Homo naledi has been added to our family tree but exactly where, is still to be discovered. Read more here...
Over 1500 fossils making up 15 separate individuals have been discovered in a cave near Johannesburg.
Here are a few highlights of it's anatomy...
The skull was globular, like a member of our genus but the brain was small and primitive. The wrist suggested this species was an adept toolmaker, but its shoulder and fingers showed it still climbed in trees, like more primitive hominins.... bones in the wrist were shaped like those in modern humans, suggesting that the palm at the base of the thumb was quite stiff. That would allow forces to dissipate over a larger area of the hand than in more primitive humans—a trait associated with tool use. At the same time, had a weird thumb and long, curving fingers, as if it still spent a lot of time climbing... its proportions were modern and the big toe was aligned with the other toes, rather than diverging like an ape’s grasping big toe. Taken together, the hand and foot suggest “you have a creature that would have walked upright really well but also would have been comfortable in the trees,” Harcourt-Smith says. Harvard University paleoanthropologist Dan Lieberman agrees: “The foot is indeed strikingly modern … and suggests it walked and ran much like modern humans. more...