Machine learning algorithm suggests ancient hominin remains not part of ritualistic...

An international team of researchers has used a machine learning algorithm to assess whether hominin bones found in caves were placed there as part of a burial service by early human ancestors. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes the factors they fed into the algorithm, and what it revealed.

One of the defining characteristics of humans is our ability to fully understand the nature of our own mortality—we are all going to die, and we all know it. But when did humans evolve to the point where this became so? Some researchers have suggested that it goes back several hundred thousand years. As evidence, they claim that hominin fossils found in caves in Spain (Sima de los Huesos) and South Africa (Dinaledi Chamber), both from the Middle Pleistocene, were put there by their fellow hominins as a part of a mortuary service, which, of course, suggests a possible understanding of the finality of death and the possibility of an afterlife. Not everyone agrees with that assessment, however. Thus, new ways to test for the possibility arise periodically. In this new effort, the researchers turned to machine learning to shed some light on the debate. Read more.