The researchers described the hands and feet of the new species as human-like.
Advertisement
In the year 2013, two volunteer cavers, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker from the Witwatersrand University (WU) found these fossils at the site of Humankind World Heritage in Johannesburg.
If Homo Naledi has much in common with modern man, especially regarding his feet, wrists and hands, “his little brain and shape of the upper part of his body are closer to a pre Group -humain called Australopithecus“.
The researchers, supported by the National Geographic Society and the National Research Foundation, unearthed 15 individuals representing the largest single discovery of its kind in Africa.
The new species, named Homo naledi, was discovered in the Rising Star cave in South Africa by a research team led by Professor Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand.
Stay tuned with us for more trending alerts happening across the globe by bookmarking us in your web browser for easy navigation.
Proffessor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum told BBC News that Homo naledi is “a very important discovery”.
If the chamber was used by Homo naledi to discard of its dead, as scientists behind the discovery argue, it shakes up theories about the ‘birth of consciousness’.
Amid the team members were two scientists from Australia’s James Cook University.
The site is located 50 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa.
The early human ancestral species was discovered in an underground chamber.
Since the discovery, Lucas Delezene, an assistant professor of anthropology in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and an expert on hominin dental anatomy, has been comparing known hominid teeth to the new fossils. While it is too early to determine the age of the bones, Holliday said they well could be 2 million years old.
“We have just encountered another species that perhaps thought about its own mortality, and went to great risk and effort to dispose of its dead in a deep, remote, chamber right behind us”.
Meanwhile, after assembling the trove of bones together, scientists say the creature had human and primitive features that made him weird and freaky in some sense.
Advertisement
That doesn’t mean we’re looking at some of our earliest ancestors here, though.
