The human family acquired a few more relatives in 2013 and 2014, and next year we get to find out who they are.
Over 1500 bones belonging to a dozen individuals were discovered after a long, arduous descent into a deep South African cave in October 2013. It was a phenomenal find. No archaeological dig has ever yielded anything close to this. More than 100 people have been analysing the hoard to figure out who the bones belonged to. Expect a slew of announcements early next year.
What are the possibilities? The Rising Star cave, where the bones were found, is part of a large cave complex called the Cradle of Humankind. A number of skeletons previously found there are from between 2 and 3 million years ago, from a time when we think the Homo genus was splitting from Australopithecus. The most famous of the recent finds is a pair of near-complete skeletons discovered in 2008, belonging to Australopithecus sediba, an entirely new species.
A. sediba has a strange mix of human and australopithecine qualities. Some say that if the various bones had been found separately, they would have been assumed to belong to different species. That is exciting because it’s a bit like seeing evolution in action.
If the Rising Star skeletons also turn out to look like chimeras with features from different species, that would further challenge attempts to draw a neat family tree with clearly defined common ancestors. Instead, it looks increasingly like a number of ape-like creatures existed a few million years back and interbred to produce a messy collection of species, from which we eventually emerged.
This article appeared in print under the headline “2015 Preview: Rising stars of human history”
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