A child of darkness
“A child of darkness” was the ominous title of the media announcement on 4 November 2021 by Lee Berger from Wits University. A new juvenile skull (nicknamed Leti) had been discovered in the Rising Star cave system of South Africa. Berger has delivered impressive finds in the past, so this would be quite a letdown for anyone expecting something similar. As evident from the reconstruction of the Leti skull, most of it (black—see photo) is missing.
The skull was found in an extremely narrow passage, its fragmented remains “found on a shelf of limestone about 80 cm above the present cave floor.” There were “no signs of carnivore damage or damage by scavenging”. Nor was there “evidence of the skull having been washed into the narrow passage”. Hence, the main issue raised by the find is how Leti and the other Homo naledi specimens ended up in the inaccessible and cramped spaces of the cave. It remains a mystery, although the authors hypothesize “that it is likely other members of its species were involved in the skull reaching such a difficult place.”
Based on dental eruption, and the assumption that the child matured like a human, it was suggested Leti was about 4 to 6 years old at time of death. The dental morphology was said to support attribution to Homo naledi. Given the location of the find this attribution seems reasonable. Creation magazine (40(4): 36–38, 2018) has previously discussed Homo naledi individuals. They were post-Fall descendants of Adam, probably erectus-like post-Babel humans. Several of them possibly suffered from a developmental pathology known as cretinism, common in regions with iodine deficiency in the soils.
- Wits University, A child of darkness, wits.ac.za, 4 Nov 2021.
- Brophy, J.K. et al., Immature hominin craniodental remains from a new locality in the Rising Star cave system, South Africa, PaleoAnthropology 2021:1, pp. 1−14, 5 Nov 2021.
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