The bones of the hominin Homo naledi were discovered in a cave in South Africa in 2015, and are said by anthropologists to be a new species of genus Homo. That makes at least five at last count, and we can be certain there are more to be stumbled upon. Anthropologists are now trying to fit naledi into the homo sapiens family tree, but suppose he doesn’t belong in a tree falsely leading from ape to us? My view is naledi does not belong in our direct line of descent, and neither does the giant homo heidelbergensis, from whom we are all supposed to be descended, nor does homo neanderthalis or homo denisova belong on the tree. I believe we all had a common ancestor possibly as far back as seven million years ago, but that common ancestor gave rise, through mutation, of several lines of ancestry that resulted in individual lines of descent for our primate cousins the ape, monkey, chimpanzee and so forth. Australopithecus, humans, neanderthal, denisova and naledi are cousins, in much the same way horses and donkeys and zebras and so forth are cousins. There is no one line of human descent, as often pictured in anthropology texts, a line where every hominin discovery must be fitted into its proper place in line. They are not in our line, they are in their own lines, with their own lines of descent from the mutated offsprings of our common ancestor. Not all of these mutations need have, or would have, occurred at the same time, but seven million years is a long time, and much could have, and did, happen. Remember this: anthropology, as a science, is not sacred. It stopped licking fossil bones with their tongues to determine age only recently. The out of Africa fakery was concocted somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century by a couple of anthropologists from the Frankfurt school of cultural Marxism, led by Franz Boas, in order to fit Karl Marx’s vision of a utopian human past. At this stage in the science, anthropology is a guess, and their guess is as good as mine, though mine seems a bit more logical than trying to fit everything into one line of ancestry.

Into the deep dark caves they crawl
Listening to the siren call
Of Nobel prizes for them all
If they can only find
The holy grail they know is there
As in their lights the bones lay bare
Collecting with exquisite care
Bone fragments of all kind
We honor them for all they do
The sacred knowledge they pursue
To find what led to me and you
The end for which they long
They place the bones in one long line
Of ancestors both yours and mine
But in the meantime I opine
That they are mostly wrong