Paleontologists in South Africa say they have discovered the world’s oldest known burial site, containing the remains of a distant relative of small-brained humans previously thought to be incapable of complex behavior.
Led by renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, researchers said in 2023 that they had found several specimens of Homo ice cream – a tree-climbing Stone Age hominid – buried about 30 meters (100 feet) underground in a cave system within the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Johannesburg.
“These are the oldest burials yet recorded in the hominin record, predating evidence of Homo sapiens burials at least 100,000 years old,” the scientists wrote in a series of preprint papers published in eLife.
The findings challenge current understanding of human evolution, as the development of larger brains is commonly thought to have enabled complex, “meaning-making” activities such as burying the dead.
The oldest previously discovered burials discovered in the Middle East and Africa contain the remains of Homo sapiens – and they were about 100,000 years old.
Those found in South Africa by Berger, whose previous reports have been controversial, and his fellow researchers date back to at least 200,000 BC.
Critically, they also belong to Homo ice creama primitive cross between apes and modern humans that had a brain the size of an orange and stood about 1.5 meters (five feet) tall.
With curved fingers and toes, hands and feet working with tools designed for walking, the species Berger discovered had already overturned the notion that our evolutionary path is a straight line.
Homo ice cream is named after the Rising Star cave system where the first bones were discovered in 2013.
The oval-shaped burials at the center of the new research were also found there during excavations that began in 2018.
The holes, which researchers say evidence indicates were deliberately dug and then filled to cover the bodies, contained at least five individuals.
“These findings indicate that burial practices were not limited to H. sapiens or other hominins with large brain sizes,” the researchers said.
The place of burial is not the only sign that Homo ice cream was capable of complex emotional and cognitive behavior, they added.
Brain size
Engravings forming geometric figures, including a “rough figure with a hashtag”, were also found on the apparently deliberately smoothed surfaces of a cave pillar nearby.
“This would mean that humans are not only not unique in developing symbolic practices, but may not have even invented such behavior,” Berger told AFP in an interview.
Such statements are likely to ruffle some feathers in the world of paleontology, where the 57-year-old has previously faced accusations of a lack of scientific rigor and jumping to conclusions.
Many balked when, in 2015, Berger, whose earlier findings received support from National Geographicfirst aired the idea that Homo ice cream was capable of more than the assumed size of his head.
“It was too much for scientists at the time. We think it’s all about that big brain,” he said.
“We are about to tell the world that this is not true.
Although they require further analysis, the findings “change our understanding of human evolution,” the researchers wrote.
“Burial, meaning-making, even ‘art’ may have a much more complex, dynamic, non-human history than we have hitherto thought,” said Agustin Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University who co-authored the studies.
Carol Ward, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the research, said “these findings, if confirmed, would be of great potential importance.”
“I look forward to learning how the disposal of the remains rules out possible explanations other than deliberate burial and to see the results once they are peer-reviewed,” she told AFP.
Ward also pointed out that the paper acknowledges that it cannot rule out that the markings on the walls may have been made by later hominins.
© Agence France-Presse
An earlier version of this article was published in June 2023.
