The treacherous burial ritual of the Homo naledi
(5-8 min read.) What can the excavation of a 250,000 year-old cave burial teach us about love and community-care?
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What do archaeologists study in order to evaluate the level of love, care, and community in any long-gone society?
The answer: what they did when one of them died, or mortuary behavior.
It was once thought that only Homo sapiens (modern humans) buried their dead, but a recent excavation in South Africa found that one of our ape-like ancestors, the Homo naledi, also performed ritual burials.
In the Rising Star cave system in Bloubank River Valley, an area in South Africa that is part of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, archaeologists found burial chambers of the naledi from about 250,000 years ago that told an incredible story of mortuary behavior.
Homo naledi were previously thought to be more similar to apes than modern humans because of their small brain size. When archaeologists first found a large cache of naledi bones at the bottom of a long chute in a cave, they assumed the naledi made a practice of dropping their dead down the chute.
However, in what's called Dinaledi Chamber, archaeologists have found new evidence that the naledi exhibited exceptional care of their deceased, actually transporting them through treacherous terrain to finally bury them.
The evidence shows the naledi carried their dead into a cave and then climbed with them in hand up a large rock face and down an extremely narrow 12-meter chute in order to get to their burial space. Once in the chamber, they lit a fire and buried their deceased using stone tools.
Hundreds are buried in the Dinaledi Chamber, maybe more. The naledi even made carvings at the entrance of the burial chamber, much like Neanderthals and early humans did.
After carefully digging the hole, placing the body inside, and covering it with dirt, the naledi climbed back up the treacherous chute, down the rock wall, and out of the cave, into the light. If that doesn't show love and care, what does?
It must have felt like being reborn - making that return journey from the darkness and pain, back into the light of day. You may call it happenstance, but we know that modern humans have constructed rituals and religious rites much like this with the purpose of having specific, transformative, transcendental effects on the psyche since the beginning of known history.
(So, wow naledi. You might really have more going on than we can imagine!)
This one relic of the past that we have from Homo naledi tells us volumes about the bonds they shared within their community. It tells us of their emotional and mental capacities. The amount of intentionality, cooperation, and planning that it must have taken to make this journey with a corpse, along with the materials for fire making and rock carving, is immense.
Not only could they not stand to see what the rest of the natural world would do to their community members after death, but they were intentional in the ritual honoring and interring of them. I can speculate that they cared for their own in everyday life, as well. Feasibly, they were quite conscious and intentional about how they constructed their society and lived their lives.
That a creature that would appear at first glance to be closer to apes than humans did all of this causes me to rethink concepts such as “progress” and “evolution.” As a result, I am becoming so obsessed with this creature that I have taken to calling my children naledis.
I wish I could see their community, their societal structure.
Because from what we can see, what the naledi are doing there is so, so profound. More so than may meet the eye. This is because this mortuary practice - intentionally perhaps - leaves remarkable, revolutionary space for the sacred to enter. The type of space where true social innovation is born from.
In the book The Dawn of Everything, the authors propose that:
“The really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world."
From what we can tell, the naledi had most, or possibly all, of those markers in that one after-death care ritual.
But what about us?
Because it's not the size of our brains - it's what we do with them, as one scientist put it in the Netflix documentary about the excavation, called Unknown.
And if we think about what we are doing within our cranial cavities, and infer how consciously we are structuring our society in the modern Western world based on how we care for our own after death - what might that inference be?
What happens when someone dies in our world?
We pick up the phone. We hand the care over. Who knows what happens after that behind closed doors? And for those of us who work in the death space, anyway, I think we all know that there is a wide range in terms of the quality of care that ensues.
We have some ritualized (or is it stale, habitualized) coming-together to honor our losses. Shadows of ritual created long ago, mostly. But can we say we participate in something that truly breaks us out of our daily state of group-think and cultural hypnosis? Do we regularly sanction wild, sacred space for new social forms to be born?
Sure, grief and loss will do this to one extent or another regardless, if we let it. But do we have a good way of safely holding this space for each other?
And generally, do we take care of our own today with the same effort to honor that the naledi did over 250,000 years ago? Are we willing to be present with the death journey like that? Be hands-on like that? Go through personal death and rebirth rituals during these opportune liminal times of loss and grief like that?
There is a fringe movement of death doulas and alternative funeral workers doing just that, but most don’t know this exists or why they need it.
But never mind the dead, for a moment.
How are we stewarding our living in our very wealthy society? Our aging? Our sick and disabled?
I have a friend in Dogon country, West Africa, and he has shared that the Dogon still have their ancient cultural funeral rites. These traditionally include climbing up a sheer rock face with their dead as well.
They are suffering from an economy destroyed by conflict, agriculture severely affected by global warming and drought - major stuff - but still they do this. And is there homelessness there like there is in America?
No. The Dogon may not have much in the way of resources, infrastructure, and comforts compared to us in America, but they have deep-time rituals, and they care for their own. The west will call their place “undeveloped” as if their life way is somewhere behind us in the evolutionary past, just like we assumed naledi couldn’t possibly engage in the burial ritual that we now know they did.
Just like it was assumed (or constructed) that the peoples found by Europeans in the American continents were less intelligent, less politically and socially conscious - the opposite just might be true. In actuality, in looking at the evidence - we find that it was likely in reading about Indigenous American thought and philosophy (shared mainly by Jesuit missionaries attempting to convert the Indians) that the French enlightenment was born, according to anthropologist-activists Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything.
We had that backwards, likely - simply because we wanted to.
Perhaps this shows an innate narcissism and egotism of our kind that blinds us to valuing the meeting of human needs, as well as stewarding to the interconnected needs of all our earthly relatives above material progress.
So, no - I'm not saying you must go rock-climbing with corpses to be in a healthy society. While many peoples have done and still do this as part of their funeral rites - there are many other ways culturally in which humans have constructed after-death rituals which have similar, yet culturally distinct, effects.
As a newly trained death doula on a journey to find my death-work (or let it find me), learning about and imaging the naledi’s journey into the Dinaledi Chamber to inter their dead clarifies for me why I was first called to this wild and sacred space.
Because years ago I sensed the same thing that the archeologists on Unknown teach us: that death-care is an ultimate act of love. It is a hallmark of true community-care, which is as relevant today as it was hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s universal.
But, to circle back to where we began - if you would join me in looking at our mortuary behavior as an indicator of the state of love and community-care in our society - what inferences and parallels would you make?
More importantly, how can we all bring the types of ritual liminality into our lives that can allow for both the death and rebirth of healthy social forms?
Editorial by Jacqueline King-Presant, edited by Laura Glasser
Updated 7/22/23
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