A trio of papers posted online and presented at a meeting today lays out an astonishing scenario. Roughly 240,000 years ago, they suggest, small-brained human relatives carried their dead through a labyrinth of tight passageways into the dark depths of a vast limestone cave system in South Africa. Working by firelight, these diminutive cave explorers dug shallow graves, sometimes arranging bodies in fetal positions and placing a stone tool near a child’s hand.
“I am more and more persuaded that something amazing happened here,” given the wealth of skeletons, says paleoanthropologist María Martinón-Torres of the Spanish National Research Centre for Human Evolution. “But they have not met the test to show deliberate burial.”at the bottom of a chute 50 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg. The team named it a new species because it had a surprising mix of traits, such as a small brain and a globular skull.
Elsewhere in the cave, the team found another set of very fragile bones. They removed two big chunks of sediment with bones inside, encased them in plaster, and took them to their lab. There, CT scans revealed 90 skeletal pieces and 51 dental pieces from threeindividuals, including a child. The scans also revealed a tool-like stone object next to the child’s hand. The researchers argue that the arrangement of the bones suggests the bodies were carefully buried in a fetal or seated position.