Note: this topic is from . Thanks for the updated info SteveH!
Posted on 09/10/2015 5:12:13 AM PDT by ilovesarah2012
Rising Star Cave, South Africa (CNN)When an amateur caver and university geologist arrived at Lee Berger's house one night in late 2013 with a fragment of a fossil jawbone in hand, they broke out the beers and called National Geographic.
Berger, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, had unearthed some major finds before. But he knew he had something big on his hands.
What he didn't know at the time is that it would shake up our understanding of the progress of human evolution and even pose new questions about our identity.
Two years after they were tipped off by cavers plumbing the depths of the limestone tunnels in the Rising Star Cave outside Johannesburg, Berger and his team have discovered what they say is a new addition to our family tree.
The team is calling this new species of human relative "Homo naledi," and they say it appears to have buried its dead -- a behavior scientists previously thought was limited to humans.
Berger's team came up with the startling theory just days after reaching the place where the fossils -- consisting of infants, children, adults and elderly individuals -- were found, in a previously isolated chamber within the cave.
(Excerpt) Read more at edition.cnn.com ...
The hand and foot of Homo naledi
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-10/uotw-tha100515.php
http://media.eurekalert.org/multimedia_prod/pub/web/100583_web.jpg
Homo naledi May Have Been Able to Walk, Climb, and Use Tools
http://www.archaeology.org/news/3757-151006-h-naledi-hand-foot
Really, because there was a great documentary on PBS about three weeks ago and it focused on the team of young, thin, female PhDs from around the world who were brought together to conduct the extraction of the remains from the cave. No joke. It was rather fascinating to see them descend into the cave and squeeze through the opening. They reckoned that they were the first people down there in quite literally millions of years.
video: virtual tour of rising star cave
http://www.bdlive.co.za/national/science/2015/09/11/video-rising-star-cave-virtual-tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaLv6ZFcQwE
articles from 2017 update research on naledi indicating that the actual age is about 236,000 BC - 335,000 BC.
Also a second chamber, Lesedi, has now been discovered containing hominin remains.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/05/homo-naledi-human-evolution-science/
Note: this topic is from . Thanks for the updated info SteveH!
I hate these kind of headlines. This species isn’t an ancestor. They say it lived at the same time as the earliest humans. They are cousins since they are genus homo.
He needed female [because of size] anthoropologists who were spelunkers [because of the intense cave diving conditions].
Utterly fascinating.
Episode on PBS’s Nova — Dawn of Humanity
The Discovery of Homo Nadeli
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzLJAa5X4Fo&t=7s
1 hour 52 minutes!
Anyway, the whole video, including the pretty women in the cave!
I’m a flea-bit peanut monkey
All my friends are junkies
(That’s not really true)
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