All-Woman Team Finds New Human Species

A new species of human? Awesome. A new species of human found 90 meters away from a cave entrance, through a 25cm tunnel, found by an all-woman team? Even more awesome! Lee Berger and her team have recently found a cave filled with the remains of a new species of human called Homo naledi. The women excavated the bones from a chamber that was through a tunnel that was only 25cm high suggesting that the early humans may have been trapped in there by others. Their features, from what they can tell from bones, are close to humans. The have human-like hands and wrists, but at the same time they have longer, curved thumbs and fingers which could mean they were comfortable climbing. Yet, their feet are so similar to ours that they may have been able to walk or even run like we do. The women found 1550 bones and are able to piece together most of a skeleton. According to Berger, “No one had ever tried to publish more than 100 fossils of a single species at once,” meaning this was an incredibly daunting task for the scientists.

Since the bones haven’t been carbon dated yet, it’s hard to tell when they lived, or which other types of early humans they lived near. Even though carbon dating would help, it’s hard to get an accurate reading on artifacts from caves sometimes, plus the bones could also be too old. Now that the bones have been extracted scientist can focus on trying to figure out more information on the species. For more information a pictures go to http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/09/new-human-species-discovered.