They crawled deep

[busker]

As the saying goes, "good poets borrow, great poets steal."  Well, shitty poets can steal, too, and I'm an example. The following edited piece was inspired by a poem called "Homo Naledi", by Tim (aka TqB).  Many thanks Tim!

They crawled deep
into caves to return their dead,
guided by faltering firelight
to the original dark.

Perhaps they then quarreled
and clawed over scraps
as hungry predators listened
at the entrance.

In this distant flicker of humanity,
huddled behind the protection
of fire, they scrawled shadows of language
upon cave walls.

What prehensile jabber echoed
back to their dead?
They expected no God, no Savior,
only sunrise.

The thing that I miss, other than the original’s use of the present tense, which lent a certain eyewitness like quality to the poem, is ‘brains the size of oranges’
I recall thst you didn’t like it in the original, but it’s a vital, factual link to the unique physical dimensions of H Naledi that made their troglodytic existence possible. 
Without googling H Naledi, the reader would be confused as to why they buried their dead in caves and crawled in them…indeed, they might as well be Australopitheci or Homo Erecti 

They probably didn’t even have to crawl