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Scientists have discovered a new human-like species in a burial chamber deep in a cave system in South Africa.

The discovery of 15 partial skeletons is the largest single discovery of its type in Africa.

The researchers claim that the discovery will change ideas about our human ancestors.

The studies which have been published in the journal Elife also indicate that these individuals were capable of ritual behaviour.

The species, which has been named naledi, has been classified in the grouping, or genus, Homo, to which modern humans belong.

The researchers who made the find have not been able to find out how long ago these creatures lived - but the scientist who led the team, Prof Lee Berger, told BBC News that he believed they could be among the first of our kind (genus Homo) and could have lived in Africa up to three million years ago.

Like all those working in the field, he is at pains to avoid the term "missing link". Prof Berger says naledi could be thought of as a "bridge" between more primitive bipedal primates and humans.

"We'd gone in with the idea of recovering one fossil. That turned into multiple fossils. That turned into the discovery of multiple skeletons and multiple individuals.

"And so by the end of that remarkable 21-day experience, we had discovered the largest assemblage of fossil human relatives ever discovered in the history of the continent of Africa. That was an extraordinary experience."

Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum said naledi was "a very important discovery".

"What we are seeing is more and more species of creatures that suggests that nature was experimenting with how to evolve humans, thus giving rise to several different types of human-like creatures originating in parallel in different parts of Africa. Only one line eventually survived to give rise to us," he told BBC News.

I went to see the bones which are kept in a secure room at Witwatersrand University. The door to the room looks like one that would seal a bank vault. As Prof Berger turned the large lever on the door, he told me that our knowledge of very early humans is based on partial skeletons and the occasional skull.

The haul of 15 partial skeletons includes both males and females of varying ages - from infants to elderly. The discovery is unprecedented in Africa and will shed more light on how the first humans evolved.

"We are going to know everything about this species," Prof Berger told me as we walked over to the remains of H. naledi.

"We are going to know when its children were weaned, when they were born, how they developed, the speed at which they developed, the difference between males and females at every developmental stage from infancy, to childhood to teens to how they aged and how they died."

I was astonished to see how well preserved the bones were. The skull, teeth and feet looked as if they belonged to a human child - even though the skeleton was that of an elderly female.

Its hand looked human-like too, up to its fingers which curl around a bit like those of an ape.

Homo naledi is unlike any primitive human found in Africa. It has a tiny brain - about the size of a gorilla's and a primitive pelvis and shoulders. But it is put into the same genus as humans because of the more progressive shape of its skull, relatively small teeth, characteristic long legs and modern-looking feet.

"I saw something I thought I would never see in my career," Prof Berger told me.

"It was a moment that 25 years as a paleoanthropologist had not prepared me for."

One of the most intriguing questions raised by the find is how the remains got there.

I visited the site of the find, the Rising Star cave, an hour's drive from the university in an area known as the Cradle of Humankind. The cave leads to a narrow underground tunnel through which some of Prof Berger's team crawled in an expedition funded by the National Geographic Society.

Small women were chosen because the tunnel was so narrow. They crawled through darkness lit only by their head torches on a precarious 20 minute-long journey to find a chamber containing hundreds of bones.

Among them was Marina Elliott. She showed me the narrow entrance to the cave and then described how she felt when she first saw the chamber.

"The first time I went to the excavation site I likened it to the feeling that Howard Carter must have had when he opened Tutankhamen's tomb - that you are in a very confined space and then it opens up and all of a sudden all you can see are all these wonderful things - it was incredible," she said.

Ms Elliott and her colleagues believe that they have found a burial chamber. The Homo naledi people appear to have carried individuals deep into the cave system and deposited them in the chamber - possibly over generations.

If that is correct, it suggests naledi was capable of ritual behaviour and possibly symbolic thought - something that until now had only been associated with much later humans within the last 200,000 years.

Prof Berger said: "We are going to have to contemplate some very deep things about what it is to be human. Have we been wrong all along about this kind of behaviour that we thought was unique to modern humans?

"Did we inherit that behaviour from deep time and is it something that (the earliest humans) have always been able to do?"

Prof Berger believes that the discovery of a creature that has such a mix of modern and primitive features should make scientists rethink the definition of what it is to be human - so much so that he himself is reluctant to describe naledi as human.

Other researchers working in the field, such as Prof Stringer, believe that naledi should be described as a primitive human. But he agrees that current theories need to be re-evaluated and that we have only just scratched the surface of the rich and complex story of human evolution.

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Originally posted by Surtur
I suppose there are more embarrassing things we could of come from then monkeys. I mean the dung beetle is a thing. Just..why not bears though? Bears would of been better.

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Like all those working in the field, he is at pains to avoid the term "missing link". Prof Berger says naledi could be thought of as a "bridge" between more primitive bipedal primates and humans.

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Originally posted by Stoic
This brings up a question that has bothered me for a long time
concerning evolution. If we physically evolved from an apelike
creature, why hasn't the Gorilla, Alligator, Lion, and several
other animals changed significantly over time? Why does an
Alligator look the same way that it did millions of years ago?
Could it be, that those apelike people, or animals were simply
killed off by us, and were of a completely different species than
we are? I'd be very interested in seeing them map that skeleton
out using 3D mapping technology.

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Originally posted by Stoic
This brings up a question that has bothered me for a long time
concerning evolution. If we physically evolved from an apelike
creature, why hasn't the Gorilla, Alligator, Lion, and several
other animals changed significantly over time? Why does an
Alligator look the same way that it did millions of years ago?
Could it be, that those apelike people, or animals were simply
killed off by us, and were of a completely different species than
we are? I'd be very interested in seeing them map that skeleton
out using 3D mapping technology.

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Originally posted by riv6672
@Stoic

That question was addressed on Ancient Aliens...

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Stoic
This brings up a question that has bothered me for a long time
concerning evolution. If we physically evolved from an apelike
creature, why hasn't the Gorilla, Alligator, Lion, and several
other animals changed significantly over time? Why does an
Alligator look the same way that it did millions of years ago?
Could it be, that those apelike people, or animals were simply
killed off by us, and were of a completely different species than
we are? I'd be very interested in seeing them map that skeleton
out using 3D mapping technology.

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Originally posted by Flyattractor
Yes but is it that way because of.....ANCIENT ALIEN DESIGN!?

Why do they never discuss the important stuff!?

quote: (post)

Originally posted by riv6672
@Stoic

That question was addressed on Ancient Aliens...

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Originally posted by Robtard
We're distant cousins with the gorilla, meaning some time back the strain that produced us and the strain the produced them were in effect the same at some point, mind you, there was lots of branchings along the way to get to were we are today.

I'm pretty sure the lion of today wasn't around some 30-40k years ago. Could possibly be said that they've changed more in the last 30-40k years than we did.

edit: To the killed off, did watch a docu on Neanderthals once and it proposed that Neanderthals were both killed and intermingled (produced offspring) with modern humans at times. But ultimately it listed 'low birth rates' and 'poor adaption to ending ice age' as the reason why Neanderthals went extinct.

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Originally posted by Surtur
If they were killed off by us you'd think other stuff would of still reached levels similar to us. For instance we couldn't of wiped out the various creatures that lived in the ocean.

For me my question is..how is it that certain species were not wiped out by the supposed meteor that killed the dinosaurs?

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Originally posted by Q99
Honestly the alien ideas are way more boring than the truth.

Evolution is complex and interesting, 'aliens did it' is just kinda... eh.

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Originally posted by Q99
One, what makes you think they haven't? Lions are only 700,000 years old- older than us, but not massively so. Most big cats are believed to have come from something very similar to the clouded leopard two million years ago, with all the varieties having come since. We still have clouded leopards, but we also have the lions, which are quite different from them.

And two, because it's not a set-rate thing.

It's often the case you have a big population, which due to it's genepool size doesn't change much, then a population gets isolated, mutations get passed around faster, and that population changes- while the original group is still there. Sometimes the new population spreads the genes back into the group, sometimes they diverge entirely, and if they diverge, sometimes they shove out the original and sometimes they just exist separately.

Alligators don't change *much*- but do change, note how the caiman, alligator, and crocodile are all visually distinguishable- due to the fact that they're well adapted to their niche without much competition (the river-ambush-predator slot is hard to move into if there's something already there) and most changes are more likely to hurt than help.

Things like population isolation, outside pressures, and changes in habitats greatly increase rate of chance. Conversely, large stable intermixing populations, and pressures selecting against those who change, can slow it to a crawl.