Scientists have determined that all 20 Homo naledi skeletons recovered from South Africa's Rising Star Cave are female, according to The Times of India. The finding challenges long-held assumptions about ancient hominin social organisation and burial practices, while quietly exposing how palaeoanthropology — in india and globally — has historically defaulted to treating ancient remains as male unless proven otherwise.
Twenty skeletons. Not one male among them. Deep inside South Africa's Rising Star Cave — a passage so narrow that only slender-framed researchers could shimmy through to reach the remains — every single Homo naledi individual recovered turns out to be female. According to The Times of india, this revelation is forcing palaeoanthropology to confront a question it has historically been remarkably comfortable ignoring: what were women doing in these ancient spaces, and why has science been so slow to ask?
The Rising Star Cave system, nestled in the Cradle of Humankind about 50 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg, has been a source of controversy and wonder since 2013, when cavers first discovered a vast assemblage of hominin bones in the Dinaledi Chamber. The species — Homo naledi, with its peculiar mix of archaic and modern features, its curved climbing fingers, and a brain volume that palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger and colleagues described in their 2015 paper in eLife as approximately 465 to 560 cubic centimetres, roughly a third the size of a modern human's — was itself a shock. But this latest finding may be more destabilising still. A chamber of exclusively female remains doesn't just complicate our picture of Homo naledi; it detonates the default assumption that ancient burial or depositional sites represent generic, mixed populations.
Consider what the all-female composition could mean. Were these women deposited deliberately — a mortuary practice organised along sex lines? Was the Dinaledi Chamber a space used exclusively by females, perhaps for shelter, childbirth, or some purpose we cannot yet fathom? Or does the absence of males point to something darker — conflict, exclusion, a social order whose logic is separated from us by a quarter of a million years? As the october 2015 National Geographic cover story on the Homo naledi discovery detailed, the chamber's extreme inaccessibility — reachable only through a 12-metre vertical chute barely 18 centimetres wide — already suggested intentional deposition rather than accident. The sex homogeneity sharpens that suggestion into something closer to a demand for explanation.
The 'Default Male' Problem in Palaeoanthropology
Here is where the finding quietly indicts the field itself. For decades, when ancient hominin remains were fragmentary or ambiguous, the working assumption in many excavation reports — including several major indian sites — defaulted to male. Partial pelves were read through a masculine template. Robust features were coded male. The result: women were systematically undercounted in the fossil record, not because they weren't there, but because the analytical lens wasn't calibrated to see them.
India's own archaeological tradition is not exempt from this critique. At sites like Inamgaon in maharashtra or the Mesolithic burials of Mahadaha in Uttar Pradesh, skeletal sexing was often secondary to typological concerns — tools, pottery, ornaments. When sex was assigned, it frequently relied on outdated morphological markers that skewed male. As the indian bioarchaeologist Veena Mushrif-Tripathy of Deccan college has argued in her work Human Skeletal Remains from Chalcolithic and iron Age Sites in Western India (published by Deccan college Post-Graduate and Research Institute), indian bioarchaeology has historically treated the biological profile of skeletal populations as an afterthought, not a primary research question. The Rising Star finding is a mirror held up to every excavation that ever defaulted to "probably male" and moved on.
What Makes Rising Star So Extraordinary
The cave itself is a character in this story. The Dinaledi Chamber sits behind what researchers call Superman's Crawl — a passage requiring contortions that would challenge a trained gymnast. The original excavation team, as documented in the 2015 National Geographic cover story by Jamie Shreeve and the accompanying PBS NOVA/National Geographic documentary Dawn of Humanity, was deliberately composed of six slender female scientists — dubbed the "Underground Astronauts" — precisely because they were the only researchers who could physically access the fossils. There is a poetic symmetry in the fact that women recovered the remains of women from a space no broad-shouldered researcher could enter.
Homo naledi, dated to approximately 236,000 to 335,000 years ago according to geological analyses published in the journal eLife by Dirks et al. (2017), occupied a strange evolutionary niche. Its brain volume — described by Berger et al. in their 2015 eLife paper as comparable in size to a large orange — was roughly a third the size of a modern human's, yet the evidence from Rising Star — including what Berger and colleagues have controversially interpreted as possible burial behaviour and even rudimentary cave engravings — suggests cognitive capacities far beyond what brain volume alone would predict. The all-female assemblage adds another layer: if these were deliberate depositions, then the social organisation capable of such acts was also capable of sex-differentiated ritual. That is a cognitive and cultural leap that demands we stop condescending to small-brained hominins.
The Controversy That Won't Settle
Not everyone in the field accepts the burial hypothesis. Critics, including some prominent South African geologists, have suggested that the bones could have been washed into the chamber by water action over millennia. The all-female finding both complicates and strengthens the intentionality argument: water doesn't sort by sex. If geological processes deposited these remains, the absence of males becomes statistically improbable unless the population using or inhabiting this cave area was already sex-segregated. Either way, the evidence points to social behaviour more structured than we assumed.
The controversy around Rising Star also extends to the age of the species and its place in the human family tree. Some researchers have questioned whether Homo naledi is truly a distinct species or a variant of Homo erectus. The exclusively female sample, paradoxically, may make definitive taxonomic placement harder — morphological variation within a single-sex sample is narrower, making it more difficult to establish the full range of the species' physical diversity.
What indian Archaeology Can Learn
For indian researchers, the lesson is both specific and structural. india possesses one of the richest Palaeolithic records in Asia — from the Acheulean sites of the Hunsgi-Baichbal valley in karnataka to the rock shelters of Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh. Yet skeletal populations from indian prehistoric sites remain understudied from a biological anthropology perspective. The rising availability of ancient dna analysis and improved osteological sexing techniques means that many indian assemblages could, and should, be revisited with the question Rising Star now forces: who, exactly, are these people — and have we been seeing them clearly?
The all-female cave is not just a South African story. It is a provocation aimed at every archaeological tradition that has treated sex as a footnote, gender as irrelevant to deep prehistory, and the default hominin as implicitly male. Twenty women in a dark chamber, a quarter of a million years ago, arranged by hands whose intentions we can only guess at — and it took us until 2026 to notice they were all women. The question is not just what Homo naledi was doing. It is what we have been failing to do.
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Key Takeaways
- All 20 Homo naledi skeletons recovered from South Africa's Rising Star Cave have been identified as female, according to The Times of India.
- The exclusively female assemblage challenges the assumption that ancient depositional or burial sites represent mixed-sex populations.
- The finding exposes a long-standing 'default male' bias in palaeoanthropology, including in indian archaeological traditions.
- Homo naledi, dated to approximately 236,000–335,000 years ago, already challenged assumptions about cognition and brain size; sex-differentiated deposition adds a new layer.
- Water-deposition theories for the cave are weakened by the sex homogeneity — geological processes do not sort remains by sex.
- Indian Palaeolithic and Mesolithic skeletal assemblages deserve re-examination with modern sexing techniques in light of these findings.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the new discovery about Homo naledi in Rising Star Cave?
Scientists have determined that all 20 Homo naledi skeletons recovered from South Africa's Rising Star Cave are female, with no male specimens identified, according to The Times of India.
Where is Rising Star Cave located?
Rising Star Cave is located in the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO World heritage Site approximately 50 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa.
How old is Homo naledi?
Homo naledi has been dated to approximately 236,000 to 335,000 years ago, based on geological analyses by Dirks et al. published in the journal eLife in 2017.
Why is the all-female finding significant?
The exclusively female composition challenges assumptions about ancient social structures and burial practices, and exposes a long-standing bias in palaeoanthropology that has defaulted to treating unidentified remains as male.
What does Rising Star Cave mean for indian archaeology?
The finding highlights the need to revisit indian Palaeolithic and Mesolithic skeletal assemblages with modern biological sexing techniques, as indian bioarchaeology has historically treated skeletal sex determination as secondary to artefact analysis.
Is there a Rising Star Cave documentary?
Yes, the PBS NOVA/National Geographic documentary Dawn of Humanity (2015) provides extensive coverage of the Homo naledi discovery and the Rising Star Cave excavations.
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