Did These Prehistoric Primates Actually Bury Simply Their Feminine Lifeless Deep in a Cave?

Researchers say that the fossilized bones of “Homo naledi,” to date discovered completely underground in South Africa, lack a key genetic male marker

Sonja Anderson

| Daily Correspondent

June 25, 2026 5:18 p.m.

Deep inside South Africa’s Rising Star cave system is an open house known as the Dinaledi Chamber. It’s accessible solely via a tough, vertical passage dubbed the “chute,” which is so slim that spelunkers can solely squeeze via in the event that they maintain their breath. In 2013 and 2014, a staff of researchers did simply that. Inside the chamber, they discovered a flooring made from bones.

The specialists revealed a study in 2015, declaring that the fossilized bones belonged to Homo naledi, a hominin species that lived in South Africa between about 335,000 and 236,000 years in the past. In all, they’ve unearthed greater than 1,500 bone fossils from the cave, belonging to greater than a dozen people. Scientists around the globe have hypothesized about how and why the bones got here to relaxation in that harmful chamber.

Now, scientists have discovered one thing that additional complicates the story. According to a research lately revealed within the journal Cell, protein fragments from the cave’s fossilized tooth point out that every one the people buried there are feminine.

“When these results came out, there were a lot of quite nervous scientists. This was not what we expected,” says research writer Lee Berger, the paleoanthropologist who led the Dinaledi excavations, to CNN’s Katie Hunt. “Two labs ran this data,” he provides. “We ran it through twice because we didn’t want it to be an internal error.”

For the latest research, scientists examined 23 tooth from 20 H. naledi people. They extracted enamel proteins via “micro-destructive acid etching,” on the lookout for varieties of amelogenin: AMELY and AMELX. As Science’s Ann Gibbons reviews, all hominin species carry AMELX on their X chromosomes, however solely males carry AMELY—on the Y chromosome.

The researchers concluded that the H. naledi fossils are homogeneous. They write that “no convincing evidence” helps “the confident identification of male individuals” within the Dinaledi Chamber.

Study co-author Enrico Cappellini is a paleoproteomicist—historical proteins skilled—on the University of Copenhagen’s Globe Institute. As he says in a statement from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, some male people and Neanderthals have been discovered to lack the whole AMELY gene.

But, “it’s very unlikely that this would be the case among even half of the 20 individuals we studied, or for an entire population,” Cappellini says. “Either scenario, namely the absence of H. naledi males in the Rising Star cave system or a systematic deletion of their AMELY gene, is fascinating and would have deep implications for a better understanding of the biology and evolution of this species.”

Berger’s staff named the species naledi after the Sothos phrase for “star,” as a result of the fossilized bones have been found within the Rising Star cave system. Remains of the species have solely ever been discovered deep in these caves.

The query is why. Last 12 months, Berger’s staff revealed a research in Evolutionary Biology concluding that H. naledi deliberately buried their useless, citing bodily proof that our bodies have been coated intentionally in sediment after being positioned within the chamber. (The staff has additionally claimed the species created rock artwork and lit fires in the identical caves.) The researchers wrote that “mortuary behavior, including cultural burial, was part of the repertoire of H. naledi.”

But many scientists rebuffed that declare, saying there’s no convincing proof that H. naledi people intentionally buried one another. If they’d, they’d carried out it some 160,000 years earlier than Homo sapiens or Neanderthal. Experts identified different potential explanations for the chamber’s pile of bones: maybe they climbed in, couldn’t get out and died.

“We know where the bodies of the H. naledi individuals ended up, but we do not know how they got there nor where or how they lived,” Ryan McRae, a paleoanthropologist on the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who isn’t concerned within the analysis, tells CNN. He says if the chamber is what the research authors declare—an all-female grave—it presents “more questions than answers.”

“The most likely reason for these robust results are, in my opinion, cultural selection after death for burial by sex and perhaps gender,” Berger tells Live Science’s Kristina Killgrove.

It wouldn’t be a novel phenomenon in hominin historical past.

“There are many past human societies with sex-specific burial practices,” research co-author John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist on the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says within the assertion. “But we’ve found very little hard evidence of this from the earliest burial sites of modern humans or Neanderthals.”

“This is well before we have differential mortuary practices for males and females,” which solely present up within the archaeological report beginning about 5,000 years in the past, says Karen Rosenberg, a paleoanthropologist on the University of Delaware who wasn’t concerned within the analysis, to Science. “Something’s weird.”

Why This Ancient Cave Is So Controversial

The analysis is thrilling, as Katerina Douka, an archaeologist on the University of Vienna who wasn’t concerned within the research, tells National Geographic’s Helen Thompson. She says the outcomes point out that the Rising Star could have prehistoric cultural and symbolic significance.

The research authors recommend that regardless of H. naledi’s smaller mind measurement, “the species appears to have engaged in practices once considered uniquely human,” per the assertion. The researchers keep that the chamber is a cemetery, however they acknowledge that the newly found absence of male markers in H. naledi tooth isn’t a smoking gun for an all-female burial floor.

“The bottom line is this is a weird result from an already weird hominin,” Elizabeth Sawchuk, a bioarchaeologist and curator on the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, who wasn’t concerned within the analysis, tells Live Science. “The key thing to remember is that failure to detect evidence of AMELY does not mean there are no males in the sample—it just means that none were detected.”