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    "headline": "Homo naledi fossils in a South African cave may all be female; 23 teeth showed no male protein marker",
    "description": "Homo naledi teeth from 20 individuals in South Africa's Rising Star cave held no male protein marker, suggesting the fossils may all be female.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-12T20:00:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Homo naledi, Lee Berger, Rising Star cave, University of Copenhagen",
    "articleBody": "Twenty-three fossil teeth from a South African cave carried no trace of a male-only protein, which suggests every Homo naledi individual tested, at least 20 of them, may have been female. The finding, from a team led at the University of Copenhagen, leaves an obvious puzzle: where are the males? That gap matters because a random group of 20 people of a species would almost never be all one sex. Corresponding author Lee Berger put the odds of drawing 20 individuals of a single sex by chance at “quite literally one in a million,” according to the EU research funder’s summary of the study. How the team read sex from 23 teeth Homo naledi is an extinct human relative that lived roughly 335,000 to 241,000 years ago. Its bones were found in 2013 in the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star cave system, inside South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site. It had a brain only a little larger than a chimpanzee’s, yet a mix of humanlike and older traits. DNA rarely survives that long in warm African caves, so the team turned to proteins locked inside tooth enamel. Using a gentle acid-etching method, they lifted tiny protein fragments, called peptides, from the enamel surface and identified them with mass spectrometry, a technique that sorts molecules by weight. They were hunting for amelogenin-Y, an enamel protein made by a gene, AMELY, on the Y chromosome. Because only biological males normally carry a Y chromosome, finding amelogenin-Y marks a male. In all 23 teeth, it was missing. The paper, titled “Proteomic analysis of dental enamel from 20 Homo naledi individuals shows no male markers,” was published in the journal Cell on 24 June 2026, with 13 collaborating institutions. Lead author Palesa Madupe, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said the result may explain why the cave’s adults look so alike. “Our study helps resolve the long-standing mystery of why Homo naledi lacked significant variation; it’s probably because they could have all belonged to one sex,” she said. Two explanations, and one sharp question The first explanation is behavior. If only females were placed or ended up in that chamber, the cave would reflect a sex-specific practice, something seen in many later human societies. Berger’s team has argued since 2015 that Homo naledi deliberately put its dead in the cave. The second is genetics. Some living men, and at least one Neanderthal male, lack the AMELY gene entirely, so they would test “female” this way. Senior author Enrico Cappellini, a professor of palaeoproteomics at the Globe Institute, considers it unlikely that this explains half of 20 individuals, let alone all of them. “Intriguingly, these results raise profound new questions, chief among them: if the H. naledi individuals in the Rising Star cave system are all females, then where are the males?” Cappellini said in the Max Planck release. Why 20 teeth are not the final word A missing protein is weaker evidence than a found one. Ancient peptides can degrade unevenly, so the absence of amelogenin-Y in a tooth is a negative result, and the gene-deletion scenario cannot be ruled out with enamel alone. The burial idea behind the behavioral explanation is also contested. As the encyclopedia entry on Homo naledi lays out, several paleoanthropologists have challenged the team’s evidence for deliberate burial, and a 2025 reanalysis could not reproduce its soil-chemistry results. Here is the scale of the Rising Star record so far: 2013: more than 1,500 fossils and about 150 hominin teeth recovered from the Dinaledi Chamber. 2017: at least three more individuals reported from the nearby Lesedi Chamber. 2026: 23 teeth from at least 20 individuals tested; zero male markers found. Badiyaa has followed other clues to early human behavior, including colorful stones that early humans in Israel may have kept as keepsakes, and four fossil teeth that tracked monkeys across the Atlantic. The next step is in other chambers. Teeth from the Lesedi Chamber and elsewhere in Rising Star could show whether males turn up a few meters away, which would point to a deliberate choice about who went where. Further reading Wikipedia: Homo naledi Image: Lee Roger Berger research team, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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