Then Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and Professor Lee Berger hold a replica of the skull of a Homo naledi during the unveiling of the discovery. (File photo)
Did Homo naledi have a soul?
That may sound like a very strange question, but let me explain the context.
It is now 10 years since the excavation of H naledi’s skeletal remains in the Cradle of Humankind near Krugersdorp.
About 1 500 fossilised bones, estimated at about a quarter of a million years old, were recovered from an almost inaccessible recess of the deep and convoluted Rising Star cave system.
How the bones got there remains a mystery; there are no signs of occupation, while natural transport by moving water or predators seems unlikely.
One (controversial) theory is that H naledi transported its dead comrades and offspring to the depths of the cave and intentionally buried them, using fire to light the impenetrable darkness and scratching geometric patterns on the cave wall.
The burial claim, rejected as unproven by most peer reviewers a decade ago, was bolstered by a follow-up paper with more compelling evidence published last week.
Naledi was a hominin, a member of a broad genus of species ancestral or closely related to humans. Where it slots into the evolutionary family tree is unclear, as it was a “biological mosaic” of primitive and derived features.
It had a very small brain, at 400-600cc about half the volume of Homo sapiens, and the upper limbs and curved fingers of a climber. But it walked upright with a modern gait on feet like ours.
Reverting to my initial question, what, in the first place, does “soul” mean? A number of ideas, some very ancient, coalesce in this term.
At its most humdrum, as in “there isn’t a soul in the street”, it means a single person.
But it can also carry the idea of a unique individual, with his or her own subjectivity and identity.
The biologist and author Richard Dawkins argues that used in this way, “soul” denotes one’s personal DNA, which is unrepeatably distinct from everyone else’s.
And it is bound up with human freedom, in the sense that free choice presupposes an awareness of oneself and the range of one’s possibilities — including ethical and devotional options.
The soul is often thought of as the wellspring of moral consciousness, artistic sensibility and the higher emotions, such as agape (selfless love), with its concomitants of service and self-sacrifice; compassion for one’s fellows; and the intuition of a higher cosmic order.
This is integral to the religious conception, which goes much further. Under the strong influence of Aristotelian physics, the Catholic Church views the soul as the “form” or immaterial deep nature of the human being, the vital principle which animates the body and survives bodily death.
In the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, for example, death is the “loosing of the silver cord” that links soul and body. The Latin “spirare” — to breathe — is the root of the term “spirit”.
No reasoned or scientific evidence as evidence for the soul’s immortality, which is a pure article of faith.
And crucially, the soul is conceived of as peculiar to human beings.
Down the Christian ages this has been the source of much monstrous behaviour, with the cruel punishment and slave-driving of colonial subjects and animals seen as divested of souls by the Creator.
In our day, after Charles Darwin’s world-transforming proposition that humans are part of, and continuous with, the animal kingdom, claims for a rigid human-animal distinction have a very old-fashioned feel.
Modern biology and anthropology have steadily chipped away at the range of cognitively advanced activities once considered uniquely human, including language and tool-making.
If anything, we are closer to the older idea that there is a continuum, with humans intermediate in the great ladder of being between the beasts and the angels.
Where does all this leave H naledi?
If it intentionally buried its dead, could such a practice point to a very human connection between the living and the departed — even, perhaps, some dim notion of life after death?
And what of the cave markings? If one could show they were a primitive attempt by the creature to assert its presence, rather than the result of natural processes — in other words, to proclaim “I was here”, like hand-prints in other cave settings — would that not also suggest cognitively modern human behaviour in embryo?
Was this “ensoulment” at a lower level, and is it conceivable that the soul itself evolves, as it does in successive lives according to Hindu belief?
Naledi’s evolutionary relationship with H sapiens, if any, is unknown, because it has not proved possible to extract its DNA.
But scholars tend to see the transition from the australopithecine genus, which includes Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), the Taung Child and “Mrs Ples” on the one hand, and the Homo genus on the other, as a crucial leap forward in the development of modern humans, though the nature and timing of that transition is poorly understood.
Is that supposed leap, when australopithecines started on the path to Homo sapiens, conceived as the trigger-point of “ensoulment”? If not, when, where and how in the long journey of human evolution did the switch from animals to humans, and thus the emergence of the human soul, take place?
With their belief in miracles, revealed mysteries, angelic visitations, divine interventions and the like, religions encourage the idea of sudden, inexplicable, world-shaking events.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey argued, for example, that the birth of Jesus had to be seen as a metaphysical singularity standing outside the march of history.
Likewise, Pope Pius XII argued in his encyclical Humani Generis that although our bodies may have undergone evolution from previous biological forms (under divine initiation and guidance), all souls are immediately created by God.
Catholics like to argue that they have never denied the theory of evolution, in contrast with the mainly American biblical literalists of “Young Earth Creation” beliefs, who hold that the world is between 6 000 and 10 000 years old.
The latter would dismiss the estimated age of the Naledi bones — between 335 000 and 236 000 years — as a plot by atheistic scientists to undermine the credibility of “inerrant” scriptures, including the folk tales of the snake in the Garden, Noah’s Ark, Jonah’s whale and the rest of the nursery school library.
The Catholic Church has made an effort to reconcile faith and science. But scholars do not see evolution as a sudden leap or series of leaps. They see it, rather, as an extremely slow process involving the gradual interchange and admixture of genes from many hominid species, referred to in the current literature as “a braided stream”.
The revolutionary new technology of ancient DNA extraction and analysis has shown that all modern Europeans have a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA, for example, while East Asians carry some genes of a mysterious newly discovered hominid species dubbed “Denisovans”.
A further difference is that many scientists would not separate body and soul as being of a different “substance”, shaped by different creative forces, in the manner of Catholic theology.
They would hold that H Naledi’s soul, its intrinsic personality and behaviour, would have been subject to the same evolutionary drivers as its hands and feet.
Drew Forrest is a former deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian.
