Homo naledi was Prehistoric Parkour Athlete

Fossils belonging to H. naledi were first found at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) northwest of Johannesburg in South Africa, in October 2013.

The fossils of no less than 15 people – totaling 1,550 skeletal items – have since been excavated from the cave.

“It shows we have a much greater diversity in the fossils of human ancestors than we thought possible”, Tracy Kivell, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Kent who’s part of the team studying the bones, told the Guardian.

This does pose a little bit of a thriller, although, as it’s believed naledi might have lived tens of millions of years in the past, and that it had a mind concerning the measurement of a contemporary chimp’s mind.

H. naledi has a curious mix of both extremely primitive and extremely modern features.

“It was unequivocally spending more time walking upright than not”, William Harcourt-Smith, a researcher from the City University of New York who’s studying H.

“H. naledi had a unique form of locomotion for a member of the genus Homo“, says study author William Harcourt-Smith of CUNY’s Lehman College.

The Homo naledi foot shares many features with a modern human foot, indicating it is well-adapted for standing and walking on two feet. The arch of the foot is low, or absent entirely, making Homo naledi flat-footed.

Homo naledi, discovered in South Africa, could combine land walking and tree swinging.

These findings suggest that early human evolution involved many experiments “on different ways to be bipedal”, Harcourt-Smith said. “The legs are long, the knees are like ours, the feet are human-like”.

Dr DeSilva said it was more “outward flaring”, like that of Lucy, the famous female Australopithecus afarensis discovered in Ethiopia in 1974.

The hand of H. naledi was analysed by lead author Tracey Kivell and colleagues.

A almost complete adult right hand was found in the cave as well.

Fossilized feet and hands of an early human ancestor show surprisingly modern features, researchers say. They found the species shared a long, robust thumb and wrist architecture with modern humans and Neanderthals, potentially giving the hand a precise, forceful grip that may have been useful for tool use. “It shows you can have a hand that is quite specialized for manipulation and tool use in a species that is still using its hands for climbing, and moving around in the trees or on rocks”.

A composite skeleton of Homo naledi surrounded by a few of the hundreds of other fossil elements displayed in Magaliesburg, South Africa, Thursday, September 10, 2015.

The team has yet to recover any stone implements near the remains of Homo naledi, but if the species did smash rocks together to make cutting and scraping tools, it did so without much in the way of brain power. DeSilva says we need to refrain from using such language.

“We are seeing what’s essentially a human foot. Apes have evolved, too”.

However, the H. naledi foot had toes that were more curved than those of modern humans, supporting the notion that the hominin was also relatively adept at life in the trees.

“Our science has known for decades that upright walking, bipedalism, preceded brain enlargement over the course of human evolution”.