The first remains of Homo naledi were found by cavers in September 2013 in a remote alcove (the Dinaledi Chamber) deep within the Rising Star cave complex in South Africa’s Transvaal region. The species, whose bones bore similarities to the remains of other species within the human genus Homo, as well as to those of Australopithecus, is thought to have evolved about the same time as the first members of Homo, some 2.8 million to 2.5 million years ago—during the Pliocene (5.3 million to about 2.6 million years ago) and early Pleistocene (about 2.6 million years ago to 11,700 years ago) epochs. A new study, however, strongly suggests that the actual remains found in the Dinaledi Chamber may be far more recent.
H. naledi is known from more than 1,500 fossil specimens found in excavations of the Dinaledi Chamber—the remains of at least 15 males and females of various ages—that were described in 2015. H. naledi had some skeletal features in common with other members of Homo, including reduced cheek teeth and similar jaws and feet. It possessed other features, including the pelvis, shoulder girdle, femur, and size of the brain cavity, that were more reminiscent of those found in Australopithecus, a lineage that most paleontologists believe was ancestral to genus Homo, and thus us (Homo sapiens).
With H. naledi’s mix of modern and primitive features, it was difficult for paleontologists to determine where to place the species on the time line of human evolution from its physical features alone. Some studies attempted to develop statistical models to estimate the age of the species based on its physical features; however, their results varied, with age estimates falling between 1 million and 2 million years ago.
A 2017 study conducted by a multinational team of researchers from Australia, South Africa, the United States, and Spain attempted to zero in on the age of the remains using a series of radiometric dating techniques (which measure the ratio amount of a radioactive element and its decay product in a sample of rock or bone). They established the dates of the sediments in which the bones of H. naledi were found using Uranium-Thorium dating (a technique capable of estimating the age of a sample out to roughly 1 million years). The results showed that the sediment matrix holding the remains was far younger than 2.5–2.8 million years old; it was only 236,000–414,000 years old. Another radiometric dating technique called U-series electron spin resonance (US-ESR) dating was used to validate these results by dating the remains of some of the teeth found in the sediment along with a few grains of sediment. Taken together, the data revealed that the age of the remains of H. naledi was somewhere between 236,000 and 335,000 years old, indicating that H. naledi was present during the Pleistocene Epoch in southern Africa.
Around the same time, it is thought that H. sapiens was emerging in different parts of Africa. The oldest known fossils of anatomically modern human beings are likely those that date to 315,000 years ago in Morocco. (Until recently, the oldest H. sapiens fossils were thought to date to 195,000 years ago at Ethiopia’s Omo site.) One could speculate that other members of each species (whose remains are yet undiscovered) could have lived at the same time, and they may have even encountered one another.
With the new information obtained by dating the sediments and the remains they contained, paleontologists developed one snapshot of H. naledi’s time on Earth—possibly one near the end of its existence. However, its true place with respect to other members of the genus remained a matter of speculation. Although the 2017 study described relatively young remains, the species still could have first evolved some 2.5–3 million years ago—a time that precedes the evolution of H. sapiens, as well as H. erectus, a species which many paleontologists consider to be the direct ancestor of H. sapiens. While it is possible that H. naledi could be simply the last of a lineage that tracked parallel to the one that produced us, some paleontologists, including some of those who were involved in the 2017 study, argue that it is also possible that H. sapiens or H. erectus (or both) could have descended from H. naledi.
Australopithecus vs. Homo