Homo naledi in the Rising Star Cave system
- Date
- c. 335,000 – 236,000 years ago
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Africa (South Africa)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
In 2013 cavers exploring the Rising Star cave system near Johannesburg, South Africa, squeezed through a narrow chimney into the Dinaledi Chamber and found it littered with hominin bones.
Excavations led by Lee Berger recovered more than 1,550 specimens from at least 15 individuals, the largest single assemblage of a hominin species yet found in Africa, and the species was named Homo naledi in 2015. It combines a small, roughly orange-sized brain and curved, climbing-adapted fingers with surprisingly modern-looking hands, feet and teeth. Most strikingly, the fossils were dated in 2017 to only about 335,000 to 236,000 years ago — overlapping with the emergence of Homo sapiens — showing that a small-brained archaic human survived in Africa far more recently than anyone had expected. The remote, dark location of the bones, deep within a cave reachable only by a difficult vertical descent, led the excavators to propose deliberate disposal of the dead, and later claims of intentional burial and engraved cave markings, though these interpretations are heavily contested. Homo naledi revealed that brain enlargement was not a simple, one-way trend and that multiple human forms coexisted in Pleistocene Africa.
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Related science, technology & invention events
- Australopithecus afarensis ('Lucy' and relatives)c. 3.9–2.9 million years ago
- Discovery of the Denisovans and archaic-modern interbreedingc. 100,000 – 40,000 years ago (interbreeding); identified 2010
- Domestication of maize from teosinte in Mesoamericac. 7000 BCE (c. 9,000 years ago)
- Domestication of rice in the Yangtze River basinc. 8000–6000 BCE
- Domestication of the dog, humanity's first domesticated animalc. 16,000 – 14,000 years ago
- Earliest Controlled Use of Fire by Homo erectusc. 1,000,000 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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