A reconstruction
of Homo naledi’s head by paleoartist John Gurche, who spent
some 700 hours
recreating the head from bone scans. The find was announced
by the University
of the Witwatersrand, the National Geographic Society and the
South African
National Research Foundation and published in the journal eLife.
Photo by Mark
Thiessen/National Geographic
(September 10, 2015) An
international research team, which includes NYU anthropologists Scott Williams
and Myra Laird, has discovered a new species of a human relative. Homo naledi,
uncovered in a cave outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, sheds light on the
diversity of our genus and possibly its origin.
“This discovery is unprecedented in the sheer number of
hominins collected from such a small area in the virtual absence of other
animal remains,” says Williams, an assistant professor in NYU’s Department of
Anthropology. “That makes this site unique. Moreover, the announcement
describes only the tip of the iceberg of analyses that will come, and we hope
that is also true of the cave itself and the material that it still holds.”
The team’s findings, which are published in two papers in
the journal eLife, were announced by South Africa’s University of the
Witwatersrand, the National Geographic Society, and the South African National
Research Foundation.
The discovery also indicates that H. naledi intentionally
deposited bodies of its dead in a remote cave chamber—behaviors previously
thought limited to humans.
Lee Berger, a research professor in the Evolutionary Studies
Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand and a National Geographic
Explorer-in-Residence, led the expeditions that recovered the fossils—more than
1,500 bones belonging to at least 15 individuals.