"We can see no other reason for this small child's skull being in an extraordinarily difficult to reach and dangerous positioning," said leader of the Rising Star Expedition Lee Berger, a palaeoanthropologist at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand and a National Geographic Explorer at Large, at a press conference about the find. naledi as a way of intentionally disposing of their dead, the study authors suggest. The discoveries hint that the remains may have been deliberately brought in by other H. The latest remains are the deepest yet found in the subsystem, deposited more than a hundred feet from its opening. The work revealed only one entrance from the wider cave system into the Dinaledi subsystem, where most H. The team mapped more than 1,000 feet of new passageways and described the maze-like system in a second study. The child's discovery, described in a new study published in the journal PaleoAnthropology, was part of an effort in 20 to explore the deepest reaches of the cave. "We're pushing into places that are metres and metres down impossible passages." "No one involved in this had any expectations that we were going to find naledi bones in these situations," says John Hawks, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The labyrinthine venture to discover the remains of the child, nicknamed "Leti" after the Setswana word for lost one, underscores a nagging question about these mysterious human relatives: How and why did they venture so deep into this dark, twisting cave?
But the recent contortionist moves required by Peixotto, an archaeologist at American University, Washington, D.C., and her team members were some of the most challenging yet. None of these discoveries have come easy, thanks to terrifying vertical drops and squeezes so tight that cavers must exhale to compress their rib cages. The remains of the child-estimated to have died between four and six years old-include six teeth and 28 skull fragments. naledi recovered from Rising Star since cavers stumbled upon the first fossils in 2013. The find adds to nearly 2,000 bones and teeth of H.
Inch by inch she wriggled her body through the twisting passage, turning nearly upside down to reach a small ledge where a scientific treasure awaited-the teeth and bone fragments of a child who lived more than 240,000 years ago, an enigmatic human relative known as Homo naledi.
Wedged in a narrow crevice about 150 feet underground in South Africa's Rising Star cave system, Becca Peixotto squeezed between the rocky walls to work her way around a bend.
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