Over the past two years, an international team of scientists has discovered more than 1,500 mysterious fragments of bone in a tiny cave in South Africa. Thursday morning, the team announced that the fossils are from a new species of ancient human that is believed to have lived 2 to 3 million years ago: Homo naledi.

They appear to resemble another ancient hominin species, Homo erectus, but they have much smaller brains, more along the lines of a gorilla’s. There’s even tantalizing evidence that they might have buried their dead — something scientists previously thought only modern humans did.

When it comes to the study of human evolution, all this is a really big deal. To date, we know of only a handful of other species similar enough to us to fit in to our genus: Homo. Scientists will debate this designation for H. naledi — as they do for all newly discovered species — but the bottom line is that these fossils, detailed in a pair of new papers in the journal eLIFE, give us a […]