Early Human Homo Naledi May Have Made Tools, Buried Dead

[Garrison Hilliard]

Far in the back of a twisty, narrow cave in South Africa lie the remains
of three pre-humans with small heads and clever hands.

The discovery, and research done on a cave full of 15 skeletons nearby,
strongly suggests the little hominids were much less ancient than
previously thought. It also suggests that they may not only have lived
alongside more modern humans, but buried their dead and, perhaps, made and
used tools.

Image: A "Neo" skull of Homo naledi from the Lesedi Chamber
A "Neo" skull of Homo naledi from the Lesedi Chamber. John Hawks /
University of Wisconsin-Madison
The hominids, called Homo naledi, had brains about a third the size of
ours but had modern-looking hands and backbones. The first fossils were
only found in 2013 and their discovery has caused heated debate ever
since.

An international team of paleontologists has now dated the bones to
between 226,000 and 335,000 years ago — a much younger age than other
finds had predicted. And a second cave containing the remains of three
more individuals strengthens the argument that the dead were put there on
purpose, the teams of researchers report in the journal eLife.

Related: Did Homo Naledi Bury Their Dead?

The second cave is about 100 yards away from the first cave, the discovery
of which led to debate about when Homo naledi lived and whether the
pre-humans had deliberately buried their dead.

"This likely adds weight to the hypothesis that Homo naledi was using
dark, remote places to cache its dead," University of Wisconsin-Madison
anthropologist John Hawks, who worked on the study, said in a statement.

"What are the odds of a second, almost identical occurrence happening by
chance?"

The team used several different methods to date the ancient bones.

“This likely adds weight to the hypothesis that Homo naledi was using
dark, remote places to cache its dead.”
"When we first identified the fossils, most of the paleo-anthropologists
on site were convinced that they would be a million or two million years
old, but we have now shown they are much more recent," said Paul Dirks of
James Cook University in Australia, who worked on the study.

"It means that a primitive hominid persisted on the landscape in Africa
for a very substantial period of time, well beyond what
paleo-anthropologists predicted to be possible."

Image: Kabwe skull from Zambia and a "Neo" skull of Homo naledi
A Kabwe skull from Zambia, an archaic human, at left, and a "Neo" skull of
Homo naledi, at right. John Hawks / University of Wisconsin-Madison
The earliest examples in the area of modern humans, Homo sapiens, date to
around 200,000 years ago.

The three new skeletons come from two adults and a child about 5 years
old, the researchers report in a series on studies published on the finds.

One of the adults has a very complete skull.

Related: Mastodon Discovery Could Upend Our Understanding of Early North
America

"We finally get a look at the face of Homo naledi," said paleontologist
Peter Schmid of South Africa's University of Witwatersrand, who pieced the
skull together.

The adults would have stood around 5 feet tall and would have weighed
around 100 pounds.

"What is so provocative about Homo naledi is that these are creatures with
brains one third the size of ours," Hawks added. "This is clearly not a
human, yet it seems to share a very deep aspect of behavior that we
recognize, an enduring care for other individuals that continues after
their deaths. It awes me that we may be seeing the deepest roots of human
cultural practices."

Related: Fresh Fossils Could Force a Rewrite of Human Prehistory

The discovery will not end the debate about how the skeletons got into the
caves. Some paleontologists doubt that such early humans were deliberately
burying their dead.

"There's a big debate, on whether it's a burial ground or they were
trapped there," Dirks said.

"They could have been chased by lions or other humans, they could have got
stuck in the cave. There are enormous storms in the region and there is
evidence of meteorite impacts of a similar age in the area. You can
speculate all you like, but at the moment the original hypothesis, that
they were placed there on purpose, still holds."

More and more studies are showing that the evolution of humans was messy
and complicated. It was not just a steady progression from the primitive
Australopithecus species best represented by Lucy to Homo erectus and then
to more modern Neanderthals and fully modern humans. Instead, various
species lived alongside each other and in some cases interbred.

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