Homo naledi ten times younger, according to reports in New Scientist 25 April 2017 and BBC News, 27 April 2017. The bones named Homo naledi were discovered deep in a cave in South Africa in 2013. At the time Lee Berger, who led the team that studied the bones, claimed they could be up to three million years old. Berger has now revised that estimate and suggests they are really 200,000 to 300,000 years old. According to Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, “This is astonishingly young for a species that still displays primitive characteristics found in fossils about 2 million years old, such as the small brain size, curved fingers, and form of the shoulder, trunk and hip joint”.
Editorial Comment: Come on Chris – living apes have small brains and curved fingers, so these features do not make any bones old. The only reason this matters to people like Lee Berger and Chris Stringer is that they believe human beings evolved from the ape lineage around three million years ago. Hence putting an age of only thousands of years on the H.naledi bones puts them way off any human ancestor evolutionary timetable.
Never forget that Homo naledi is not one skeleton, or even a partial skeleton from only one individual. It was the name given to a mass of hundreds of disarticulated bone pieces found lying on a cave floor. Some of the bones have human-like features, and some have ape-like features, and this was why it was claimed to be a human ancestor. As the bones are broken and separate they may turn out to be from different species, including both apes and humans, and have been jumbled up by being washed into the cave.
For more information on Homo naledi see the question: Is the discovery of Homo naledi in South Africa evidence for apes evolving into humans? Answer here.
Evidence News vol. 17 No. 7
3 May 2017
Creation Research Australia
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