As I type this just now, Lee Berger's Carnegie lecture about Homo naledi ecology has just ended. To be honest, I'm quite fatigued from livetweeting the lecture, so I will skip the preamble and jump straight into the discoveries and my thoughts. Berger begins the lecture by teasing a new Netflix docuseries releasing later this year and recounting his journey and the discovery of Rising Star, which takes up most of the broadcast. Now, we've the goodies. First, he discusses last year's infant skull found deep within remote fissures. This skull, which perhaps was overlooked by me initially so this may not be new information per se, was found isolated on top of a limestone shelf. Then I started getting anxious, he leaves this slightly open to interpretation—but he suggests that it was placed there. He starts to recall his first in-person experience with the cave, detailing his weight loss and struggle up and down the chute. Here's the meat and potatoes. In the chamber
Guide des Animaux Cachés (2009) is an obscure cryptozoology handbook penned and illustrated by Philippe Coudray, notably including a diverse assemblage of cryptozoological phenomena. Of these is the curious "spiny-backed chimpanzee", created for this book ( Coudray 2009 ). Coudray states that an anonymous US Navy unit member—by their own request—recalls the incident. Between 1997 and 2002, a sensitive mission in the Congo came across a band of thirteen chimpanzees with "spines" perched on their back that rose upon agitation and a uniform gray colouration. Allegedly, the unit took a three minute video of the chimpanzees attacking a smaller animal that was seized by the United States government for having been taken during a secretive mission. Coudray describes them as small (1.35-1.5 meters in height, possibly), being partly carnivorous and with porcupine-like quills that react to excitement ( Coudray 2009 ). Much of this story is quite dubious. Coudray himself adm