Johannesburg: Scientists have discovered a whole new species in the human family tree, after a huge haul of fossilised bones were found in a barely accessible, pitch dark chamber of a South African cave.
The species measures about 1.5 metres tall on average, weighed about 45 kg and had the brain size of a chimpanzee. While its skull and teeth were similar to the earliest known members of the Homo Genus, its shoulders were more similar to the apes. Africa's largest single collection of Hominin fossils, it is made up of 15 individuals, from infants to the elderly, priced together from 1,550 fragments. They have been named Homo Naledi, in honour of the cave where it was found. The discovery was made in the Rising star Cave in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site near Johannesburg. The finding also indicates that Naledi may have been capable of ritual behaviour, which until now was thought only to be limited to humans.
Lee Berger, research professor at the University of Witwatersand said, “It was a species that we never suspected of complex behaviour. We thought of them as little more than animals. We have eliminated that this was a mass death. We have eliminated the possibility of catastrophe. These individuals came in one at a time over a long period. They were not taken there by carnivores.”
“We are also left with the idea that they did not live there. There is no archaeology. That has led us to the rather remarkable conclusions that we have just met a new species of human relative that deliberatley disposed of its dead inside of the chamber in cradle of mankind. Until this discovery we thought that ritualised behaviours directed towards the dead, things like burial, was totally unique to home sapiens. It perhaps in fact identified us. It may have been our singularly unique thing.”
“We saw ourselves as different. We have now seen a species with the same capacity and that is an extraordinary thing,” he said.
