The cave where it has been found is only 18 centimeters wide and is located 50 kilometers from Johannesburg (South Africa). Specifically, the team of anthropologists, led by the University of the Witwatersrand, has found 1,500 fossilized bones of at least 15 individuals, which could be more than 2.5 million years old.
The discoverers believe that those hominids were deposited by their congeners, something that would imply a funerary behavior not previously observed in such primitive humans. But what really draws the attention of archaeologists and researchers is the inability to answer some questions today, for example how all those corpses ended up there , if to get to the chamber where they were found you have to travel 80 meters, climb up a wall and slip through a tiny crevice.
In addition, none of them have marks of trauma from a possible fall into the pit, nor are there any marks of strong rising waters that could have dragged the remains there. Therefore, it remains to think that someone must have left them there following a funeral ritual, something that until now was attributable to more modern humans and with a larger brain.
“ We have almost every bone in the body represented multiple times, which makes Homo naledi practically the best-known fossil of our lineage,” said Lee Berger, a palaeontropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand.
And finally, what would it look like and what capabilities would it possess? After studying it and comparing it with other groups, experts have concluded that it would be located between Australopithecus and Homo . They were approximately one and a half meters tall and weighed 45 kg, but they already had a slim body, they walked upright, and they had an opposable thumb that allows the manufacture of stone tools.
