Soul-searching among the bones

Drew Forrest uses one of South Africa’s most important hominid discoveries to debate the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the religious doctrine of ‘ensoulment’

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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 1500 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.