Anthropologist Lee Berger and his team at the University of the Witwatersrand, working within the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, have published their most extensive evidence yet of deliberate burial by Homo naledi, a small brained hominin that walked the Earth with several current modern human cousins over 240,000 years ago.
It began with a Facebook call for short, skinny and fit anthropologists who “must not be claustrophobic.” There is a backstory to the beginning of course, but it is here in this Facebook advert for the smallest in stature and bravest of heart to drop everything and fly to South Africa where the team was assembled.
Their task: delve 30 meters down and explore an over 100 meter-long topography of a treacherous and at times impossibly narrow cave system.
The original announcement of the find in 2015 was met with amazement, some skepticism and a hint of controversy. Amazing because it was impossible to imagine the discovery of a new species of hominin, not by a single bone or fragmented skull, but by a trove of over 1,500 well-preserved fossilized bones from a minimum of 15 individuals, many articulated in place, buried in a cave that had been undisturbed for possibly more than 300,000 years.
With so many fossils awaiting excavation, the team dubbed the most concentrated area within the Dinaledi Chamber the “Puzzle Box.”
Hellbound and Down 