A Discovery That Revolutionized Our Assumptions About Primitive Hominids
In 2013, a treasure trove of fossilized hominid skeletons was discovered in a South African cave, thirty miles from Johannesburg. About 1550 skeletal pieces from fifteen individuals were unearthed. The fossils combined anatomical features from an early hominid species known as Australopithecus, such as a small braincase volume, with the skull shape of the more advanced early Homo. That combination of features led scientists to assume that the fossils came from an early hominid species about 2 million years old. It was a reasonable ballpark initial guess, since hominids with those types of anatomical features were known to have existed around that time.
However, by 2017, the fossils had been more accurately dated to between 335,000 to 236,000 years ago. They were thus not part of the lineage leading to modern humans, but an extinct and more primitive hominid that coexisted with more modern Homos. The new species was dubbed Homo naledi. The excitement about the newly discovered species was not limited to the sheer number of bones, however. The condition and placement of those bones also upended preexisting assumptions about the behavior of primitive hominids.