Meet Your Ancient Relative

A missing cog in our evolutionary chain is what two cavers named Steven Tucker and Rick Hunter discovered while seeking adventure in a region of South Africa known as the "Cradle of Humankind." Though the cave may be a popular climbing spot, since so many fossils of early human ancestors have been found there in the past, the chamber where they ended up at is incredibly hard to get to.

Anyone looking to do that first has to squeeze through a narrow passage known as "Superman's Crawl" — wherein you must keep one arm pressed against your body and raise the other above your head like Krypton's beloved hero — and if you succeed at that, then you have to drop down a 40-foot narrow, pitch-black chute. At the bottom of that is where these two men found a trove of bones, strewn about as if they had been tossed there on purpose. The cavers, assuming they had found something exciting, sought scientific confirmation.

Two years later, after 1,550 other human-ancestor fossils, including bones and teeth — the most specimens of a single ancestral human species ever found in Africa — had been recovered from the site by Lee Berger's scientific team at South Africa's University of Witwatersrand, and processes such as forensic facial reconstruction had been completed, the world was introduced to "Homo naledi," a new species that lies somewhere along the evolutionary tree between Australopithecus afarensis, which contains the remains of Lucy, and H. erectus, an extinct great-ape species that walked upright.

This newly-discovered species is said to have had human-like hands, wrists and feet, but more primitive shoulders, torsos and pelves. It is also said to have had a much smaller brain than that of a modern human, and would have looked something like this...

Especially curious, though, is that the bones appear to have been deposited in the cave intentionally, a sign that these early human ancestors either buried their dead ceremoniously or that they dumped their bones there to keep away predators that might be attracted by the dead bodies.

Either way, this suggests that these individuals may have lived within a small area, unlike many early human ancestors, which were hunter-gatherers.

For more information on the finding that National Geographic called "one of the greatest fossil discoveries of the past half century," please read the two studies published earlier today in the journal eLife.

PS: In case you're wondering, "naledi" means "star" in the South African language Sotho.