A new study concludes that every Homo naledi individual known to science is female, adding weight to a growing picture of a carefully tended, culturally expressive hominin. But the same work is forcing archaeologists to confront what it means to dig up graves
In the passage between the Hill Antechamber burial chamber and the Dinaledi Burial Chamber, Lee Berger holds a photographic scale beside a crosshatched engraving known as Panel A. The moment looks almost ceremonial—until you remember what the markings represent and what Berger says they don’t.
“These symbols weren’t meant for us. Whatever they’re meant for, it certainly wasn’t for a Homo sapiens,” Berger says. In his view. the engravings were intended for someone else’s return. someone else’s descendants—or for some purpose entirely outside our species’ story. “They were meant either for them to come back to. their descendants to come back to. or some other purpose. but they weren’t meant for us.”.
The Rising Star cave system has become a kind of pressure point for debates about culture in deep prehistory. For some archaeologists. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals are already enough to anchor the idea that hominins could use fire. leave traces of it. and perhaps even communicate in durable ways. Evidence from Rising Star had suggested that Homo naledi used fire as well. The same cave context has yielded the rock engravings that Berger, Hawks, and their colleagues described in a 2023 paper.
What makes this latest conclusion land with extra force is the gender finding: every Homo naledi we know of is female. That result tightens a question that had already been unsettling in its own way—who exactly were these individuals, and how might their lives and actions have unfolded?
For Berger, the stakes are partly intellectual, partly ethical. He argues that if Homo naledi used fire and made deliberate marks in their environment—and if they tended their dead—then they may have done so with cognition that should be treated as real. not inferior. Neanderthals and Denisovans. he notes. were genetically. anatomically. and cognitively very close to humans. to the point that some anthropologists argue they shouldn’t even be classified as separate species. Against that backdrop, Berger says Homo naledi is different in a crucial way.
“This is our first contact with a—and I think it’s important to repeat this—a non-human species. Their brains are not human brains,” Berger says. And he describes the concern that follows: how humanity navigates that first contact.
So far. no other hominin species—meaning none of the Australopithecines and not even Homo erectus—has produced evidence that so clearly matches this combination: tending the dead and etching art or symbols on cave walls nearby. In other words. Berger says Homo naledi’s behavior may be on a level with human cognition that we can’t casually dismiss.
The protein results behind the gender conclusion have also changed what happens in the cave. Berger and his team paused their excavations in the cave system after the findings. even though analysis in the lab continues. His hope is that the protein study will push anthropologists—and Homo sapiens more broadly—to think seriously about the ethics of digging up the graves of an intelligent and cultured but non-human species.
“It certainly will mean we have to stop digging hominins like dinosaurs,” Berger says. “I think that we have the responsibility to be respectful, but we also have a responsibility to also be real. This is more like a Star Trek episode, you know?. I know what we do if it’s a human culture, but it isn’t one.”.
Understanding what comes next, Berger argues, requires more than a single finding. The first step is learning more about Homo naledi and their culture, which will demand more excavation and more lab work—carefully, because the ethical ledger is already changing.
The study appears in Cell in 2026, with DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2026.05.044.
Homo naledi Rising Star archaeology human evolution burial practices cave engravings fire use protein results ancient DNA ethics of excavation Cell 2026 DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2026.05.044