Pet cemetery

Here, two noted creationists argue that the naledi fossils are human:

http://www.coresci.org/jcts/index.php/jctsb/article/view/44/61

http://www.coresci.org/jcts/index.php/jctsb/article/view/51/68

I don't have an a priori objection to that identification. I do, though, have two reservations:

i) One argument for the human identification is that the remains are situated in a very cramped location. You have to crawl there. 

However, is it possible that the floor of the cave is higher than it used to be, due to cumulative debris building up over the intervening time? In other words, was there originally more space between the ceiling and the floor?

From what I've read, the cave is located in a river valley. What about the possibility of flooding? Would that deposit debris in the back of the cave?

I don't know the elevation of the cave. And, of course, the topography may have changed over time.

ii) The tacit assumption is that the agents who buried the remains were the same kind of creature as what was buried. However, humans sometimes bury animals. Not only do you have modern pet cemeteries, but there was the ancient Near Eastern custom of equid burial. Cf. K. Way, Donkeys in the Biblical World: Ceremony and Symbol (Eisenbraus, 2011), chap. 3. Likewise, you have Egyptian animal mummies, viz. cats, jackals, crocodiles, bulls. baboons. 

What if naledi was an ape that held special associations for humans? They buried it for the same reasons that some people bury pets or some ancient people buried or mummified animals? 

Point is: you can't just assume that naledis were buried by naledis. 

Science & worldview

His dissertation was a statistical study of accumulated fossil data, "an estimation of true taxonomic duration from fossil occurrence data." It asked the question, "Give our actual fossil record, how can we estimate when these organisms actually began to exist and when they became extinct?" After [Kurt] Wise presented his work, one of his peers said, according to Wise, "It's obvious this worked had to be done. We see that now, but we would never have done it. Your creationist worldview made you see things differently. T. Stafford, ed. The Adam Quest (T. Nelson 2013), 20.

On the contingency of evolutionary history

Kurt Wise reviews Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould. It's an old review (1997) but more or less still relevant today.

As for Gould's book, much of it is known to be incorrect (cf. Simon Conway Morris' The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals). But insofar as I understand it his main ideas are still alive and well.

"What Science Tells Us about the Age of the Creation"

From Kurt Wise (PDF).