One Cave Reveals Several Discoveries About an Ancient Human Relative

Homo naledi likely buried their dead, had death related rituals, and much more that make us rethink what it means to be human

Hiya!

Ooof, I’m warning you now that today is a long one. I’m about to share a whole lotta information that might make you question what it means to be human — or, perhaps I should say, Homo sapian.

Ready for this? Okay, so over the last decade, experts have discovered a South African cave system with bones from a new ape-like Human species called Homo naledi. The cave and everything archeologists have unearthed so far provide a glimpse into the advanced cognition of a Human relative we assumed to be primitive and small-brained. Now, only half of that is true. Homo naledi may have been small-brained, but it appears they were far less primitive than we assumed.

Quick accreditation recap:

The discoveries I’m about to tell you are the combined efforts of archeologists, geomorphologists, physical anthropologists, and more scientists from Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Nigeria, Portugal, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I’ll link to the actual research papers and studies through this article, but I also recommend Netflix’s recent documentary called Unknown: Cave of Bones which ties everything together beautifully and includes some remarkable visuals.

National Geographic also published a book on the findings similarly titled Cave of Bones by Professor Lee Berger, a National Geographic and University of Witwatersrand palaeoanthropologist, and his co-investigator and human evolution expert, Professor John Hawks. They are also two of the primary researchers for all the discoveries so far, and I’ll refer to them often throughout the article.

Now then, let’s get to the good stuff.

Homo Naledi

Okay, so a decade ago, in 2013, two members of palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger’s scouting team, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, found some bones in the Dinaledia cave of the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, around 30 miles (50 km) from Johannesburg. Little did the recreational cavers know that the bones they found belonged to a new (to us) Human species.

This species was named Homo naledi — “Homo” for Human, and “naledi,” which means “star” in the local Sotho language and references the cave the bones were found in. So far, experts believe Homo naledi lived around the same time and place as our Homo sapiens ancestors.

We emerged around 300,000 years ago in Eastern and Southern Africa. The bones of Homo naledi were found in South Africa and dated to between 241,000 and 335,000 years ago. However, the scientists made clear that our two species were not directly related. More likely, we descended from a common ancestor long before either of us existed.

While Homo naledi and Homo sapiens looked very different, we still shared a few similarities. Naledi had long curved fingers, and their torso, hip joints, and shoulders resembled more ancient Hominin species or primates. But skeletally, their hands, wrists, feet, legs, and teeth are more similar to us and Neanderthals.

Side note about the teeth: Agustin Fuentes, an American biological anthropologist and primatologist at Princeton University and formerly the chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, makes an intriguing suggestion in the Netflix documentary.

He points out that most other mammals with canine teeth (the pointy fang-like ones on the top row and near the front of your mouth) all bare them in a threatening manner to warn off other animals. Yet, we show our canines through smiling. And since Homo naledi had smaller canines like ours, it stands to reason that they, too, smiled.

Anyway, Naledi was smaller than us, averaging around 5 feet (152 cm) tall, and weighed in at about 100 pounds (45 kg). They also had a brain closer to the size of a chimpanzee — roughly one-third the size of ours.

That said, since the bones were first found, Berger, Hawk, their colleagues, and the teams of international, multidisciplinary experts have discovered we may share far more with Homo naledi than meets the eye.