New Chamber Reveals Most Complete Homo Naledi To Date

The skull of a Homo naledi specimen named "Neo." (Credit: Wits University/John Hawks) With a series of papers out today, Homo naledi gets both a birthdate and more complete. Discovered in a South African cave,H. naledi first came to light in 2015, in a paper by University of the Witwatersrand anthropologist Lee Berger. Though the remains were undated at the time, estimates put them at anywhere from 100,000 to several million years old. This was based on a physical analysis of the bones, which contained a curious mixture of modern and archaic traits. Now, after putting the remains through a rigorous series of tests, Berger and his coauthors have shown that these individuals lived between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago, co-existing, at least for a time, with modern humans. Also in the series of papers released Tuesday in the journal eLife is the announcement of a new chamber within the Rising Star cave where the hominin species was first found. It too contains a collection of H. naledi bones, including at least three individuals and one "remarkably complete" specimen with a nearly intact skull.