Jewish Bubba: Documentary of Cave of Homo Naledi Bones-Oldest In The World

Nadene Goldfoot

Meet Neo the most complete skeleton of Homo Naledi ever found . Many must have looked on with jealous eyes in 2013 as Lee Berger at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his colleagues pulled hundreds of bones from the Dinaledi chamber in Rising Star.

Meet a Man of 1928, 20 year old Boxer Billie Meshke of Portland, Oregon, 5' 8" tall, 170 lbs or less; my father, the Jewish homo Sapiens of Lithuanian Ashkenazi Jews; Boxed at the Neighborhood House. His ancestors came from Israel, then migrated to Lithuania. How does Neo compare with today's man, I ask?

Netflix is showing a documentary that has turned out to be very popular. "The documentary heads to an anthropology site that is found in South Africa. This area is essential as more human bones have been found there than in any other area worldwide. It means it is vital to research the origins of life on the planet. This documentary spends a lot of time in the Rising Star Cave System, and the belief is that the bones may provide evidence of a new type of prehistoric human called Homo Naledi.

Homo naledi is an extinct species of archaic human discovered in 2013 in the , Cradle of Humankind, South Africa dating to the Middle Pleistocene 335,000–236,000 years ago.

The earliest known examples of Neanderthal-like fossils are around 430,000 years old. The best-known Neanderthals lived between about 130,000 and 40,000 years ago, after which all physical evidence of them vanishes. Female Homo neanderthalensis skull discovered at Tabun Cave at Mount Carmel in Israel.

The Rising Star Cave Systems, also known as Empire Cave, can be found in the Malmani Dolomites in Bloubank River Valley.

The wheel was invented in the , about 6,000 years ago, in Lower Mesopotamia(modern-day Iraq), where the Sumerian people inserted rotating axles into solid discs of wood. Homo Sapiens invented this. Scientists found that at least 10% of the modern human genome has changed within the past 50,000 years! Many of those changes relate to various brain functions. This means that the human brain has evolved since prehistoric days, which is the opposite of what traditional evolutionary psychologists thought. Scientists also looked at how fast genetic change happened in 62 animal species, and discovered that a trait will change in only 25 generations. It may not seem like it, but in evolutionary terms, that's pretty quick. This information helped to disprove the theory of evolutionary gradualism. Not only has the brain evolved, but it has evolved quickly, not slowly.
No wonder I'm having a hard time with my Smart TV and my computer at times with my son so much smarter in these areas as I nee him to bail me out of situations I get into...his brain has evolved more than mine!

So your brain really is different from a caveman's brain!

It is regarded as part of The Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa." This is the continent of Egypt which is in North Africa in which the Pharaoh's go back with Prehistoric Egypt (prior to 3100 BC) or over 5,000 years ago. Neanderthals disappeared about 35,000 years before the first Pharaoh, though sometimes I see people that look a lot like a Neanderthal.

The bones are the oldest every found, say older than the Denisovan or Neandertal bones; seemingly a mixture of homo Sapien and chimpanzee bones, to put it mildly. There are a multitude of bones in this cave. They go back three times farther than any bones found in Israel, where the oldest bones have been, we thought. The question this brings up with anthropologists is that it looks like, way deep down in this cave, bones were found that were lightly buried. The first thought in the PhD's mind was, did they have afterlife as a reason for doing so? My thought was to keep them from being gnawed on by varmits.

Other comments are: that the documentary Follows Paleo anthropologist Lee Berger in South Africa, as he and his team try to prove that the world's oldest graveyard, they found, is not human. A small brained, ape-like creature could have practiced complex burial rituals.

Thinking back about Abraham who lived during the 2nd millennium BCE or 1948 BCE, almost 4,000 years ago. At Hebron, Abraham purchased the Cave of Machpelah as a burial place for his wife, Sarah, from Ephron, the Hittite (Genesis 23); This became a family sepulchre. He planned on having it as a place of the family tomb. He is the father of the Jewish people who brought the concept of monotheism. When he buried the dead, was he thinking of afterlife ? We know that the city of Ur, which Abraham and Sarah had left near the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia, has been explored by archaeologists. Did they find evidence in the belief of afterlife? Did they bury their dead?

The Jews, even Abraham, showed respect for the dead by burying them and concern for the future. Abraham was in pain from losing Sarah. So, the honor and respect, due even to a lifeless human being , and the concern for the mental, emotional, and spiritual well being of the living mourners, and the requirement of extending comfort to them caused a development of burial customs with Jews.

The Jewish tradition cherishes life. the Torah was given to Israel so that "you shall live" by the teachings and "not die through them." Death has no virtue since the dead cannot praise the Lord.." (Psalms).

It didn't have anything to do with afterlife at this time. Leave that to the Egyptians who made that their life-time building of pyramids.

Around 100,000 years ago, the climate worsened abruptly and the environment of Central-Eastern Europe shifted from forested to open steppe/taiga habitat, promoting the dispersal of wooly mammoth, wooly rhino and other cold adapted species from the Arctic. Neanderthals living in these territories suffered severe demographic contractions due to the new ecological conditions and only returned to the areas above 48° N latitude during climatic ameliorations.

However, in spite of the discontinuous settlement, specific bifacial stone tools persisted in Central-Eastern Europe from the beginning of this ecological shift until the demise of the Neanderthals. This cultural tradition is named Micoquian, (making handaxes) and spread across the frosty environment between eastern France, Poland and the Caucasus.

Micoquien artifacts are distributed across all of Eastern Europe and Central Europe. In Germany they can be found at Balver Höhle and Lonetal.

Previous genetic analyses showed that two major demographic turnover events in Neanderthal history are associated with the Micoquian cultural tradition. At ~90,000 years ago, western European Neanderthals replaced the local Altai Neanderthals population in Central Asia. Successively, by at least ~45,000 years ago, western European Neanderthals substituted the local groups in the Caucasus.

We've invented a lot; from the wheel to rockets to the moon in the last 6,000 years. Once we got our brains in gear,, there has been no stopping us. Those dendrites in our brains just keep on multiplying, helping us to think more.

Resource:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2130280-meet-neo-the-most-complete-skeleton-of-homo-naledi-ever-found/

https://readysteadycut.com/2023/07/20/where-is-unknown-cave-of-bones-location/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_naledi#:~:text=Homo%20naledi%20is%20an%20extinct,Pleistocene%20335%2C000%E2%80%93236%2C000%20years%20ago.

https://neuroscience.ucdavis.edu/news/making-and-breaking-connections-brain

https://askabiologist.asu.edu/plosable/do-you-have-cavemans-brain

Netflix: Unknown Cave of Bones https://www.netflix.com/title/81473682

Book: To Be a Jew by Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin