Based on their looks, Berger said, they could have lived as long as 2.8 million years ago to only a few tens of thousands of years ago. The clay coating the bottom of the discovery pit defies standard dating techniques. The mystery is deepened by the scientists' inability to say exactly when the newly discovered species lived. The team estimates they weighed about 90 to 120 pounds as adults. But they also likely climbed trees like apes, judging their from curved fingers, stout chests, and apelike shoulders, he said. "It's kind of a Sherlock Holmes case where they belong in human evolution."īased on human-looking feet, Homo naledi likely walked like modern people, said John Hawks, a study team co-author at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. This leaves researchers puzzled over where the new species fits in the human family tree, Wood said. Wood noted the extinct species sported a mixture of features that look like modern human ones, such as small teeth and flattish feet, and more ancient characteristics including an apelike pelvis and brow ridge. "In a word, they are weird," paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who was not involved in the discovery, told BuzzFeed News. The chamber pit - located at the bottom of a long, skinny cave chute only 7.5 inches wide in places - yielded the bony remains of perhaps 15 individuals, from infants to adults, described in two papers in the journal eLife. Caving expeditions in 20 recovered some 1,550 fossils from a small stone chamber roughly 100 feet underground, he said. "This is the first time we've found human fossils alone in a chamber like this in Africa," Berger said on a press call Wednesday. Fossils of a newly discovered extinct human species have emerged from deep in a South African cave, paleontologists reported on Thursday, describing a prehistoric pit intentionally filled with thousands of bones.ĭiscovered inside South Africa's Rising Star cave, these newly discovered human cousins have been dubbed Homo naledi (nuh-LEE-dee), meaning "Star Man" in the local Sotho language, by the discovery team led by paleontologist Lee Berger of South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand.īerger formally announced the discovery on Thursday morning in a South African government ceremony.
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