New member of the family! - Homo Naledi

Arsemageddon

There's a brand new member of the human family called Homo Nadeli. The remains of 15 distinct individuals were found in a cave system in South Africa in a National Geographic funded research excavation. The positioning of the bodies and the quantity of bone recovered indicate they may have deliberately placed in the cave as part of a funerary ritual, though this hypothesis is not as yet widely accepted.

Exact dates for Homo Naledi have not yet been established (which would seem to be putting the needs of the National Geographic ahead of best practice) but I'm willing to overlook that as they did fund the excavation.

The excavation itself looks to have been incredibly difficult with the excavation team having to pass through tunnels just 0.20m wide. Because of this six small framed women were selected to carry out the excavation (I trust they didn't see the horror film The Descent beforehand).


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150910-human-evolution-change/

Fries-With-That

Arsemageddon wrote: »

There's a brand new member of the human family called Homo Nadeli. The remains of 15 distinct individuals were found in a cave system in South Africa in a National Geographic funded research excavation.


http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150910-human-evolution-change/

Great article, thank you.

Wibbs

Handsome looking people alright.

The age, when they work it out will be the really interesting thing. Millions of years has been mooted and understandably given the features involved, but I'm going to go and smoke the doobie, drop the good blotter acid and go more than a bit off piste here and suggest younger than that. Maybe much younger. Oh yes, mad bastid that I am.

They don't look nor read like millions of year old fossils, more like non fossilised bone, with low mineralisation*. Odd given they've been found in a cave system like this, carved out by water. Has it been that dry and undisturbed for millions of years? Maybe, oddball shíte like this does happen, but I'd be awaiting further developments. I wonder have they even tried C14 dating techniques? Or have they just assumed an age where that couldn't possibly work? I'd be also drilling the teeth for DNA while I was at it.

We do have some previous here after all; QV the "Hobbits" Homo floresiensis which lasted until at least 12,000 years ago and had a similar suite of primitive features. Indeed they looked more like "Lucy" an Australopithecus, than a dwarf Erectus. We've also got the Red Deer Cave people from China, again with loads of primitive features(though much more advanced than Lucy/Hobbits/new guys) and living up to 11,000 years ago.

The idea that these folks were deliberately disposing of their dead in such a manner has previous too. Homo heidelbergensis in Spain, IMH Neandertal Mark 1 appears to have been doing similar in a cave in Atapuerca(20 plus people IIRC) and may have even thrown in votive offerings in the form of extremely well made hand axes/bifaces that show no usage wear. In the same neck of the woods, Neandertal bones have been found deep in cave systems. IN their case they had been butchered for meat. Or that's what it looks like to our eye. TO their eye it may have been the equivalent of a "sky burial", a way to honour the dead(and feed the living).

The human story is wonderfully complex and we have so so much left to learn. So often in the past and even today, what we learned was down to mad men and women with local access to good sites and isolated fossils that they ascribed whole species to(IMH Homo Habilis, should have been named Homo Leakey). Again that's understandable considering the dearth of material to work from. All it takes is a better site like the one in Georgia to show how diverse we were back then.

Meh, I'm still majorly pissed off to live in a world where only one species of human is knocking around.




*might also explain the wonderful state and sheer amount of preservation.

Arsemageddon

Hi Wibbs,

I can't think of a good reason why they didn't obtain C14 dates before holding a press conference. C14 dates usually only take a couple of months to obtain from a commercial lab, and that's mostly due to the lab having a backlog.

I strongly suspect that they already have C14 dates but their holding that information back for publication at a later date, National Geographic need to get the most from their investment. As a matter of fact the failure to give a date as of yet makes me think that they may well be relatively recent.

They're still pretty cool though.

Black Swan

Dating will be key to describing and explaining this discovery. Until then, caution should be exercised.

tac foley

Wibbs wrote: »

Meh, I'm still majorly pissed off to live in a world where only one species of human is knocking around. [/SIZE]

All I can say to that comment is that you've obviously not sat outside our local town coffee bar on a Saturday morning and seen some of the examples of so-called humanity shambling by - my own son-in-law included, BTW.

tac

Wibbs

Black Swan wrote: »

Dating will be key to describing and explaining this discovery. Until then, caution should be exercised.

Sure, but if they're very old it's a game changer and if they're very young it's still a game changer. The site and environment is a bit of an oddball for me. There are stalactites etc so percolating water, yet the bones have little or no coverage and less mineralisation than expected. If they are in there for millions of years that's very odd. I also note they say they weren't the first modern people in the cave section as there was evidence of previous spelunkers. Very bloody interesting though.

Wibbs

A thought occurred to me…

I suspect that for long periods of time this planet had a host of different human and human similar species going on all over the place. Like way more than we imagine at the moment. That we being on our lonesome today is the major outlier in human evolution. I mean go back 60,000 years and we know at the moment that there was us, Neandertals, Erectus, Hobbits, Denisovans. Five different humans knocking about. Maybe we can add these new guys to that mix.

That brings me another idea as to why they look like they were purposely buried there. Maybe they weren't intentionally buried by members of their own species, but killed and intentionally buried by members of another human species, maybe even us? It'll be interesting to see what if any pathology they can glean from the bones.

slowburner

Wibbs wrote: »

That brings me another idea as to why they look like they were purposely buried there. Maybe they weren't intentionally buried by members of their own species, but killed and intentionally buried by members of another human species, maybe even us? It'll be interesting to see what if any pathology they can glean from the bones.

Very valid point, and it serves to highlight the fact that the researchers may very well have jumped to a conclusion on this aspect of the discovery.
Access to the cave is currently through a 0.2 metre opening. It might be unwise to assume that the opening was the same at the time of deposition...if indeed that was how the remains entered the cave.

Wibbs

The info on the cave geology itself seems scant enough, or at least what's been released so far. Is the blockage the result of a cave collapse, is it a blockage at all, or is it the natural layout of the cave because of more water resistant rock there? Lotsa questions. Questions one would assume would be relatively easy for geologists to start to answer?

Bonedigger

Something to put into your diaries - A documentary about this discovery is due to be aired at 8pm on Channel 4 next Sunday (27th September):
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/first-humans-the-cave-discovery

dubhthach

If they can extract viable aDNA than that will be an eye opener, but question is has the technology caught up to deal with a sample that old. Plus it depends on condition that the remains were in (eg. were they buried under thin layer of deposit etc.)

robp

dubhthach wrote: »

If they can extract viable aDNA than that will be an eye opener, but question is has the technology caught up to deal with a sample that old. Plus it depends on condition that the remains were in (eg. were they buried under thin layer of deposit etc.)

Well we have nuclear DNA from Sima de los Huesos so its possible, if its a very cool cave.

dubhthach

robp wrote: »

Well we have nuclear DNA from Sima de los Huesos so its possible, if its a very cool cave.

Sure but you looking at 400,000 years old or there abouts in that case. Some of figures been brandied around for Homo Nadeli are north of 2million years. The micro-climate of the cave systems gonna be important that's for sure.

Wibbs

Watching the documentary as we speak and I got a few questions. Numero uno, WTF are they doing? Why are they not wearing gloves and masks? They're contaminating potential DNA. They're manhandling them all over the place. We're in the 21st century here FFS. Another question would be a fair number of the bones in situ look like they have "recent" breakages, pale surfaces of a very different patina to the normal bone surface(a patina difference missing from the prepared specimens). No mention of the previous visitors to the cave the spelunkers noted. They're making the usual bold statements too. They don't know the age, or niche these guys fit into yet and are already calling early homo.

robp

Wibbs wrote: »

Watching the documentary as we speak and I got a few questions. Numero uno, WTF are they doing? Why are they not wearing gloves and masks? They're contaminating potential DNA. They're manhandling them all over the place. We're in the 21st century here FFS. Another question would be a fair number of the bones in situ look like they have "recent" breakages, pale surfaces of a very different patina to the normal bone surface(a patina difference missing from the prepared specimens). No mention of the previous visitors to the cave the spelunkers noted. They're making the usual bold statements too. They don't know the age, or niche these guys fit into yet and are already calling early homo.

Accelerating the speed of scholarship is wonderful, but only to a point. The speed which the PIs insisted that this project had to be carried out and written up (with 1-2 months of the dig) leaves a lot to be desired IMO.

Bonedigger

I paid a visit to the Natural History Museum on Merrion Square in Dublin during the week, and was delighted to find two cabinets displaying replica skulls of early Hominids. If I've got anything wrong below, I'm sure Wibbs will set me straight?!! By the way SB, if this is not an appropriate thread for this post, feel free to post it elsewhere.

Australopithecines




Members of the genus Homo




A closer look at some of the skulls:

Australopithecus afarensis Johanson and White
East Africa.
2.9 - 3.6 million years old.




Australopithecus africanus Raymond Dart
Sterkfontein, Transvaal, South Africa.
2.5 million years old.



Another A. africanus skull known as the "Taung child"
This is the skull of a 5-6 year old infant.
Taung, South Africa; Dart.
2.3 million years old.




Australopithecus/Paranthropus robustus Robert Broom
A skull recovered from a cave in Swartkrans, South Africa, where the remains of 130 individuals were discovered. It was the second Australopithecine to be found after Dart's A. africanus.
1.5 - 2.0 million years old.




Homo habilis Leakey et al.
Koobi Fora, Kenya.
1.9 million years old.

Following its discovery, Louis Leakey assigned habilis to the genus Homo, but there was dissent in the Palaeoanthropological world (nothing has changed it seems!) with many believing it was closer in morphology to the Australopithecines. However, having a braincase on average 50% larger than that of Australopithecines, and Leaky's assertion that this hominid was responsible for the manufacture of simple stone tools at Olduvai Gorge (Oldowan tradition), Tanzania, it was difficult for most of his critics to deny that it qualified as a human ancestor.




Homo ergaster Groves and Mazák
Nariokotome, Kenya.
1.6 million years old.

"Homo ergaster is variously thought to be ancestral to, or as sharing a common ancestor with, or as being the same species as, Homo erectus.
Interpreting Homo ergaster inevitably leads to Homo erectus, particularly regarding the taxonomy issues that persist within the scientific community of classifying the two species and separating their two lineages—if indeed they represent two separate lineages rather than one. Some palaeoanthropologists consider H. ergaster to be a variety of H. erectus, that is, the so-called African Homo erectus. Others call H. ergaster the direct ancestor of H. erectus, which then emigrated out of Africa into Eurasia and branched into a distinct species. Still others dispense with the specific epithet ergaster and make no such distinctions among fossils assigned to erectus.
The latest discoveries at Dmanisi, Georgia, suggest that all the contemporary groups of early Homo in Africa, including H. habilis and Homo ergaster, are of the same species and should be assigned to Homo erectus." (Wikipedia)




Homo erectus Eugene Dubois
Caves at Zhoukoudian, China.
240,000 to 500,000 years old.

The oldest known Homo erectus date to 1.9 million years in East Africa. H. erectus is believed to have been the first Hominin to migrate out of Africa (many H. erectus fossil remains were discovered at Zhoukoudian, China, in the 1920's and 1930's). Fossil remains were first discovered by Eugene Dubois on the island of Java in 1891, which the public later dubbed 'Java Man'. Evidence suggests H. erectus was making stone tools as early as 1.8 million years ago (see Acheulian technology); recent excavations in the Wonderwerk caves in South Africa have unearthed evidence that may suggest H. erectus was using fire as early as 1.0 million years ago.




Homo heidelbergensis Schoetensack
Sima de los huesos, Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain.
300,000 to 500,000 years old.

H. heidelbergensis lived in Africa, Europe and Western Asia between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago. H. heidelbergensis is probably the common ancestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern Humans (H. s. sapiens).




Homo neanderthalensis
La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France; King.
50,000 years old.

I can relate somewhat to these guys! They were short, stocky, hairy and maybe a little ugly, but were smarter than you think!




Homo floresiensis Brown et al.
Flores, Indonesia.
18,000 years old.

Nicknamed "the hobbit", the remains of an individual that would have stood about 1.1 metres (3.5 ft.) high were discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia.




Homo s. sapiens

Modern man!