One of the new Homo naledi skulls unearthed by Hawks, Berger, and their colleagues.eLIFE, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.24232.008Recently discovered fossils belonging to Homo naledi appear to be much younger than previously suspected, according to a new study of the remains and surrounding sediments and rocks. The materials were found deep in a South African cave system in 2015, adding H. naledi to the hominin ranks. But researchers were baffled by the species’s mixture of primitive features, such as a relatively small brain case, and modern ones, including feet skeletal morphology similar to that of our own.
Last year, scientists performed phylogenetic analyses that pegged the age of the H. naledi specimens to about 900,000 years. Since then, the scientists who originally unearthed the fossils have suggested that the remains could be hundreds of thousands of years younger.
Now, those more recent estimations have been supported by new chemical aging analyses of the bones and of surrounding inorganic materials. An international team of researchers publishing their work in eLife today (May 9) suggest that the H. naledi fossils were deposited in the Rising Star Cave system between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago.
“The dating of [H.] naledi was extremely challenging,” said coauthor Paul Dirks of Australia’s James Cook University and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, in a statement. “Eventually, ...
