All Female? What the Rising Star Cave Homo naledi Burials Reveal — and Don't

Danko · August 24, 2026

Homo naledi Rising Star Cave Dinaledi Chamber proteomics South Africa

In June 2026, a team spanning the University of Copenhagen, the University of the Witwatersrand and the National Geographic Society's Rising Star project published something Homo naledi research has never had before: molecular sex data. Acid-etched enamel from 23 teeth, representing at least 20 individuals recovered from the Dinaledi Chamber, was screened for Amelogenin-Y, a peptide encoded on the Y chromosome and normally detectable only in biological males. It turned up in none of them. As co-author John Hawks put it, these remains are older than any confirmed Neanderthal or modern human burial, and now they may also all belong to one sex.

A Peptide, Not a Skeleton

The method itself is why this data exists at all. Homo naledi fossils are estimated at 236,000 to 335,000 years old, well past the point where ancient DNA reliably survives in South Africa's climate. What does survive, in far better condition, is enamel protein. A 2017 PNAS study by Nicolas Stewart and colleagues established that minimally destructive acid etching could recover sex-linked amelogenin peptides from tooth enamel even when DNA extraction fails, by comparing the AMELX peptide (present in both sexes) against AMELY (present only in males with an intact Y-linked copy). Applying that method to Homo naledi is a genuine methodological event — the first time this species has yielded biological sex data of any kind, rather than sex estimated from bone size and shape, which is far less reliable in a species this small-bodied and this incompletely known.

Zero Is a Loud Number, From a Small, Non-Random Sample

Twenty individuals showing no male marker is a striking result. It is not, on its own, a description of Homo naledi as a species. Every one of those 20 individuals came from a single chamber, reached only through a punishing, near-vertical route deep in the Rising Star cave system — a sample defined entirely by whatever process put bodies in that specific place, not a cross-section of the population as a whole. What that process was remains one of the most contested questions in the field. Lee Berger's team has argued, in a paper published in eLife, that the positioning of some remains reflects deliberate burial — treating the chamber's contents as evidence of intentional funerary behavior in a small-brained hominin, centuries before any confirmed Homo sapiens burial. A separate team, led by María Martinón-Torres, published a direct rebuttal in the Journal of Human Evolution arguing the taphonomic evidence presented does not meet the standard needed to distinguish deliberate burial from natural accumulation.

That disagreement matters here because it decides what an all-female result would even mean. If bodies were deliberately placed in the chamber by other naledi individuals, a uniform sex ratio becomes a real claim about mortuary selection — who was chosen to be put there, and why. If the chamber instead accumulated through some natural process, geological or otherwise, that filtered who ended up there, then "all female" is a fact about that filter, not about naledi social behavior. The proteomic result doesn't adjudicate between these two readings. It just raises the stakes on an argument that was already unresolved, by adding a second pattern in the same assemblage that only makes sense once you know how the assemblage was formed.

All Female? What the Rising Star Cave Homo naledi Burials Reveal — and Don't

A Peptide, Not a Skeleton

Zero Is a Loud Number, From a Small, Non-Random Sample

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