Deep cave yields a new human

摘要

One thousand four hundred bones, 140 teeth, belonging to at least 15 individual skeletons - and that's just what was recovered in a single short field session. The early human fossil record isn't normally this rich. For a century, palaeoanthropologists have generally learned to make do with slim pickings -part of a face here, a jawbone fragment there. Now, from the depthsofa cave in South Africa, has come a monster cache of hominin bones from a previously unknown early species of our own genus, Homo. "It's unique," says Fred Spoor at University College London, who has seen casts of some of the finds. The sheer number of bones and their location hint at something even more astonishing: the bodies they belonged to appear to have been left deliberately in the cave. This has never been seen before in such a primitive human, and could have big implications for understanding the origins of modern human behaviour (see "Did ancient hominins bury their dead?", opposite).