Puzzling skeleton shows how ancient human relative grew up

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More than 200,000 years ago in what is now South Africa, a child, standing about three feet tall, somehow died before reaching adulthood. The young human relative’s body came to rest inside a deep, dark cave, alongside the remains of at least 14 others of its kind. 

 The remains went unnoticed and undisturbed until 2013, when spelunkers an African cave system came across hundreds of bone fragments and teeth from a newfound cousin to modern humans, a relative now called Homo naledi. Now, researchers poring over the cave’s fossils have pieced together the child’s partial skeleton—the first such juvenile H. naledi skeleton ever assembled. 

Recovered from the cave system’s Dinaledi chamber, the individual—named DH7 (Dinaledi Hominin 7)—is thought to have died between eight and 15 years old. The newly described bones, unveiled today in the journal PLOS ONE, consist of a lower right jawbone and 16 fragments from the rest of the body. Such complete skeletons from young hominins other than modern humans and Neanderthals are exceedingly rare because the smaller, softer bones are less likely to fossilize.

Finding juveniles is particularly significant, says University of Tuebingen paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati-Papatheodorou, who was not involved with the new study. “Because fossil hominids did not necessarily follow the same growth patterns as modern humans, such information can also tell us how different or similar their growth would have been to our own or to other extinct species,” she says in an email.

Most early human fossils are found as scattered, individual bones, not as sets that clearly belong to the same individual.

But the new Homo naledi skeleton stands out. The other early hominin species lived more than a million years ago, while H. naledi is much closer to our species in time. DH7 and the other fossils found with the skeleton were deposited between 226,000 and 335,000 years ago, just as signs of modern humans appear in Africa. But even though these two species may have coexisted, H. naledi had several physical features—such as its hips and shoulders—that more closely resembled ancient hominin cousins.

When study co-author Marina Elliott led excavations in the chamber in 2013 and 2014, she and her colleagues uncovered a treasure trove of bones. Scattered on the surface of the cave floor and buried within less than four carry-on suitcases’ worth of excavated dirt, the team found some 1,550 bones and teeth belonging to at least 15 Homo naledi individuals, ranging from infants to adults. To date, the chamber has yielded more than 1,800 fossils.

Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/puzzling-skeleton-reveal-ancient-human-relative-homo-naledi-grew-up/

[Guest Blue Madonna]

I love your science posts keep it up! This is crazy 

[Guest Adarsh]

I learn more from you than I did in school 🤓 

[Sneaky Oliver 22,988]

How long are we aware of Homo naledi? I have never heard of it. The evolution of Homo species is so interesting. Sometimes I wonder how the world would be if we had multiple homo species living today

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53 minutes ago, Sneaky Oliver said:

How long are we aware of Homo naledi? I have never heard of it. The evolution of Homo species is so interesting. Sometimes I wonder how the world would be if we had multiple homo species living today

From what I found it was just described in 2015. 

57 minutes ago, Sneaky Oliver said:

 Sometimes I wonder how the world would be if we had multiple homo species living today

There are people that argue that it wouldn't end up too well considering colonialism, racism, slavery and murders all happened against people of the same species and obviously the differences are less noticeable between humans of different races within a species compared to humans of different races. 

In a way, there are multiple species of humans living today because modern human's genome includes Nearderthal and Denisovan DNA and in varying proportions too among families or geographical regions.

[Sneaky Oliver 22,988]

3 hours ago, FfFfFfFF said:

In a way, there are multiple species of humans living today because modern human's genome includes Nearderthal and Denisovan DNA and in varying proportions too among families or geographical regions.

I'm shocked! I didn't know that!  well perhaps our ignorance towards that is a positive thing, otherwise it would affcet our society like you said: with war, colonialism, racism and all sort of discrimination and crimes