Homo naledi with controlled FIRE!
At his Carnegie Science lecture tonight, Lee Berger just announced abundant evidence of fire use in the Rising Star Cave, where the famous Homo naledi remains were found. That's beyond HUGE.
To recap: A massive fossil trove from a cave called Rising Star has been excavated by Lee Berger's team over the last decade. The creatures are called Homo naledi, and the peculiar attributes of their deposition suggests they were intentionally placed their by the fellow Homo naledi. I've written about this a lot (just search for naledi), and I've taken flak from fellow creationists who have criticized my position on Homo naledi. My own research has shown that Homo naledi is human, and the evidence for intentional body disposal (human burial?) is pretty overwhelming. No one has yet proposed anything close to a model that explains the peculiar features of the Rising Star Cave and that is NOT intentional body disposal.
As I mentioned, tonight Berger announced evidence of fire found throughout the Rising Star cave. Among his announcements:
- There is soot all over the roof of the Dinaledi chamber.
- There's an ancient, small hearth newly excavated at the base of the Dragon's Back (which is the entrance to the Dinaledi Chamber), and in that hearth there are burned antelope bones.
- There are additional hearths throughout the cave at "every" juncture of passages. (Not sure how much is included in "every.")
- There is a large burn site in the Lesedi chamber with burned animal bones.
- There is a stack of stones in the Lesedi chamber with ash around and under it.
- One location has charcoal, the remains of burned wood.
I have no idea when these discoveries will be published, so I can't add any more details or professional assessment. But the photos Berger showed were pretty jaw-dropping. Well, they made my jaw drop anyway.
So what does this mean for us creationists? For me, it's exactly what I expected, and we creationists have been muttering about it to each other since Homo naledi was announced. We all knew that the bone beds were deep in the cave, far deeper than any creature could possibly go without light. We all thought, if these were humans, they must have had fire. It's the only way they could have gotten down there. But in my wildest dreams, I never expected the fire evidence would be SOOO complex. Fire in the Dinaledi chamber is just light? Fire in the Dragon's Back cooking meat maybe? We creationists predicted this sort of complex behavior because we were convinced that Homo naledi is fully human, descended from Adam and Eve, made in the image of God. And there it is. Fire in the Rising Star completely confirms our expectation that Homo naledi is human.
Now there have been other creationists that have rejected the humanity of Homo naledi, some rather forcefully. I have no doubt in my mind that they'll come up with some kind of creative just-so story to explain away all of this evidence. Maybe these were weird underground wildfires? Maybe ancient Homo sapiens dragged these Homo naledi into the cave and made the fires? Maybe this, maybe that. But here's the thing. I don't have to explain away this data. It's precisely what I predicted (see this post from a year ago), and that, my friends, is a hallmark of good science. If your model is propped up by special pleading, ad hoc speculations, and cherry-picked literature citations, it's not as good as the hypothesis that makes a successful prediction. That's just How to Do Good Science 101.
I also think this makes things increasingly awkward for theistic evolutionists who want to draw some kind of line in the fossil record and say that everything "after" is human and everything "before" is not. Homo naledi is clearly not Homo sapiens, yet it exhibits astonishing behavioral complexity of the sort we've only ever associated with human beings. The fossil record is much easier to cope with theologically if we just recognize that "human" is more than just us.
Yes, I'm excited, but I also have to remind myself that there are no papers yet, just some assertions and photos. I'm no fan of science by press release, so there's a part of me that's kind of annoyed that I don't get to see the full technical descriptions of all these excavations. Actually, I'm really kind of annoyed at this. Big claims require big evidence, so we'll have to wait and see. But for now, I'll marvel at Berger's assertions. What if they're true? (And what if they're not? What if the evidence for fire isn't as good as he indicated? Well, we're back where we are now, and I still say the evidence overwhelmingly supports recognizing Homo naledi as human. Hint: There'll be even more evidence next summer. wink wink)
I'm feeling mighty gratified. What a time to be alive!
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