via Sapiens, 27 July 2023: This op ed was written in response to the controversial Homo Naledi claim. Research has dispelled earlier claims that Homo floresiensis used fire, but misconceptions persist despite corrective efforts by scientists.
While Sutikna and his team worked incredibly hard to correct the narrative, fire use and H. floresiensisremain linked in both scientific and public understandings of the hobbit. While this correction has been in the scientific literature since 2016, the original hypothesis remains burned into the minds of many anthropologists to the point where new ideas are being built on old errors.
And now, yet again, a team contends that a small-brained hominin wielded flames. In this case, H. naledi purportedly used fire to navigate the Rising Star cave system in South Africa between 335,000 and 241,000 years ago. But unlike with the research at Liang Bua, the announcement was made without conducting analyses to connect H. naledi to the hearths (or if such work has been done, it has not been published). Moreover, the team’s studies that published online prior to peer review—evaluation by qualified scientists unaffiliated with the project—said H. naledi buried their dead and made engravings too.
The researchers proposed a new “distinctive socio-cognitive hominin niche” among small-brained hominins of the later Pleistocene. In a nutshell, the authors questioned the necessity of having a large brain to engage in complex behaviors. While this is an interesting possibility, the authors erroneously included H. floresiensis as supporting evidence, citing the earlier research that has been convincingly overturned. Major media outlets and a Netflix documentary swiftly spread the unsupported claims.
