Paleontologists in South Africa say they have found the world’s oldest known burial site, which contains the remains of a distant human relative with a small brain previously thought to be incapable of complex behavior.
Scientists led by renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger said they discovered several specimens in 2023 Homo naledi – a Stone Age tree climber – buried about 30 meters (100 ft) underground in a cave system at the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Johannesburg.
“These are the earliest burials yet recorded in the hominin record, earlier than the evidence Homo sapiens burials by at least 100,000 years,” the researchers wrote in a series of preprint papers published in eLife.
The findings challenge the current understanding of human evolution, as it is commonly thought that the development of larger brains allowed for complex, “sensory” activities such as burying the dead.
The oldest previously discovered burials, found in the Middle East and Africa, contained remains Homo sapiens – and they were about 100,000 years old.
Those found in South Africa by Berger, whose previous announcements were controversial, and his fellow researchers date back to at least 200,000 BC.
It also belongs critically to them Homo naledia primitive species at the crossroads between apes and modern humans that had a brain the size of an orange and was about 1.5 meters (five feet) tall.
With curved fingers and toes, tooled hands and feet as if made for walking, the species discovered by Berger have already disproved the notion that our evolutionary path is a straight line.
Homo naledi it is named after the “Rising Star” cave system where the first bones were found in 2013.
Excavations started in 2018 also found oval tombs at the center of the new studies.
The holes, which scientists say evidence suggests were deliberately dug and then filled in to cover the bodies, contain at least five individuals.
“These discoveries show that burial practices were not limited to H. sapiens or other hominins with large brain sizes,” the researchers said.
The burial ground is not the only sign of this Homo naledi he was capable of complex emotional and cognitive behavior, they added.
Brain size
Carvings forming geometric shapes, including a “crude hashtag image”, were also found on the apparently deliberately smoothed surfaces of a nearby cave pillar.
“This would mean that not only are humans not unique in developing symbolic practices, but they may not have even invented such behavior,” Berger told AFP in an interview.
Such statements are likely to ruffle feathers in the world of paleontology, where the 57-year-old has previously faced accusations of a lack of scientific rigor and jumping to conclusions.
Many were reluctant when, in 2015, Berger, whose earlier discoveries gained support national geographyfirst aired the idea that Homo naledi he was capable of more than the size of his head suggested
“That was too much for a scientist at the time. We think it’s all tied up with this big brain,” he said.
“We’re going to tell the world that’s not true.”
While the findings require further analysis, they “change our understanding of human evolution,” the researchers wrote.
“Funeral, meaning, even ‘art’ may have a much more complicated, dynamic, inhuman history than we previously thought,” he said. Agustín Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University who co-authored the studies.
Carol Ward, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the research, said that “these findings, if confirmed, would have considerable potential significance.”
“I look forward to learning how the disposal of the remains rules out possible explanations other than deliberate burial and to seeing the results once they are peer-reviewed,” she told AFP.
Ward also pointed out that the paper acknowledged that it could not rule out that the markings on the walls could have been made by later hominins.
© Agence France-Presse
An earlier version of this article was published in June 2023.