The discovery and existence of a new species, Homo naledi (H. naledi), was revealed on Thursday 10 Sept. 2015, indicating a possible missing link in our understanding of the evolution of humankind.
Although the find is integral to our understanding of who we are as human beings, the stage we are at in our evolution does not allow for lengthy readings.
So, to make it easier, this is what you need to know about H. naledi in nine fast facts:
1. H. naledi was initially discovered in 2013 in the Dinaledi Chamber at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in Maropeng in Gauteng, South Africa.
2. H. naledi was named after the Rising Star cave. Naledi means “star” in Sesotho.
3. H. naledi is a newly discovered species possessing a mixture of physical primitive and human-like characteristics indicating it could use tools and walk upright but also climbed and had a brain size associated to earlier hominin.
4. The average H. naledi had a small brain, weighed approximately 45 kilograms, was 1.5 metres in height, and – if it were female – would need to shop for the smallest shoes in the adult section.
5. To date, roughly 1,550 numbered fossil elements were found and are believed to represent at least 15 individuals, making it the single largest fossil hominin find yet made in Africa.
6. The location and nature of the find is significant because – after testing other theories – it appears that H. naledi intentionally deposited its dead in the remote chamber, the sort of behaviour previously thought to be limited to humans.
7. The expedition team said they encountered some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions ever in the search for human origins.
8. The entrance to the cave was so small a call had to be put out on social media for experienced scientists small enough to fit into the 18-centimetre opening. Six female “underground astronauts” were chosen from a global pool of candidates.
9. Interested parties could and still can follow the conversation and discoveries online using the hashtage #NalediFossils.
re. Picture: Straight hair? If so then thick fur covering and sleeping in forest canopy bowl nests like great apes (climbing hands). Curly hair resulted from dome hut living in tropical forest.
I wonder what are the significant similarities and differences are (if any) between H. naledi and A. sediba.
posted
Ahem! Some reports put it as Homo Erectus and NOT a new species .
-------------------- Without data you are just another person with an opinion - Deming Posts: 12143 | From: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable | Registered: Jun 2007
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posted
"The evidence really tends to exclude the idea that they entered the chamber one at a time, alive, over some time, because we have infants, small children, and very old adults who would almost certainly not have managed to get into this chamber without being deposited there.”
Actually those are exactly the ones I'd expect to find in a small dark rear chamber. I reject the "intentional deposit" idea as unlikely. If there were some young adult bones, that would be more likely, I'd think. - - -
Homo naledi: New species of ancient human discovered, claim scientists
Bones found in South African cave are Homo naledi, a new species of ancient human relative, say researchers, but some experts are sceptical of find
Ian Sample Science editor
Thursday 10 September 2015 10.30 BST Last modified on Thursday 10 September 2015 11.53 BST
A huge haul of bones found in a small, dark chamber at the back of a cave in South Africa may be the remnants of a new species of ancient human relative.
Explorers discovered the bones after squeezing through a fissure high in the rear wall of the Rising Star cave, 50km from Johannesburg, before descending down a long, narrow chute to the chamber floor 40 metres beneath the surface.
The entrance chute into the Dinaledi chamber is so tight - a mere eight inches wide - that six lightly built female researchers were brought in to excavate the bones. Footage from their cameras was beamed along 3.5km of optic cable to a command centre above ground as they worked inside the cramped enclosure.
The women recovered more than 1,500 pieces of bone belonging to at least 15 individuals. The remains appear to be infants, juveniles and one very old adult. Thousands more pieces of bone are still in the chamber, smothered in the soft dirt that covers the ground.
The leaders of the National Geographic-funded project (link to video) believe the bones - as yet undated - represent a new species of ancient human relative. They have named the creature Homo naledi, where naledi means “star” in Sesotho, a local South African language. But other experts on human origins say the claim is unjustified, at least on the evidence gathered so far. The bones, they argue, look strikingly similar to those of early Homo erectus, a forerunner of modern humans who wandered southern Africa 1.5m years ago.
“We’ve found a new species that we are placing in the genus Homo, which is really quite remarkable,” said Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist who led the work at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He described the slender, small-brained creatures as “long-legged”, “pinheaded” and “gangly”. The males stood about 5ft, with females a little shorter.
Measurements of the bones show that the creature has a curious blend of ancient ape and modern human-like features. Its brain is tiny, the size of a gorilla’s. Its teeth are small and simple. The thorax is primitive and ape-like, but its hands more modern, their shape well-suited to making basic tools. The feet and ankles are built for walking upright, but its fingers are curved, a feature seen in apes that spend much of their time in the trees. The findings are reported in two papers published in the online journal eLife.
The Dinaledi chamber has been visited by explorers in the past, and the soft sediments in which the bones were found have been badly disturbed. Because the remains were not encased in rock, Berger’s team has not been able to date them. They could be 3m years old, or far more modern. No other animals were found in the chamber that might hint at when the human relative got there.
“If this is an ancient species, like a coelacanthe, that has come down through time and is only tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years old, it means that during that time we had a complex species wandering around Africa, perhaps making tools. That would make archaeology very difficult, because we aren’t going to know who made what,” Berger said.
John Hawks, a researcher on the team, said that despite some of its modern features, Homo naledi probably belonged at the origins of our genus, Homo. “It’s telling us that evolutionary history was probably different to what we had imagined,” he said. Paul Dirks, another scientist involved, said that work was ongoing to establish the age of the bones. Some tests, such as carbon dating, will destroy the material, and will only be tried once the bones have been studied more closely.
Without knowing the age of the bones, some researchers see the fossils as little more than novelties. “If they are as old as two million years, then they might be early South African versions of Homo erectus, a species already known from that region. If much more recent, they could be a relic species that persisted in isolation. In other words, they are more curiosities than game-changers for now,” said William Jungers, an anthropologist at Stony Brook School of Medicine in New York.
Christoph Zollikofer, an anthropologist at the University of Zurich, said that many of the bone characteristics used to claim the creature as a new species are seen in more primitive animals, and by definition cannot be used to define a new species. “The few ‘unique’ features that potentially define the new species need further scrutiny, as they may represent individual variation, or variation at the population level,” he said. Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, goes further. “From what is presented here, they belong to a primitive Homo erectus, a species named in the 1800s.”
The Dinaledi chamber is extremely hard to access today, raising the question of how the creatures came to be there. They may have clambered in and become stuck, or died when water filled the cave. But Berger and his colleagues favour a more radical explanation. “We have, after eliminating all of the probable, come to the conclusion that Homo naledi was utilising this chamber in a ritualised fashion to deliberately dispose of its dead,” Berger said.
The conclusion is not widely accepted by others. “Intentional disposal of rotting corpses by fellow pinheads makes a nice headline, but seems like a stretch to me,” said Jungers. Zollikofer agrees. “The ‘new species’ and ‘dump-the-dead’ claims are clearly for the media. None of them is substantiated by the data presented in the publications,” he said. Hawks is open to other explanations, but said that disposal made sense. “The evidence really tends to exclude the idea that they entered the chamber one at a time, alive, over some time, because we have infants, small children, and very old adults who would almost certainly not have managed to get into this chamber without being deposited there.”
posted
Iirc. It was reported as Erectus. On Yahoo news feed this morning.
Posts: 12143 | From: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable | Registered: Jun 2007
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quote:Originally posted by xyyman: Iirc. It was reported as Erectus. On Yahoo news feed this morning.
There may be some truth to this
"The average H. naledi had a small brain, weighed approximately 45 kilograms, was 1.5 metres (150cm) in height"
"Early African Homo erectus fossils (sometimes called Homo ergaster) Ranges from 4 ft 9 in - 6 ft 1 in (145 - 185 cm) Weight: Ranges from 88 - 150 lbs (40 - 68 kg) There is a large amount of variation in the size of Homo erectus individuals. Many fossils cannot be attributed to male or female, so we present the entire size range here. The fossils from Africa indicate a larger body size than those from China, Indonesia, and the Republic of Georgia."
But it is best we familiarize ourselves with the data that accompanies this find before we embark on some hideous suppositions.
posted
You have got to wonder why in an African country of majority black Africans discoveries like this are led by white European scientists? Does this mean black Africans are not interested in their own history? Or does this mean that black Africans are still left out of the fields of anthropology and archaeology as a matter of routine as part of the white supremacist paradigm to control history?
Also, you have to ask what are they hiding? After all white Europeans have a long history of covering up and distorting history in South Africa and all these new discoveries pose the question what is it that they have not shown publicly? I am sure that with all the digging they have done for mines they have uncovered much more than what they are discussing here.
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It always come as a surprise to us Bantu people, when those who claim to have found a way to decipher the Mdu Ntr, take a stance in support of the Evolution theory in its current state. Well, the materialization of the 'Thought of God'(Mtu Ntr), does not support this.
The Mtu Ntr contains 3 levels of encoding, the 3rd level is what was/is commonly used and understood by the general public, that includes the many translations that floods the internet. 2nd level is what the scribes and initiates understood and use to communicate amongst themselves. The 1st level was/is reserved for the Kemetic/Hermetic Priesthood (for e.g the Ntswana Priesthood). From this level, Priests/Kings can access the 0ed level of Mtu Ntr, that is; its thought-form, which is where speech or the spoken word come from. This is how the ancient encoding is decoded and there exist no scholarly shortcut to this.
As always, we are objective in our approach and the discoveries at Maropeng are not dictated upon (unlike European & Western institutions) because no matter how one University portrays a find, this inevitably inspires debate and dialogue.
Refer to Dr Mathole Motshekga's interview, whom I believed is well qualified to challenge what was concluded on the Homo Naledi bones.
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H naledi brain size is small because they were very small group inbred/isolated paleo-Pygmy-San perhaps 2ma - 400ka, no adult bones, only children & 1 skinny elder that got lost in the pitch-black chamber and were thought by the family members to have gone outside, they were not carried into the cave.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: You have got to wonder why in an African country of majority black Africans discoveries like this are led by white European scientists? Does this mean black Africans are not interested in their own history? Or does this mean that black Africans are still left out of the fields of anthropology and archaeology as a matter of routine as part of the white supremacist paradigm to control history?
Also, you have to ask what are they hiding? After all white Europeans have a long history of covering up and distorting history in South Africa and all these new discoveries pose the question what is it that they have not shown publicly? I am sure that with all the digging they have done for mines they have uncovered much more than what they are discussing here.
Belief systems play a major role in these professions. This is not unique to Africa, most Blacks, including those in the United States, have a problem engaging in activities or professions that disturbs the final resting places of people who lived in the past. This is more on a subconscious level than anything else.
Some time ago the University of Pretoria was ordered to return the remains of Bakgatla because the unearthing of the remains was deemed disrespectful by the local Tribal authority
Other than bones of dead people, I personally have a private collection of stone and iron age tools that was independently dated. Just because my discoveries were not covered by media does not mean Black folks are mere spectators in the mapping of human origins Traces of early Batswana link
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The White Supremacy conspiracy is only a subset of the Open-Sky Supremacy conspiracy, which is far more ancient and detrimental (agriculture messes with natural selection).
Abstract Homo naledi is a previously-unknown species of extinct hominin discovered within the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star cave system, Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. This species is characterized by body mass and stature similar to small-bodied human populations but a small endocranial volume similar to australopiths. ---
Good link DD'eDen, it seems the person who wrote this saw the script to the up-coming National Geographic H.naledi documentary
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