But perhaps the strangest and most significant part of the find is that the remains were apparently carried with great effort through the narrow tunnels of the cave system to be laid to rest.
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Visitors examine the skeleton of Homo naledi Thursday during the unveiling of the discovery.
Frayer said the Rising Star Cave discovery is significant because of the array of bones and complete or almost complete bones found in the cave.
The find – Africa’s largest single collection of hominin (human and human-related) fossils – was pieced together from more than 1,500 fragments.
“We can infer from their bodies that they are long-distance walkers, again that’s something nearly unique to human”, explained Berger.
The features of Homo Naledi are exceptionally interesting with a face like that of humans along with feet that are meant to be on the ground but hands that are for climbing trees.
The discovery was announced today, September 10, by the National Geographic Society, Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa and the National Research Foundation’s South African Department of Science and Technology. Researchers said it would be easy to place naledi if the age of his bones could be determined correctly.
John Hawks, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, describes “Homo Naledi” with a tiny brain, of size of orange, of a very slim person. Lead scientist Lee R. Berger, an paleoanthropologist who teaches human evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand, reported that the fossilized species has been named Homo naledi.
Besides introducing a new member of the prehuman family, the discovery suggests that some early hominins intentionally deposited bodies of their dead in a remote and largely inaccessible cave chamber, a behaviour previously considered limited to modern humans. “We’d never seen a non-human that shares so many primitive and yet sometimes advanced characters”, says Berger in the clip above.
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The fossils were discovered over a 21-day period deep in a cave system and were first revealed during an global launch at the Maropeng Visitor’s Centre in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site.
