are including people in this room are going to be looking at this data and coming up with their own hypotheses on what's going on and I also just want to give a quick shout out if you happen to be attending the AAPA meetings this year Saturday morning we are having an entire session on home on the that I hope people attend because we are going to be talking about all of the stuff that's going on today we currently have Cavers and excavators who are still working in the cave system we are currently not excavating in the Dinaleti chamber where these fossils came from that are instead exploring other chambers partially because we're hoping that we're going to find some that are associated with Bona but there's still stuff going on and we're going to find new things looking into it and so there's going to be more on this story for sure so stay tuned and thank you I'm happy to feel questions to try and figure out what we can say to that what we know right now is that they have small molars they are not sterile but they can steep by any means they have small canines and so that suggests that just like we re-guess with Hormorectus and as such species that we would be thinking of some sort of door just being told all in some way we don't know yet but that's where the eyes of goats are going to come in and we're going to hopefully be able to get an answer to that Do you have any hip-hop and size causes of death? We don't so there's no broken bones there's one that had a infection on the toe that healed while they were still alive so they sent their toe and they healed before they died but it's not like they fell into the cave and died in a corner part I'd like to say we have no animal teeth marks or anything like that so we don't really have a cause of death and we have a weird sample for ages that this isn't like it was just really old people who they sent them to the cave to die or something like we have babies and so yeah we don't have any hip-hop disease right now for that I know there's a whole bunch of different individuals what is the most complete single ones go together we can tell some based on age some like the hand and part of the wrist were articulated and so we know those go together and what they did is when they were excavating these they had an arctic scanner with them that they were able to scan the surface floor so that they know the exact orientation of all these bones together so let's see that we'll hopefully go through and try to guess which ones were individuals that went together but for most of the fragments so yeah we don't really have exact individuals most of the 16 individuals are actually represented by the teeth for the pelvis there's like 5 individuals as the MNI but we have every part of the body represented multiple times in multiple individuals and so we are able to put together pretty good composite which is with both kind of army skeleton that you know put together like source or would they would they have had a different kind of vision that would allow because it seems like that's a pretty treacherous it is it does seem very treacherous and it's certainly something so I have the composite skull that we've made here they don't want particularly like the iris or anything so we're not thinking like these are maternal creatures or anything like that and so it is this question of what kind of lights there are so they have personally I'm looking really kind of aside in terms of what are they doing how are they doing this but right now we don't have any evidence of what the lights were so quickly so I knew you had that charge showing us how these specimens compare to other groups I was just wondering do you have any data slides that show us how they quantitatively discriminate these specimens from other other groups right now it's talked about a little bit in the life paper it's sensibly a life paper in terms of the comparisons that we made in the subliminal the original intent is that we were going to at the same time as that paper comes out have a whole bunch of papers representing the skeleton so we don't have all of the data and all of the details in that initial paper and those papers are all in various stages of being reviewed and revised and submitted again kind of thing right now so we are hopeful like you know maybe it's like a year or so and we'll have different people to reach part of the skeleton that will include that data on the hand and the foot but so far so good I'm not actually finished with the review process yet and just as like a follow-up question since these are all found like in the same place is what do you guys think about the hypothesis that the variation you see between this and other groups is just localized population and level variation um I so I've heard that idea before that this is just you know a population that looks different than other members of the possibly the same species um that we've identified previously that this isn't homonymy this is something else um and the problem with it is just that you don't get a lucy like pelvis with any with that dentition you don't get it with that kind of foot and so it's composite but we have multiple individuals for each part of the skeleton so we know that's what the pelvis or the legs look like um and so even though we don't know what exactly one individual looks like we know overall what they look like at each part of the skeleton and it just doesn't work out that it matches anything that we see and so any species that any known species previously that you put it into um it ends up extending homogenous variation you put in homorectis and suddenly you're saying well actually depending on the species of us some of them have human looking feet which as well is not human looking and so there's always something that is just like a really jarring mismatch comparative sense is like for like late actual and early homo in the with the pelvis what were the comparative specimens that you were using for the pelvis let's see I looked at um well for early homo I looked at ericotomy um it threw me off a genuishon which is later in time and agent but you know I looked at basically anything I could get my hands on in terms of cast materials compared to um I compared it to the manuscript from gono although I didn't actually have gono with me uh looked at casts of lucy it's really I did try to look at everything that had been published on in terms of pelvic remains and I was coming at this having just done my dissertation research looking at neanderthals so I also had a really good idea what neanderthals look like at these like neanderthals um so that was what I was doing like I said we did try to bring cast material with us from our different institutions to create a large cast collection of live neanderthals with us because we have a large sample of those there and so um the team that was working on teeth and also kind of neanderthal morphology uh with those and so they had a wide variety um some other people were able to bring materials from um age and things like that uh so cast of material that we weren't able to actually have any comparisons from um and the ones that we can't compare directly we try to make sure that after we scan the advising star material we way to solve these fossils in order to try to get a better idea of them and even the limited sample sizes for anyone tax on a lot of post-cranial elements do you feel that this morphology is different enough that you can exclude that it's a taxonomy all the time um but when talking and I'm also a huge worker I love to work things together and say this is just a variation of the species that's like my go-to response to almost everything um but when you have species that are mostly defined based on crania and now suddenly a species player leaves and so when post-cranial doesn't match even if there's cranial features there somewhere that this is how we got to this is how the genus come which is yeah there are some cranial features that are sort of useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a useful or a what John Gertrude did to face that on. It's much less modern looking, though, so I'm not sure that's really just like. The cats here deserve a lot of love. Right, exactly. It's confusing, I know. I don't know what the thinking was in doing her instruction to do that. Apologize. I'm just, I'm a good question. There's interest, are there children? There are, there are children. There are young adults. There are, I'm going to say teenagers in the country. This isn't the MNI of 15 or of the other things that can. This isn't the MNI of 15. So we have only a few that we do know are like full adults. And again, most of those are just based on teeth. But then we have their parents, a baby, who's a toddler that's represented by some of the hormones. The pelvis, we actually have a lot of juvenile material, which is difficult because it's not the part of the pelvis that's useful to determine exactly how old it is. But we can tell from the size and from the fact that it's part of the hemorrhageuse that this is definitely not quite an adult yet. It's a small human eye, but an age all the way across. Yeah, so it's an interesting example because it allows us to ask different questions about what we've asked from possible motherhood where we're only having one or two. Can you do a common email? New. Do you know pieces that look like that? There are, so, from the pelvic material, the closest we come to looking at features that are to be considered succulent or possibly predicted to be sexually demorphic and a little ephemous. We have four great side-eye patches. None of them are complete. They all seem pretty wide. I have no idea, one of them is a kid, so that doesn't help me at all. I have no idea if this is like, we just have to find three females and this happens to be what, preserved, or this is something that was wide and proximal in the body and was actually sexually demorphic. I don't know of the example. Looking at the rest of the skeleton, we have crania that are slightly smaller than others, so if you go off the crania, it's the capacity of size. The dental size. Or dental size, you can say like, okay, that's like the smaller ones or female and that's like the larger ones around. But there's not a lot of diversity between those, and so that variety is pretty small, so I'm kind of on the fence on thinking that that actually represents size. And the last question is, it seems like getting the bones into the cave from the smaller, you can't ask questions. Is the only way then to get them to that very last chamber to go all the way through, could you get up the back and then drop things down from that opening? You could drop them down. The way they're deposited though, could they look like they could be dropped or they still spread out if someone had your bones? Yeah, I think one of the hypothesis that someone might have. This is a really good question. So the excavator's kind of showed me that it would be possible for them to have kind of dropped them down the end of dragonsback and for them to kind of like sludge in there, and then as they drop more, those kind of sludge further pushing out. So the deposition could be that. It could be that, yeah. This leads to us knowing that there were multiple depositions for this. But that still requires them to get to two minutes while climbing up dragonsback, do all of this in the dark, and carry a dead body with them while they're doing this opening up. Right, exactly, exactly. So it's, it doesn't totally help us that the hypothesis is true. They weren't actually at the chamber alive. But then they also somehow dropped them in a way where they didn't break at all, because we have no breaks from that that we would suspect from a, assuming they were flesh parts. Sorry, I know. So do you guys want to have a date on this specimen? I was just wondering, yeah, yeah. Do you have a sense of how much time there is between the depositions if you have to guess or ask me? No, the only thing is that we can tell you, there might get slightly differently where we can tell where one deposition ends and the next one begins, and you might, this is all of them, like eight inches and so. I can't go into detail of this because I haven't looked at the data on exactly how they were deposited. I'm just beginning with the people that excavated that have told me. And so I don't think there's a way at the stage to know how they moved around, except that the hand that's fully articulated, that wasn't on top. That was actually one of the second level depositions. And so presumably this was long enough, or at least in that case, the prediction is that that wasn't really decomposed before the next layer was deposited on top of it, because I hand stayed together even after that. But that doesn't tell us for any of the other ones how much time there would have been. And without knowing exactly the temperature and if I was going to have to take it, I don't know how long it would have taken it to be this level or anything, so. Was any of us ever tried and bailed or was it still to be tried? I don't know. I know that we have a team that's working on that, and I'm not part of that team because it's not my area of expertise. I'm more personatic this gradient. And so I don't know exactly what techniques have been tried. I know that there were lots of easy teeth to looking possibly for uranium, something like isotopes. But I don't know the current status of those. I haven't heard anything since September when they were planning on starting this process, and I haven't heard anything that they liked how it was. I know that they've been looking at dating the lidstones, and so they were working on doing the top one in the cave. But I don't think they have access to the one that's under vacant because we don't know how far down it is. So even that's kind of on offense. So this is a little stuff that it's in process, and as the science, as the analyses come through, there's a little certain bullish on them as soon as we know, but we're not right there yet. And with a broad team like this, I'm sadly not an expert on everything. Thanks for coming. Thank you very much. Thank you.