WE TALK ABOUT
Scientists find oldest cemetery in SA
UP UNTIL lately, it was thought that only humans laid their loved ones to rest – but scientists in South Africa have found the oldest known burial site in the world, containing the remains of a distant relative of humans.
PROFESSOR LEE BERGER, a world-renowned palaeoanthropologist (see Word of the Week) from the University of the Witwatersrand in Gauteng, recently discovered several specimens of Homo naledi in shallow graves about 30m underground in a cave system near the Cradle of Humankind, not far from Johannesburg.
Homo naledi is a prehistoric species seen as the bridge between apes and humans. Their brains were the size of an orange, and they were up to 1,5m tall. The new revelation suggests that Homo naledi buried their dead at least 100 000 years before the earliest humans did so.
It’s not Professor Berger’s first big find – in 2013 he found the first fossils in the Dinaledi Chamber
