Flint Dibble 🍖🏺 Dr. Kim Foecke Great video! Where we see that even with a one-hour long video it's only scratching the surface of all the issues we found in the sedimentological study of this paper!

Exclusive: Critics challenge an explosive claim that despite having a brain about one-third the size of a modern human’s, Homo naledi deliberately buried its dead about 250,000 years ago. scim.ag/7V7

A piece in Science News covering paper on deliberate burial by Homo naledi. It is good to see that the Rising Star team agrees in hindsight that their methodological choices were incorrect. I disagree with their other responses, but that was expected. science.org/content/articl…

surely open comment is what the RS team wanted by posting preprints and going via this elife process? As such, it is strange to critique people replying to it as Dr. Kim Foecke et al. have done

Andy I.R. Herries at La Trobe Archaeology I find that criticism interesting…to say the least…I think we were fair in presenting our critique in a journal, particularly as we went open access. It’s still a public comment. As for treating it as the version of record…events speak for themselves I think. I stand by it.

The reply to sedimentological evidence presented to support the claims of Homo naledi burials, in which our colleague Queffelec Alain is co-author, is now covered by Science.

Pre-prints per se were never the issue. Going ahead with *major claims in media* while aware of seriously critical peer reviews, without the latter also being public, was the issue. Also, if you want colleagues' feedback on in-progress work, then just present it at conferences?

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Apologies, wrong account tag! This piece is from Michael Price at News from Science!

More Research Shuts Down Controversial Claims About Homo Naledi, Star Of Netflix Documentary - out today from IFLScience Queffelec Alain Dr Robyn Pickering iflscience.com/more-research-…

Interesting that the argument is for dwarfing, yet, no testing for dwarfism was done (standard metrics include head-body lgth, skull lgth, body mass etc.) Also, sexual dimorph & pop variation were not considered valid explanations for the small size 🤔 nature.com/articles/s4146…

What we know and do not know after the first decade of Homo naledi | Nature Ecology & Evolution nature.com/articles/s4155…

For those asking, yes I do have comments on the revisions to the Homo naledi pre-prints. I’m taking some time to carefully review it and gather all of my thoughts, and will write something here soon. For now, I will say this - I do not think they fixed the problems.

Taking my first day of school pic from the *other side* this year! Assistant prof day 1 😊

Newspaper article about our rebuttal of the first version of Berger et al. preprint, and with information about the second version.

Happy to share this new paper I’ve been working on since my PhD 🥰 Here we explore traditional and novel techniques to investigate the taphonomic damage and history of fossil remains, focusing on this human-modified giant sloth tooth from Brazil (around 13,000 yrs ago). (+)