A team of international and South African researchers have discovered the fossil remains of an early hominid child in a cave in South Africa.
The team announced the discovery of a partial skull and teeth of a Homo Naledi child, named Letimela (‘The lost one’), who died almost 250,000 years ago when it was approximately four to six years old.
Reports indicate that the remains were found in a remote part of the cave that suggests the body had been placed there on purpose, in what could be a kind of grave. The discovery of the different human species in South Africa, according to researchers, show that the Homo naledi species buried their dead just like humans.
Presenting their findings at a virtual press conference, the researchers said it is evidence that hominins have been performing funerary rights for hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Professor Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand believes “if this skull was moved from some other location to that point, that truly is a remarkable level of interaction with the dead”. According to him, “we can see no other reason for this small child’s skull being in the extraordinarily difficult position”.
Homo Naledi is a species of archaic human found in the Rising Star Cave, Cradle of Humankind, 50 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of Johannesburg.
First discovery of the Fossil hominins
Fossil hominids were first discovered in the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa during an expedition led by Lee Berger beginning October 2013.
In November 2013 and March 2014, over 1550 specimens from at least 15 Homo naledi individuals were recovered from this site.
This excavation remains the largest collection of a single hominin species that has been found in Africa. Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker found an additional 133 Homo naledi specimens in the nearby Lesedi Chamber in 2013, representing at least another 3 individuals – two adults and a juvenile. The researchers said in 2017, the Homo naledi fossils were dated to between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago.
The Homo naledi
Homo naledi had some features that resembled modern humans, but in other respects, it looked like an older species: in particular, its brain was small.
The remains are only about 250,000 years old, meaning Homo naledi existed at the same time as our species and other big-brained hominins like the Neanderthals – yet they retained features from species that lived millions of years earlier, experts say.
Marina Elliott of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, was one of the researchers who went in. The distance isn’t great – “It’s about 12 metres from where the Dinaledi material was originally recovered in 2013-14”, she said.
Elliott had to first go through a room dubbed the Chaos Chamber. “There’s boulders that have fallen from the ceiling”, and “then, there’s a little bit of a drop into a crawl space that just literally leads into a couple of small narrow passages”, she said. These passages are only tens of centimetres across, so the researchers had to turn sideways and even partly upside-down to get inside.
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