Twenty Homo Naledi Skeletons. Zero Male Markers. Nobody Knows Why Yet.
Twenty individuals. Zero males. That's the finding, stated as flatly as the paper states it: a peer-reviewed protein analysis in Cell , published June 24, 2026, tested tooth enamel from 20 Homo naledi individuals pulled out of a South African cave and found not one Y-chromosome marker among them. Nineteen came back female at better than 95% confidence. The twentieth cleared a lower bar for the same call. That's the whole result. Everything past that sentence is interpretation, and the paper is honest enough to say so. Here's how they got it. The method targets amelogenin-Y, a protein that only shows up if the individual carried a Y chromosome. Tooth enamel is the hardest tissue the human body makes, and it turns out to trap protein long after DNA has broken down past the point of recovery — which is exactly why this worked when direct DNA extraction on H. naledi had already failed. Twenty-three teeth, at least twenty people, one cave system — Rising Star, the Dinaledi Chamb...
