Amazing haul of ancient human finds unveiled

Link

Fascinating stuff

A new haul of ancient human remains has been described from an important cave site in South Africa.

The finds, including a well-preserved skull, bolster the idea that the Homo naledi people deliberately deposited their dead in the cave.

Evidence of such complex behaviour is surprising for a human species with a brain that's a third the size of ours.

Despite showing some primitive traits it lived relatively recently, perhaps as little as 235,000 years ago.

That would mean the naledi people could have overlapped with the earliest of our kind - Homo sapiens.

Diversity

The fact that Homo naledi was alive at the same time and in the same region of Africa as early forms of Homo sapiens gives us an insight into the huge diversity of different human forms in existence during the Late Pleistocene.

"Here in southern Africa, in this time range, you have the Florisbad skull, which may be an ancestor or close relative of modern humans; you've got the Kabwe skull, which is some kind of archaic human and possibly quite divergent; you've got evidence from modern people's genomes that archaic lineages have been contributing to modern populations and may have existed until quite recently,"

"You have this very primitive form of Homo [naledi] that has survived alongside these other species for a million years or more. It is amazing the diversity that we are now seeing that we had missed before."

Culture

The researchers say that finding the remains of multiple individuals in a separate chamber bolsters the idea that Homo naledi was caching its dead. If correct, this surprising - and controversial claim - hints at an intelligent mind and, perhaps, the stirrings of culture.

Pretty cool stuff to think about. My imagination gets pretty wild when I start to think about how they were living back then. How did we go from that to where we are now, in a relatively (in evolutionary terms) short time? There's a big chunk of history missing that we are completely oblivious to, (Fill in the blank conspiracy) but that's a totally different topic.

Nothing to comment at the moment. Reading and thinking.

S&F for you

bodies start to stink if you just leave them around, so putting them somewhere that they wouldn't gag you is important. What would be really amazing is if there were some ritual involved with this. Not sure how you could determine that, but it would show some characteristics of modern thought in a simplistic race. Very cool thread topic. Thanks.

a reply to: network dude

That would be quite amazing if they did indeed have some type of burial ritual.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001 comes to mind. In the opening scene, (atleast how I interpreted it) a perfect symmetrical object (a monolith in this case) could be enough to trigger something in the brain to evolve to a higher level of thinking. (Because nothing in nature is perfect)

a reply to: knowledgehunter0986


Great timing for this find. Hawkes and Berger have a book that just came out regarding the 2013 finds at this site and I'm hoping it arrives before I go to Tulum next week so I can read up on the data during my flight. It's an outstanding site that adds so much to the giant hush that our family tree has become the last couple of decades. I'm highly skeptical of the claim of overlap with H. Sapiens as the youngest Naledi remains predate the oldest Sapiens remains and there is also the large geographical barrier between S. Africa where H. Naledi lived and Ethiopia where our own species originally emerged. Fingers crossed that we can continue to improve on our ability to recover ancient genetics so that we can compare H. Naledi genomics to our own. Don't let me skepticism of the attempted association of the 2 species add confusion... this is one of the most important finds since Australopithecines were first found.
were first found 75+ years ago

originally posted by: knowledgehunter0986
a reply to: network dude

That would be quite amazing if they did indeed have some type of burial ritual.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001 comes to mind. In the opening scene, (atleast how I interpreted it) a perfect symmetrical object (a monolith in this case) could be enough to trigger something in the brain to evolve to a higher level of thinking. (Because nothing in nature is perfect)

a reply to: network dude

If these were "burials" that were practiced for either religious or hygienic reasons, then there was a purpose derived from reasoning. I like the idea that the cave was just a good place to put rotten corpses, it contained the smell and provided a cool damp environment to slow the decay rate. It may have even help prevent flies and other insects from laying eggs on the bodies keeping maggots from infesting them. After a while it may have become a learned behavior, a ritual, passed down to the generations.

Caves and other holes in the ground are considered scared because of natural associations with birth and death to the sunrise and sunset. The sun seems to be born from the underworld in the east, then it dies when it sets in the west, going back into the underworld. Also caves are womb-like with an opening to the outer world signifying birth or re-birth.

a reply to: AdmireTheDistance

Wow is that natural?