Homo naledi
A small-brained relative who may have buried its dead.
Full detail, evidence and debate
Fossils of at least fifteen individuals recovered from a near-inaccessible chamber in South Africa's Rising Star cave system, dated far younger than their anatomy suggested — and now at the centre of one of palaeoanthropology's noisiest arguments, over whether a creature with a brain a third the size of ours buried its dead and carved marks on a wall.
- Discovered
- 2013, Rising Star cave system, Cradle of Humankind
- Fossil elements
- Over 1,500, from at least 15 individuals
- Brain size
- c. 465–610 cm³, roughly one third of a modern human's
- Age
- 335,000 – 236,000 years — contemporary with early Homo sapiens
- Access
- A 12-metre chute narrowing to about 18cm
Source Mode
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The find
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
In September 2013 two recreational cavers, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, squeezed through a narrow fissure in the Rising Star cave system north-west of Johannesburg and found a chamber floor scattered with bone. Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand recognised what the photographs showed and faced an immediate practical problem: the final approach was a vertical chute narrowing to about eighteen centimetres. He advertised on social media for excavators who were qualified scientists, slight enough to fit, and willing to work in the dark far underground. Six women were selected — Marina Elliott, Becca Peixotto, Hannah Morris, Alia Gurtov, Elen Feuerriegel and Lindsay Hunter — and the press named them the underground astronauts. Over two field seasons they recovered more than 1,500 fossil elements, representing infants, juveniles, adults and at least one elderly individual: one of the richest single hominin assemblages ever excavated anywhere in the world. A second chamber, Lesedi, later produced more.
An unexpected anatomy
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Homo naledi is a mosaic, and that is what makes it important. The skull is small, with a brain volume between roughly 465 and 610 cubic centimetres — closer to an australopithecine than to us. The shoulders are ape-like and built for climbing; the fingers are strongly curved. Yet the wrist and hand are capable of a powerful precision grip, the legs are long, and the feet are almost indistinguishable from a modern human foot. The teeth are small and human-like in some respects, primitive in others. Evolution, in other words, did not proceed as a tidy upgrade of all features together. Different parts of the body changed at different rates in different lineages, and Homo naledi is a vivid demonstration.
Why the date upset everything
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
When the fossils were first published in 2015 the anatomy suggested an age of perhaps two million years. Direct dating in 2017 returned something else entirely: between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago. That is the same window in which Homo sapiens was emerging elsewhere on the continent, and in which Middle Stone Age toolkits were spreading across southern Africa. A small-brained hominin was alive in South Africa while anatomically modern humans existed in Morocco and Ethiopia. Two consequences follow. First, the human family tree was bushy until recently: several hominin species shared Africa, as Neanderthals, Denisovans and sapiens shared Eurasia. Second, brain size is a poor proxy for date. The old habit of assuming small brain equals old fossil no longer holds.
How did the bodies get there?
Several incompatible readings exist. We present the disagreement rather than resolving it for you.
The chamber is hard to reach now and was probably hard to reach then. There is no evidence of a collapsed entrance, no sign of carnivore damage or gnawing, no water-carried sediment sorting, and almost no other animal bones — a very unusual assemblage. The excavation team's interpretation is deliberate body disposal: living Homo naledi carried their dead into the dark, through a difficult passage, over a long period. That is a claim about behaviour normally reserved for large-brained humans. The alternatives have all been argued. A death trap, with individuals entering and failing to leave. A now-blocked second entrance. Bodies washed in by water. Each has problems: a death trap should produce a different age profile and more disturbance; no alternative entrance has been found despite extensive survey; the sediments do not look water-sorted. None of the readings is comfortable, and that is precisely why the argument continues.
The disputed claims
Several incompatible readings exist. We present the disagreement rather than resolving it for you.
In 2023 the team went further, publishing preprints arguing for intentional burial in dug pits, for engraved cross-hatch markings on the cave walls, and for controlled fire use in the system. The response was severe. Reviewers of the preprints described the sedimentary evidence for grave cuts as insufficient, argued the wall markings were undated and could be recent, and objected that extraordinary claims were being announced alongside a television documentary before peer review completed. Some critics were pointed about the pattern; the team responded that the criticism was conservative gatekeeping. An honest reader should hold two things at once. The claims are not proven. And the assemblage genuinely is difficult to explain by ordinary taphonomy. What we are watching is not a scandal but the normal, uncomfortable process by which a contested claim is tested — carried out unusually in public.
The Cradle of Humankind
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
Rising Star sits inside a UNESCO World Heritage Site containing Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai and Malapa — dolomite cave systems that have produced a large proportion of the world's australopithecine fossils. These caves work differently from the Rift. Sinkholes and vertical shafts acted as natural traps, and bones accumulated in breccia cones that hardened into rock. Dating is harder, relying on uranium-lead in flowstone and cosmogenic nuclide burial dating rather than volcanic ash, which is why South African dates have historically carried wider error bars and sharper arguments. The roll call is still remarkable: the Taung Child, identified by Raymond Dart in 1924 and initially dismissed by European experts; Mrs Ples at Sterkfontein; Little Foot, an almost complete Australopithecus skeleton excavated over two painstaking decades by Ronald Clarke, Stephen Motsumi and Nkwane Molefe; and Australopithecus sediba at Malapa.
Science in public
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
The Rising Star project changed the working practice of the field as much as its content. Excavation was livestreamed. Fossils were published open-access and scanned models released for anyone to download and print, which was close to unheard of in a discipline notorious for restricting access to specimens. That openness is why criticism arrived so fast and so specifically: rivals could examine the data. Whichever way the burial debate resolves, the shift from guarded specimens to open scans is likely to be the more lasting change. There has also been a naming choice worth noticing. Naledi means 'star' in Sesotho, and the chamber names Dinaledi and Lesedi are Sesotho too — a small but deliberate departure from a nomenclature dominated by Latin and Greek.
Why it matters
The broad outline is accepted but dates, numbers or details are actively argued by specialists.
Homo naledi is the clearest reminder in current palaeoanthropology that the human story is not a ladder. It is a bush, with branches coexisting, overlapping and dying out, and our own survival as the only remaining branch is recent and not obviously inevitable. It also puts a question mark over what we assume requires a big brain. If a hominin with a 500cc brain carried its dead into a cave, then ritual, planning and social cohesion are not exclusive property of large-brained species — and much of what we consider distinctively human would need rethinking. That conclusion is not established. It is being fought over, in journals and in public, with African fossils held in an African institution and African students on the excavation team. That is itself part of the story.
Where to go next
Supported by archaeology, written records and peer-reviewed research with broad agreement among historians.
The Great Rift Valley explains why the East African record looks so different from these South African caves. The First Humans places naledi in the wider sequence. Blombos Cave, a few hundred kilometres south, shows what unambiguously modern symbolic behaviour looks like in the archaeological record.
Sources
- Hominin fossil and ancient-DNA research reports
Nature / Science / Journal of Human Evolution
- General History of Africa (8 volumes)African source
UNESCO International Scientific Committee · 1981–1993
https://www.unesco.org/en/general-history-africa - UNESCO World Heritage List — African sites
UNESCO
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/
Follow the thread
The First Humans
Africa is not part of the human story. Africa is where it starts.
Every human being alive today descends from populations that lived in Africa. The continent holds the deepest fossil record of our lineage, the oldest stone tools, the earliest evidence of fire, pigment and ornament, and by far the greatest human genetic diversity on Earth. This is not a claim about African pride; it is the settled reading of the fossil, archaeological and genomic evidence, and it reframes every other chapter that follows.
ContinentalThe Great Rift Valley
The trench that preserved the human record.
A 6,000km tear in the Earth's crust running from the Red Sea to Mozambique, still widening today. Its volcanic ash layers and lake sediments preserved and precisely dated the fossils that built the human story — and in doing so gave the whole discipline an East African accent it is only now correcting.
East AfricaBlombos Cave
The oldest known drawing, and jewellery 75,000 years old.
A cave on South Africa's southern Cape coast that produced engraved ochre, pierced shell beads, finely made bone tools, an ochre-processing workshop and a deliberate cross-hatch drawing — the earliest known. Together they show that symbolic thought, planning and chemistry are old, and African.
Southern Africa