World's Oldest Burial Site Reveals Homo Naledi Buried Their Dead 100,000 Years Before Humans

AncientPages.com | June 6, 2023 |

Jan Bartek - AncientPages.com - Paleontologists have discovered the oldest known burial site in the world, containing remains of a small-brained distant relative of humans previously thought incapable of complex behavior.

The bones were buried about 30 meters (100 feet) underground in a cave system within the Cradle of Humankind near Johannesburg, South Africa. The excavation was led by renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger who, together with his team, announced they discovered several specimens of Homo naledi – a tree-climbing, Stone Age hominid.



llustration. Credit: S.V. Medaris, UW Madison

"Recent excavations in the Rising Star Cave System of South Africa have revealed burials of the extinct hominin species Homo naledi. A combination of geological and anatomical evidence shows that hominins dug holes that disrupted the subsurface stratigraphy and interred the remains of H. naledi individuals, resulting in at least two discrete features within the Dinaledi Chamber and the Hill Antechamber.

These are the most ancient interments yet recorded in the hominin record, earlier than evidence of Homo sapiens interments by at least 100,000 years. These interments along with other evidence suggest that diverse mortuary practices may have been conducted by H. naledi within the cave system. These discoveries show that mortuary practices were not limited to H. sapiens or other hominins with large brain sizes," the scientists wrote in a series of yet-to-be peer-reviewed and preprint papers to be published in eLife.
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