Mysterious species buried their dead and carved symbols 100k years before humans | Hacker News Reader

Mysterious species buried their dead and carved symbols 100k years before humans

cnn.com

55 pointsbatmaniam6 comments

Seems like the real deal. I was expecting something as weak as the current UFO tease. Here's a handful of information:

Originally discovered in 2018, this expedition took place last year (a video is labeled July 28, 2022). The paleoanthropologist said that 47 people had been in the site before him. He had previously only seen videos of the site. There's HD video of the team inside. The CNN video of his interview on TV has the wrong title, saying "that just died", instead of the real quote, "I almost died". The video interview has a better view of the symbols and the researcher discusses how these symbols challenge "the idea of human exceptionalism" about how it was our bigger brains that made us unique.

I would love to see more of the original raw footage.

> Mysterious species buried their dead and carved symbols 100k years before humans

CNN headline. Before which humans ? (Homo Erectus, Homo Sapiens ).

Sapiens according to the first sentence (i.e. “modern humans”) in the CNN article. (Although, this is what most people assume anyway when seeing the word “humans”.)

Interestingly and headline-related, the species isn’t that mysterious as the headline suggests because the second sentence of the article identifies thems as the “Homo naledi”. Insert typical rant about article titles for X reason.

Homo Naledi is a fairly recent discovery, though.

The headline is undoubtedly designed to amp this up. As written, it could be about a species of homo we'd never heard of, or even about aliens. It's just Homo Naledi again.

A better title would have been "Homo Naledi buried their dead and carved symbols 100,000 years before Homo Sapiens"

1. I was being facetious. I don’t care about the use of the word “mysterious” in the title. I just wanted to insert my joke about people who are nitpicky about article titles in cases when it honestly doesn’t matter such as this one.

(Maybe facetious isn’t the right word because, again, this isn’t a serious issue. The article title is fine as-is. It’s not clickbaity in the slightest and the lede isn’t buried or insert usual explanation for nitpickiness)

2. Your suggested title is only better depending on the target audience (and if you don’t capitalize “naledi” or “sapiens” after “Homo”, ha more nitpickiness). It’s CNN, not Scientific American. Better is subjective.

TLDR: On HN, there’s too much pedantic circle-jerking going on related to fixing article titles. We get it. We’re all “smart”.

(For more context, I’ve seen so many complaints about article titles over the last few weeks. It’s ridiculous. GP’s comment that asked “which humans?” was literally the first and only comment on this post when I viewed it earlier. That’s annoying. The literal second comment was mine which basically says “stop complaining, the title is explained in the first 2 sentences of the article”.)

Maybe someone can clarify this, but doesn't Naledi mean "Star".

Are we calling this extinct group of people Star Humans?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com