Qualla: Rising Star Cave

Rising Star Cave: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photo by Brett Eloff. Courtesy Profberger and Wits University who release it under the terms below., CC BY-SA 4.0. The hardest part was a crack in the rock called the Chute. To reach the chamber where the bones lay, a person had to wriggle down a vertical slot that narrows in places to about eighteen centimeters - roughly the width of a laptop. In September 2013, two recreational cavers, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, forced themselves through it and surfaced in a chamber whose floor was scattered with fossil bones. When they showed the photographs to paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, he realized he had a problem most scientists would envy: an extraordinary trove of human-relative fossils, locked behind a passage almost no adult could fit through.

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Image: Photo by Brett Eloff. Courtesy Profberger and Wits University who release it under the terms below. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rising Star Cave: The Underground Astronauts

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Fraser University, CC BY-SA 2.0. Berger needed excavators with rare qualifications: trained in paleontology, experienced in caving, and small enough to thread the Chute. He posted the call on Facebook. Within ten days, nearly sixty people applied, and Berger chose six - all of them women, all slight of build. Th...

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Image: Simon Fraser University | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rising Star Cave: A Face No One Expected

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernietaylor, CC BY 4.0. The bones belonged to a species never seen before. In 2015, the team named it Homo naledi - naledi means 'star' in Sesotho, after the cave - and gave the chamber the name Dinaledi, 'place of stars.' The species was a contradiction. It stood under five feet tall, with humanlike ha...

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Image: Bernietaylor | CC BY 4.0

Rising Star Cave: How Old, and How They Died

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting), CC BY-SA 3.0. Early guesses ran into millions of years, on the assumption that so primitive a brain must be ancient. The rock said otherwise. In 2017, direct dating placed the fossils between 236,000 and 335,000 years old - astonishingly recent, overlapping with the dawn of our own species. Th...

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Image: Eric Gaba (Sting - fr:Sting) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rising Star Cave: The Burial Question

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit english Wikipedia user, CC BY-SA 3.0. Berger's team offered a startling answer: that Homo naledi carried its dead into the dark on purpose. In 2023 they reported what they interpreted as deliberate burials and faint engravings scratched into the cave walls - behaviors long thought to require a large, symbolic-thinkin...

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Image: english Wikipedia user | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rising Star Cave: A Place Few Will Ever See

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernietaylor, CC BY 4.0. Rising Star lies in the Bloubank River valley, deep within the Cradle of Humankind, a short distance from the more famous Sterkfontein caves. Its passages wind through ancient dolomite for hundreds of meters. Fewer than fifty people have ever stood in the Dinaledi Chamber; the Ch...

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Image: Bernietaylor | CC BY 4.0