on Monday, according to palaeontologists in South Africa, the oldest known burial site in the world, which includes the remains of a primitive human distant relative once believed to be incapable of complex behaviour, was discovered.
In the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO world heritage site close to Johannesburg, researchers led by famous palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger claimed to have found multiple examples of Homo naledi, a tree-climbing Stone Age hominid, buried around 30 metres (100 feet) underground in a cave system.
"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," the scientists wrote in a series of yet-to-be peer-reviewed and preprint papers to be published in eLife.
The results cast doubt on the conventional wisdom of human evolution, which holds that the growth of larger brains enabled the performance of complex, "meaning-making" acts like burying the dead.
The oldest burials ever discovered, about 100,000 years old, were in the Middle East and Africa. It contained Homo sapiens' remains.
They were discovered in South Africa by Berger and his colleagues, who have made some controversial claims in the past; they are at least 200,000 years old.
Importantly, they also descended from Homo naledi, a prehistoric species that existed at the nexus of apes and modern humans. Homo naledi was around 1.5 metres (five feet) tall and had brains the size of oranges.
With curled fingers and toes, tool-wielding hands, and feet designed for walking, the species identified by Berger had already challenged the idea that our evolutionary route was linear.
The "Rising Star" cave system, where the first bones were discovered in 2013, inspired the name "Homo naledi."
During the 2018-starting excavations, the oval-shaped interments in the core of the current study were also discovered there.
At least five people are found in the trenches, which researchers claim provide proof that they were intentionally dug before being filled in to conceal the deaths.
(Image: AP/ AFP)
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