Michael Shermer has a piece up on Sci Am on the recent H. naledi finds. Rightly, he expresses some skepticism about many of the claims made about naledi. Apparently, Lee Berger has a history of making over-inflated claims and speculation. Some of it is quite clearly pulled out of where the sun don't shine, like the idea that modern humans learned about ceremonial burial from H. naledi despite the fact that the fossils are undated and there is no association between humans and H. naledi. There is also the inevitable debate between lumpers and splitters over whether H. naledi is actually a new species, but I'll leave that to the Paleoanth folk.

He lists the rejected hypotheses about the deposition of the fossils, but then jumps to the conclusion that death by violence was more likely. The short R3 is that the bones display no signs of violence -- cut marks, fractures prior to death, signs of trauma, etc. John Hawks has a long R3 here. The editor apparently noticed that point and put it in as a note at the end of the article. (Shermer also has a non-response here.

But besides ignoring the basic physical evidence, Shermer continues to commit the fallacy that all prehistoric peoples were the same, regardless of time and geography. (Here he uses the even vaguer term "ancestral people.") This is evident in the citations he gives. Keeley was writing largely about Mesolithic and Neolithic humans at the earliest, so this is pretty much irrelevant. (The other odd things about the constant citations to Keeley are that he doesn't propose a biological explanation of warfare and he directly argues against trade, or "gentle commerce" to use Pinker's term, mitigating warfare.) Pinker's book commits the same fallacy, and that's a dead horse already. I don't know about Leblanc's book, but I believe he is a Southwest archaeologist which is far removed from South African hominins. This is a really desperate stretch to validate the "deep evolutionary roots" hypothesis of warfare.