Up until now the story of our existence has been that we started with Australopithecines and ended with the well-known Homo sapiens. However, a discovery in South Africa has changed the narrative. Welcome, Homo naledi.
The newly discovered species’ bone fragments, which were found 50-feet deep in a cave 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg, have a remarkable similarity to the human species. John Hawks, a researcher on the team, said in an interview with The Guardian that this discovery completely changes an understanding of human evolution.
“It’s telling us that evolutionary history was probably different to what we had imagined,” said Hawks.
Unfortunately, there were no remains of any other species, which makes it difficult to pinpoint where to place Homo naledi on the evolutionary timeline. Without this crucial information, researchers have nothing but speculation about how this new discovery ties in with already known human ancestors.
“We don’t know how old these fossils are,” said Dr. Lee Berger, the leader of the team that discovered the new species, in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. “But based on its anatomy, H. naledi clearly sits at the root of the homo genus.”
The location of the discovery, and the fact that remains of 15 members of the species were found, leads some researchers to believe that Homo naledi already had their own rituals and used the cave as a burial site. Such assumption means that Homo naledi, which had a brain approximately the size of a gorilla’s, went deep into the cave to dispose of the dead, which is evidence of an incredible thinking process.
“Nothing is certain at this early stage, but a lot of the evidence points to the chamber being a potential deliberate body disposal site,” explained Paul Dirks, a geologist involved in the discovery, in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.
With this explanation, the understanding of this new species brings a whole new colour to what was previously known to science, since such complex ways of thinking is far from what is expected of primitive human-like species.
What is fascinating about this discovery is that it changes our current knowledge about the development of the human species. The presence of a ritual of burial, such as burying the dead somewhere far in the depth of a cave, would mean that, even before early human-like species diverged and evolved into Homo sapiens, they had already developed cultural practices that show the incredibly complex way of thinking that would not be expected of an ape-like species with the brain size of an orange.
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