Palaeontologists in South Africa said Monday they have found the oldest known burial site in the world, containing remains of a small-brained distant relative of humans previously thought incapable of complex behaviour.
Led by renowned palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger, researchers said they discovered several specimens of Homo naledi -- a tree-climbing, Stone Age hominid -- buried about 30 metres (100 feet) underground in a cave system within the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO world heritage site near Johannesburg.
"These are the most ancient interments yet recorded in the hominin record, earlier than evidence of Homo sapiens interments by at least 100,000 years," the scientists wrote in a series of yet-to-be peer-reviewed and preprint papers to be published in eLife.
