Our very understanding of what it means to be human will never be the same after Thursday.
Wits University scientists – and their international colleagues – have discovered a brand new hominin species. A species which buried its dead.
On Thursday, legendary palaeontolgist, Professor Lee Berger, announced the single largest hominin fossil find yet to come out of Africa – itself the font of humanity.
Berger and his team discovered a cave known as the Dinaledi Chamber (Rising Star), in the aptly named Cradle of Humankind, full of the remains of strange creatures.
They were small, thin animals which walked on two long legs, with human-like size seven feet and ape-like rounded shoulders.
About 1.5m high, their heads, although similar in shape to humans, were small. Their brains were the size of an orange.
Their hands were human-like until the palms, their fingers curved to such an extent their shape has never been seen before. It is believed they used their fingers to climb, but it was a climbing movement we have no experience of.
Berger believes they are possibly the most primitive member of the human genus yet discovered.
The cave system where they were found was well known and had been explored many times.
In 2013, two cavers, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, found a narrow crack, just 17.5cm wide which led into a chamber where the fossils lay covering the floor.
They called the chamber Dinaledi – the chamber of stars. The two showed pictures of the bones to caver and geologist Pedro Boshoff, who immediately took them to Berger.
He realised something truly remarkable lay below the earth in a cave that had never seen the light of day.
More than 60 cavers worked together in what Marina Elliott, one of the excavating scientists, described as “some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions ever encountered in the search for human origins”.
Elliott was one of six women selected as “underground astronauts” from a global pool of candidates after Berger put out a call on social media for experienced scientist cavers who could fit through the 17.5cm-wide cave opening.
After 21 days, 1 550 separate bones and bone fragments from the floor surface and from one small excavation near the back of the chamber were found. They belong to at least 15 separate individuals, aged from babies to the elderly whose teeth were worn down.
The human relative was dubbed Homo Naledi, a Sesotho word that means “stars”, after the cave they were found in.
“All of this alone would be one of the greatest scientific finds,” said Berger.
“But the remote cave, which takes considerable risk to get to in complete darkness, has led the team to believe that living Naledi carried their dead into the chamber over time in a ritual burying behaviour.
“This has never been seen before in history, except by human beings.”
Berger said the team was convinced there had been no catastrophic event that led to their burial there, or any predator which might have dragged them there.
“Until this moment in history we would have perhaps thought that putting your dead in the same place is perhaps the definition of being human… But you would not mistake Naledi for us. It is a great moment for science and for our species to begin to contemplate what it is that makes us human now.”
Berger believes this will be tough on humanity.
The three things that set us apart from animals, Berger said, were our use of tools, the contemplation of our mortality and critical thought.
“We have just met another species, although lost to time, who perhaps did that too,” Berger said.
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