naledi date further back, to between 335,000 and 241,000 years ago. Our tightest constraints on the age of H. Neanderthals also sometimes buried their dead, although the best evidence of this behavior comes from fairly late in their existence, less than 100,000 years ago. The oldest clear cases were found in Israel, believed to be between 120,000 and 90,000 years old. Burial, on the other hand, is something more intentional: a body being purposely interred and then covered.Īrchaeologists have found surprisingly little evidence of burial among the earliest members of our species. naledi, we suggested that the bodies found in Dinaledi could have been either carried into the cave or dropped down, perhaps through the chimney-like passage we called the Chute. But “deliberate body disposal”-the language we had all carefully used in our earlier work-is very different from “burial.” In our 2015 papers describing H. naledi had occupied these spaces, and we had reason to suspect that they used Dinaledi as a repository for their remains. If the bones had flowed into the chamber, why had the fossils clustered? Why was there empty space between them?įor years we had worked in Rising Star knowing that H. Oddly, the surrounding sediment contained only a few fragments-or no bones at all. Further digging revealed a sterile area of no bones, and then another concentration of bones containing a jaw and limb bones in disarray, preserved at all angles.Īs Marina and Becca removed sediment one spoonful at a time from the area that Bones and I were puzzling over on the live stream, they uncovered a concentration of bones about as large as a medium-size suitcase. The northern square revealed a concentration of fragments that looked as if they’d come from one individual. We dug two new excavation squares: one south of the Puzzle Box and one north of it. We had returned to the Puzzle Box in November 2018 to test whether Dinaledi had a continuous layer of bones.
In total the Puzzle Box grew to an area of about a yard across and was packed with fossil remains. Excavating it felt like a high-stakes version of pick-up sticks, in which each piece had to be carefully extracted without disrupting the others. naledi that sat within a complicated array of bones and bone fragments: leg bones, arm bones, pieces of hands and feet. The biggest find from our excavations in 20 was a skull of H. We named the chamber Dinaledi, or “chamber of stars.” The remains represented a new species of primitive human relative we named Homo naledi : Homo, because it belonged in the genus shared by other humans, and naledi, meaning “star” in Sesotho, a common language in the cave system’s region of South Africa, about 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg. In less than two months’ time, my team had recovered more than 1,200 fossils-primarily bones and teeth-from a spot within Rising Star no bigger than 10 square feet.Īs we described in more than a dozen scientific papers, those fossils were unlike anything paleoanthropologists had ever seen. Our previous work at Dinaledi, in 20, was astonishing. I didn’t know it then, but that decision would lead to a scientific revelation-and some of the most terrifying, and most wondrous, moments of my life. “I think you’re making the right decision,” she said. It looks a lot like a burial feature to me,” I concluded.īones’s eyes widened: “It does.” She considered the on-screen image again. “I don’t think it’s a natural depression. “It looks like there was a hole in the floor of the cave,” I told Bones. But the sediment that Marina and Becca were scooping out didn’t have that same level of uniformity. Sediments in these caves formed through dust and debris slowly coming off the walls and blanketing the floor in nearly invisible layers.
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