GALLERY: Meet Neo, Naledi’s ‘brother’

Meet Neo, Naledi’s “brother”, who roamed the earth some time between 236 and 335 thousand years ago. The two hominids may have walked around Africa with early humans.

Naledi is the name given to a skeleton constructed from a mound of fossils discovered in a cave in 2013 by spelunkers Rick Hunter and Steve Tucker, who went off-map while exploring the Rising Star Cave (also known as Westminster or Empire cave) near the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, west of Johannesburg.

They discovered a jawbone and showed it to Wits professor and paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, and the rest is history.

To that end and just two years after Naledi’s announcement to the world, the recent discovery by scientists of a second set of Homo Naledi fossil,  coupled with finally figuring out Naledi’s age, should have answered many of the scientific community’s questions generated by the 2015 reveal of Naledi, Berger said yesterday.

Neo’s remains and others were discovered in a second cave only about 100 metres away.

Berger was speaking at Maropeng on Tuesday during the unveiling of what he and other scientists had named Neo (SeSotho for “a gift”), a second set of fossils belonging to the Homo Naledi species discovered recently in.

Professor Lee Berger with a copy of the skullof a newly found example of a Homo Naledi skeleton named Neo during a media event held at Maropeng, 9 May 2017 to announce more findings from the Rising Star cave system in which Homo Naledi was found a year and a half ago. The age of Homo naledi has been determined to be in the vicinity of 335 000-236000 years old, meaning that it is likely they roamed the earth in the vicinity of Homo Sapiens demonstrating for the first time that another species lived alongside the first humans in Africa. Picture: Neil McCartney

The remains include a child and a partial skeleton of an adult male with a well-preserved skull, considering new fossil dating methods put the age of the fossils between 236 and 335 thousand years ago.

“People always wanted to know the dates, and sometimes for the wrong reason,” said Berger.

“It was the wrong idea the date would assist you in placing this in a phylogenetic position, in a relationship position. I think we have in scientific literature why you don’t need to do that, why the date is irrelevant to placing it,” said Berger, who headed up a team of 52 scientists.

“We know it is a primitive member of the genus Homo and likely come from several million years ago as a species. This population happens to be young, and that has its own implications.”

“We can no longer assume we know which species made which tools, or even assume it was modern humans who were the innovators of some of these critical technological and behavioural breakthroughs in the archaeological record of Africa,” said Berger. “If there is one other species out there which shared the world with ‘modern humans’ in Africa, it is very likely there are others. We just need to find them.”

John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wits University said he thought some scientists assumed they knew how human evolution happened.

A newly found example of a Homo Naledi skeleton named Neo during a media event held at Maropeng, 9 May 2017 to announce more findings from the Rising Star cave system in which Homo Naledi was found a year and a half ago. The age of Homo naledi has been determined to be in the vicinity of 335 000-236000 years old, meaning that it is likely they roamed the earth in the vicinity of Homo Sapiens demonstrating for the first time that another species lived alongside the first humans in Africa. Picture: Neil McCartney

The discovery of a second site of fossils gave added substance to the theory that the sites were purposeful graveyards, something only modern humans were believed to do until Berger’s discovery on Naledi.

British anthropologist Chris Stringer of The Natural History Museum in London said the dating was “astonishingly young” for a species, which still displayed primitive characteristics found in fossils two million years old.

“Despite the young age for the Naledi fossils, their anatomy indicates in evolutionary terms they could lie close to the genus Homo, suggesting this is a relic species, retaining many primitive traits from a much earlier time,” Stringer said.

The 2013 expedition was funded by the South African National Research Foundation and the National Geographic Society, of which Berger is a National Geographic explorer-in-residence.

The excavation team enlisted six woman paleoanthropologists,  Alia Gurtov, Becca Peixotto, Elen Feuerriegel, Hannah Morris, Lindsay Eaves and Marina Elliott, who were able to fit through the 18-centimetre wide access tunnel to the Dinaledi Chamber where Naledi’s fossils were found.

Neo’s discovery and research was done by a large team of researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), James Cook University, Australia, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, United States, and more than 30 additional international institutions.

“The dating of Naledi was extremely challenging,” noted Professor Paul Dirks of James Cook University and Wits, who worked with 19 other scientists from laboratories and institutions around the world, including labs in South Africa and Australia, 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.”

Three teeth were eventually destroyed in the testing process.

Dr. Marina Elliott, exploration scientist at Wits and one of the original “underground astronauts” on the 2013 Rising Star Expedition, said she had always felt Naledi’s fossils were “young”.

“I’ve excavated hundreds of the bones of Homo Naledi, and from the first one I touched, I realised that there was something different about the preservation, that they appeared hardly fossilised.”

See pictures below:

For the scientific research papers, visit https://elife.elifesciences.org/content/6/e24231