Homo naledi. A South African hominin with the cranial capacity of a chimpanzee.
The great strength of science is the inbuilt fact-checking mechanism that is an integral part of the scientific method - a method derived from the fact that scientific opinion is always evidence-based and only ever provisional. If new evidence is found or previous evidence is shown to be not what was thought, then scientific opinion changes accordingly.
Religion's great weakness is that it is never evidence-based, so there is nothing to check and reassess. If it was, there would only be one religion and it would be a division of science.
For these reasons, science, for which the facts are a neutral referee, tends to converge on a single explanation, whilst religions tend to diverge and schism into different competing ideologies with no facts to referee the competition and no ultimate winners or truth to converge on, so we end up with about 40,000 Christian sects alone, all claiming to be the one true faith, and condemning the followers of all the others to an eternity of torment.
A case in point, so far as science is concerned, is the recent publication of a reassessment of the evidence behind the claim that the fossil hominin, Homo naledi was a culturally advanced species that made artistic patterns on the cave walls, made fire and buried their dead in prepared graves. The evidence for those claims was that the remains of three individuals were found deep in the cave system, to where it was thought they must have been carried deliberately, and were apparently buried in prepared graves, one with a stone tool close to its hand. There was also what looked like evidence of fire and fire would have been needed to light the way to carry the bodies deep into the cave system.
The finds were something of an enigma because, while having the body of a human, H. naledi had a cranial capacity nearer to that of a chimpanzee, so to have developed a relatively advanced culture with a brain that size would have been surprising. The other surprising thing is that the fossils were dated to around 300,000 years ago, which would have made it contemporaneous with much more advanced hominins such as H. erectus and even early H. sapiens. That was a problem for theories of human evolution that had the savannahs of East and South Africa as the environment in which evolving humans had evolved a large brain, and yet here was H. naledi in the same environment with a brain the size not much larger than that of the hominin-chimpanzee common ancestor.
