Five years ago, in South Africa, scientists discovered Homo naledi, a species of hominids that lived side by side with the ancestors of modern humans. This finding could change all our ideas about evolution.
This week, a group of Russian scientists presented in Moscow a scientific reconstruction of the head of this mysterious creature, discovered in South Africa by the American paleontologist Lee Berger. The scientist presented one cast of the skull of Homo iced to his Russian colleagues.
The fruits of scientific work were presented on Sunday at the National Research Technological University "MISiS". Homo ice - half man, half monkey. However, instead of shedding light on the origins of humanity, he turned out to be a link that does not fit well into the evolutionary chain, explains Russian anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky.
"Homo ice combines some features that are more characteristic of primates, such as the brain, with the latest signs of evolutionary development, in particular teeth and feet, which bring them closer to modern humans," says Drobyshevsky. “Naledi are extremely peculiar. Their height was about one and a half meters, the brain weighed from 400 to 600 grams, just in the interval between Australopithecines (erect primates) and Homo habilis, who is considered the earliest person.
In the first analysis of the bones of fifteen individuals found in the deep South African Rising Star cave, scientists initially thought they were the remains of the first people who lived about three million years ago. Their astonishment knew no bounds when dating revealed that Homo frost lived only 300 thousand years ago, at a time when the Rhodesian man (Homo rhodesiensis) - one of the closest to modern man - was spreading across the South African steppes with might and main.
“The coexistence of these two species on the same territory proves that human evolution could have followed a completely different path,” says Drobyshevsky. Other types of people lived in the same era, but they were not as different from each other as man and chimpanzee (as in the case of Australopithecus and Homo habilis), or they lived on different continents or in territories separated by insurmountable geographical barriers.
It remains a mystery how Homo ice and Rhodesian man interacted with each other, which some scientists attribute to the species Homo sapiens. “They could both cooperate with each other and be at enmity. There are genes of some African peoples, for example the pygmies or the Bushmen, that have not yet been deciphered,”says the Russian anthropologist. As in the DNA of European sapiens there is something from the Neanderthals, so the undeciphered links of the genetics of African peoples could be the legacy of Homo ice, although in order to unravel this mystery, it will be necessary to decipher the genome of a new species.
On the other hand, the brain of the frost, comparable in size to the brain of the very first person, and its chest, which, like in primates, was not adapted to speech, indicate that the intellectual abilities of the ice were poorly developed. Their only cultural artifacts can be found in the same place, next to their remains, in a cave more than 16 meters deep, which can only be entered through a very narrow hole 20 centimeters wide, which from the very beginning excludes the possibility that they lived there. The most likely, according to Drobyshevsky, is that the undersized ice buried the dead there, but not as a ritual, but for hygienic reasons.
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The jaw and teeth of these hominids are even smaller than those of modern humans, which refutes one of the main claims of the theory of evolution. Until now, it was believed that the size of the teeth decreased in the course of human evolution. Drobyshevsky says that the curvature of the fingers on the hands, which is greater than that of modern monkeys, on the contrary, proves that at some point the ice could involution in order to adapt to the habitat.
Drobyshevsky says that, despite the shape of the ice brush, almost the same as that of a modern person, and the ability to produce tools, bending of fingers refutes all previously existing theories. New data allow scientists to understand that the ice went straight and used tools, like the first man, but at the same time could climb trees like a monkey. “Some of those tools that scientists had previously found and attributed to sapiens, in fact, could belong to ice. Nothing of the ice culture has come down to us, but the shape of their brush indicates that they could produce tools, even though their brains were small,”says Drobyshevsky.