We are, certainly, a burying species as well as a building species – and our predecessors were buriers too. In a cave system called Rising Star in the limestone of South Africa a team of palaeoarchaeologists led by six women has discovered fossilized bone fragments thought to belong to a previously unknown early human relative, a species now named as Homo naledi. The disposition of this dark matter in two deep-set chambers suggests, remarkably, that Homo naledi was already interring its dead underground some 300,000 years ago.
