![]() ![]() ![]() Not that this viewpoint diminishes the importance of the find. “If you have lots of bones scattered all across East Africa, that might actually give you a better indication of what’s going on in terms of human evolution over a widespread region,” he says. naledi could really be a localised exception. “Both sediba and naledi say you can’t take a mandible, a maxilla or a collection of teeth and try to predict what the rest of the body looks like,” he says.īut Spoor says H. These fossils generally amount to just a few fragments rather than complete skeletons. That has implications for how we interpret other early human fossil finds representing the transition from Australopithecus to Homo, he says. sediba, with its assortment of ancient and modern features, as a quirk of human evolution, the new find hints that such “mosaicism” is not the exception in early humans but the rule, says Berger. And almost everywhere that sediba is derived, naledi is primitive.”Īlthough it was just about possible to dismiss A. “Almost everywhere in the sediba skeleton where you see primitive features, in naledi you see derived features. “ Naledi is almost the mirror of sediba,” says Berger. We have previously seen such a mosaic in Australopithecus sediba, a 2-million-year-old hominin that Berger and his colleagues excavated in 2008 from the Malapa cave, a few kilometres away. The team refers to the fossils’ mixture of features as “anatomical mosaic”. It would make them a human version of the coelacanth, he says: an ancient species that survived, unchanged, into essentially modern times. They might turn out to be 2 or 3 million years old, dating back to the time when Homo first came on the scene.īut even if they prove to be much younger – 100,000 years old, say – that would be significant, says Berger. Its anatomy suggests it is one of the earliest members of our genus to evolve, but frustratingly, we don’t yet know exactly how old the skeletons are. “It may not be that closely related to us, but could have had a cognitive ability essentially equal to ours.” They have named it Homo naledi ( eLife, DOI: 10.7554/eLife.09560). Even so, he and his colleagues think that, on balance, the features of the skull, hands and teeth mean the new species probably does belong in our genus. “It doesn’t look a lot like us,” says Berger. Its skull, though, makes clear that the brain was less than half the size of ours, and more like that of some species of Homo that lived about 2 million years ago. But look at its foot and you could think it belonged to our species, which appeared just 200,000 years ago. Look at its pelvis or shoulders, says Berger, and you would think it was an apelike Australopithecus, which appeared in Africa about 4 million years ago and is thought to be an ancestor of Homo. The species the bones belonged to had a unique mix of characteristics. #SKELETONS FOUND HOLDING HANDS THOUSANDS OF YEARS LATER FULL#“Once we realised the full potential, we decided the best thing to do was to lock down the site, and engage the entire community to make a decision on what to do there next,” he says.īut what has been recovered so far tells an extraordinary tale. There are still thousands more remains in the cave, according to Berger. ![]()
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