Homo naledi may not have been the most cognitive or physically developed human, but the newly discovered species is an ancestor to modern man nonetheless.
According to National Geographic, a team of scientists detailed a collection of bones belonging to Homo naledi in a cave in South Africa. They published a study on the species in the journal eLife.
Homo naledi apparently had shoulders better suited for climbing, rather than for labor, and its brain was small as well.
"This discovery is unprecedented in the sheer number of hominins collected from such a small area in the virtual absence of other animal remains," study co-author Scott Williams, an assistant professor of anthropology at New York University, said in a press release. "That makes this site unique. Moreover, the announcement describes only the tip of the iceberg of analyses that will come, and we hope that is also true of the cave itself and the material that it still holds."
Two spelunkers named Steven Tucker and Rick Hunter were exploring the Rising Star cave some 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg two years ago when they decided to make their own way. Nat Geo pointed out that the Rising Star cave is visited often by cave divers, so Tucker and Hunter wanted to explore its untouched parts.
About 100 yards from the mouth of the cave, the spelunkers found the Dinaledi chamber and with it hundreds of fossils. But the chamber was anything but easily accessible and involved a belly crawl through an area just 10 inches high and about a 50 foot climb before encountering another thin passageway, Nat Geo noted.
The location seems to be just as much a revelation as the discovery itself, as nearly all the remains belonged to Homo naledi and were all apparently discarded after death.
"It does appear after eliminating all other possibilities that Homo naledi was deliberately disposing of its body in a repeated fashion," Lee Berger, of the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand, told Reuters. "That indicates to us that they were seeing themselves as separate from other animals and in fact perhaps from the natural world."
