On 9 May, scientists announced that the Rising Star Cave system has revealed yet more important discoveries, only a year and a half after it was announced that the richest fossil hominin site in Africa had been discovered, and that it contained a new hominin species, named Homo naledi by the scientists who described it.
The original Homo naledi remains from the Dinaledi Chamber have been revealed to be startlingly young in age. Homo naledi, which was first announced in September 2015, was alive sometime between 335 000 and 236 000 years ago. This places this population of primitive small-brained hominins in a time and place when it is likely that they lived alongside Homo sapiens, and is the first time it has been demonstrated that another species of hominin survived alongside the first humans in Africa.
The research, published today in three papers in the journal eLife (elifesciences.org), presents the long-awaited age of the Naledi fossils from the Dinaledi Chamber and announces the discovery of a second chamber in the Rising Star cave system, containing additional specimens of Homo naledi. These include a child and a partial skeleton of an adult male with a remarkably well-preserved skull.
The new discovery and research, which was done by a large team of researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the James Cook University in Australia, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, United States, and more than 30 additional international institutions, has advised of two major discoveries related to Homo naledi.
More here: Homo Naledi discovery might be the new pyramids
The team was led by Professor Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, who is also a National Geographic Explorer in Residence. The discovery of the second chamber with abundant Homo naledi fossils includes one of the most complete skeletons of a hominin ever discovered, as well as the remains of at least one child and another adult. The discovery has led the team to argue that there is more support for the controversial hypothesis that Homo naledi deliberately disposed of its dead in these remote, hard to reach caverns.
The dating of Homo naledi is the conclusion of the multi-authored paper, headed by Professor HGM Dirks of the University of the Witwatersrand and the James Cook University in Australia, which is entitled The age of Homo naledi and associated sediments in the Rising Star Cave, South Africa.
The Homo naledi fossil remains have primitive features that are shared with some of the earliest known fossil members of our genus, such as Homo rudolfensis and Homo habilis, two species that lived nearly two million years ago. However, it also shares some features with modern humans. After the description of the new species in 2015, experts predicted that the fossils should be about the same age as these other primitive species. Instead, the fossils from the Dinaledi Chamber are barely more than one-tenth that age.
“The dating of naledi was extremely challenging,” noted Dirks, who worked with 19 other scientists from laboratories and institutions around the world to establish the age of the fossils. “Eventually, six independent dating methods allowed us to constrain the age of this population of Homo naledi to a period known as the late Middle Pleistocene.”
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The age of this population of hominins shows that Homo naledi may have survived for as long as two million years alongside other species of hominins in Africa. It was previously thought that only Homo sapiens (modern humans) existed in Africa in the late Middle Pleistocene, and it is at precisely this time that we see the rise of what has been called “modern human behaviour” in southern Africa – behaviour attributed, until now, to the rise of modern humans and thought to represent the origins of complex modern human activities such as burial of the dead, self-adornment and complex tools, but now thought to be present in the Homo naledi population as well.
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