World’s oldest-known human burial site found in South Africa
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Scientists have stumbled across evidence of what could be the world’s oldest-known burial of ancient humans.
Found in South Africa, it contains the skeleton remains of Homo naledi, a distant relative of humans. These ancient humans were short and had long arms, curved fingers, and a small brain (the size of an orange).
The newly discovered ancient interments date back at least 200,000 years. Previously, 100,000-year-old Homo sapiens interments were thought to be the oldest known burial in the hominin record.
The burial findings
Renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger led the excavation work at the Rising Star cave system — part of Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO world heritage site in South Africa.
The team uncovered several Homo naledi fossils buried about 100 feet (30 meters) underground in this site's Rising Star cave system.
“To be inside the caves –– inside the world of Homo naledi –– is not only a life-changing adventure but what we’ve uncovered forces us to rethink a whole set of assumptions about hominins and human evolution,” said Fuentes, professor of anthropology at Princeton University, in an official release.
The oval-shaped interments contained the remains of dozen of extinct hominin species, who were likely buried in “fetal positions.” The individuals were identified as adults and children (likely younger than 13).
This tree-climbing hominid species was at the crossroads between apes and modern humans. The first Homo naledi bones were discovered in 2013.
The engraved wall symbols
Their brain was one-third the size of modern humans, and they were long thought to be incapable of complex emotional and cognitive behavior.
However, the newly-identified specimens challenge the current understanding of human evolution as it had mainly been assumed that the development of larger brains enabled the performance of complex activities such as burying the dead.
These findings suggest that mortuary practices were not exclusive to just large-brained hominins.
Despite their small brains, these Stone Age hominids may also have lit fires and etched geometrical symbols on cave walls. These identified engraved symbols could be anywhere between 241,000 and 335,000 years old.
“These recent findings suggest intentional burials, the use of symbols, and meaning-making activities by Homo naledi. It seems an inevitable conclusion that in combination they indicate that this small-brained species of ancient human relatives was performing complex practices related to death,” said Berger. “That would mean not only are humans not unique in the development of symbolic practices, but may not have even invented such behaviors.”
The symbol inscription has also been reported in other human species, including Neanderthals (dating back to 60,000 years) and in early Homo sapiens in South Africa from about 80,000 years ago.
The findings are yet to be peer-reviewed and will be published in the journal eLife. The study is funded by National Geographic.
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