Was a small-brained human relative the world ’s first gravedigger—and artist?

A trio of papers posted online and presented at a meeting today lays out an astonishing scenario. Roughly 240,000 years ago, they suggest, small-brained human relatives carried their dead through a labyrinth of tight passageways into the dark depths of a vast limestone cave system in South Africa. Working by firelight, these diminutive cave explorers dug shallow graves, sometimes arranging bodies in fetal positions and placing a stone tool near a child’s hand. Some etched cave walls with crosshatches and others cooked small animals in what amounted to a subterranean funeral, more than 100,000 years before such behaviors emerged in modern humans. If true, this scenario, based on a wealth of fossil finds in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system, would have major implications for the dawn of human behavior as well as the abilities of our extinct cousins, Homo naledi . “We are facing a remarkable discovery here of hominids, nonhumans with brains a third of the size of [modern] humans … burying their dead, using symbols, and engaging in meaning-making activities,” team leader Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand said at a press conference. “Not only are [modern] humans not unique in their development of symbolic practices, but [we] may not have even invented such behaviors.” However, other researchers are overwhelmingly skeptical of the papers, which are in review at the online journal eLife and have been p...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news