Four months after the announcement (of new species Homo Naledi), questions about H. naledi have crept up. Articles about the fossils were published too quickly, naysayers claim. They were published without “proper” peer review. Moreover, the fossils—and the entire Rising Star Expedition that found them—are simply a means of fueling the project’s media agenda.

If the history of paleoanthropology shows us anything, it’s that controversy over a new fossil hominin species is nothing new. In fact, most newly discovered hominin species have undergone periods of serious scrutiny, particularly because discoveries force scientists to rethink evolutionary relationships. For the past hundred years, paleoanthropologists have bandied about insults, in addition to hypotheses, as they discussed fossil hominins in academic and public circles.

The H. naledi brouhaha, however, offers a curiously new type of challenge for paleoanthropology. Instead of shaking up the hominin evolutionary tree, H. naledi has shaken up the way that paleoanthropology goes about the business of doing science.

Traditionally, fossils have been studied and published in a very top-down way, where small teams of senior experts spend years (even decades) studying fossil hominins before publishing their discoveries in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. This means the fossils are carefully scrutinized, measured, compared, and analyzed before they reach a public audience. The peer-review process of such top-tier journals—like Science or Nature—forms a well-established social system of checks and balances, ensuring that research credibility is attached to published discoveries.

The H. naledi project has championed an opposite view of how data should be collected and distributed. Berger’s team found, excavated, studied, and published the Rising Star Cave’s cache of more than 1,550 fossils in just two years. The project has relied on the expertise of many young, early career researchers. In addition, the project published scans of the fossils themselves in eLife in September 2015, an open-access journal with a shorter peer-review process.