A New Addition to the Human Family Tree Is Surprisingly Young
<em>Homo naledi </em>was alive between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago, which complicates the story of human evolution.
The one thing everyone agrees is that the fossils themselves are spectacular. In 2015, researchers unveiled 1,500 hominin fossil fragments found deep in a South African cave, excavated by six cavers who were all skinny, short, and female. The hominin, a new species the team christened Homo naledi, was an unusual mix of the old and modern. Their heads were small, suggesting an early hominin perhaps more than a million years old. But their feet were stiff for walking upright and their hands adept like modern humans.
So in the media frenzy that followed—a , a , numerous articles—the question kept coming up: How old are these fossils, really? What do they tell us, if anything, about the origin?
