When Humans First Began to Bury Their Dead
The bones in the South African cave lacked gnaw marks indicating that they had been dragged into the cave by carnivores. Between that and their placement deep in a shaft that they were unlikely to have ended up in by accident, it became clear that the bones had been deliberately placed in the cave by other Homo naledi individuals. In other words, they were buried. It was not the earliest known burial, as 28 skeletons dating to about 430,000 had been discovered years earlier in a Spanish cave.
However, the Spanish skeletons came from a big-brained Homo species that looked and behaved much like modern humans. Homo naledi on the other hand had a brain half the size of ours, and could not have been mistaken for a modern human. Its burial practices demonstrated that individuals understood mortality and the concept of something after death. That squashed a hitherto prevalent notion that such understanding and behavior required big brains, and forced a reexamination of early hominids’ culture and intelligence.