We lived with our primitive cousins
maropeng (South Africa) — Primitive hominids may have lived in Africa at the same time as humans, researchers said on Tuesday, in new findings that could change the understanding of human evolution.
Fossils found deep in South Africa’s Rising Star cave complex in 2013 have been dated by several expert teams with their findings suggesting the hominids, called Homo naledi, may have lived alongside Homo sapiens. It had previously been thought that the hominids were millions of years old.
A team of 20 scientists from laboratories and institutions around the world, including in South Africa and Australia, established the age of the fossils which suggests that Homo naledi may well have lived at the same time as humans. Their findings were published on Tuesday in three papers in the journal eLife.
The focus of the team’s research has been South Africa’s barely accessible Rising Star Cave system, part of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, about 50km northwest of Johannesburg. The area has been an incredibly rich source of artefacts for palaeontologists since it was first discovered.
johannesburg — A species belonging to the human family tree whose remnants were first discovered in a South African cave in 2013 lived several hundred thousand years ago, indicating that the creature was alive at the same time as early humans in Africa, scientists said on Tuesday.
A meticulous dating process showed that Homo naledi, which had a mix of human-like and more primitive characteristics such as a small brain, existed in a surprisingly recent period in paleontological terms, said Prof. Lee Berger of The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Berger led the team of researchers, which also announced that it had found a second cave with more fossils of the Homo naledi species, including a relatively well-preserved skull of an adult male. The conclusion that Homo naledi was living between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago — and had not become extinct much earlier — shows that the human ‘Homo’ family tree was more diverse than previously thought, said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wits University.
The next step in research is to “sort the relationship of these different species to each other and also their role in our process of becoming human,” Hawks said during an announcement of the discoveries at the Cradle of Humankind, a site near the South African town of Magaliesburg where the fossils were found. The research was also published in the journal eLife.
The name of Homo naledi refers to the ‘Homo’ evolutionary group, which includes modern people and our closest extinct relatives, and the word for “star” in the local Sotho language. The fossils were found in the Rising Star cave system, which includes more than 2km of underground, mapped passageways. The second chamber containing the more recent fossil discoveries is more than 100 metres (330 feet) from the cave where the original discoveries were made, and publicly announced in 2015.
Some experts who were not involved in the research also marvelled at the age of the fossils, determined by dating Homo naledi teeth and cave sediments. —