This face tells us why we must rethink our views on our ancestors
More than 1,500 fossils from the Rising Star cave system in South Africa have been named as a new human species, Homo naledi, one which displays a unique combination of human and non-human traits throughout the skeleton.
In September 2013, two cavers discovered bones in an almost inaccessible chamber deep within the Rising Star cave system, about 25 miles from Johannesburg in South Africa. Two months later a team led remotely by palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand (remotely because only excavators much slenderer than Berger could squeeze themselves into the chamber) was recovering a haul of fossil human bones. The extraction of the remains was widely publicised, along with numerous videos and live feeds, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought that the coverage had more hype than substance.
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