...In 2013, a team of anthropologists led by Lee Berger unearthed the remains of more than 20 small-bodied hominins (ancient relatives of humans), all 335,000 to 236,000 years old, from the Rising Star Cave System in South Africa. Excavations at Rising Star have sparked debate about whether these little hominins had all ended up in the caves by tragic accident, or whether they’d been carefully placed there by other members of their enigmatic species, dubbed Homo naledi.

Now there’s a plot twist that may speak to how the remains got there: All of the hominins in Rising Star are female, at least according to the proteins in their dental enamel...

There’s an ongoing debate about Neanderthal art and abstract thought despite a growing pile of evidence. And that sort of debate rises in intensity when the early hominins in question have brains as relatively small as Homo naledi’s, which is about the size of a chimpanzee’s.

“There is a divide in the field between those that think that humans evolved from cultural species that were before us, and those that believe that culture originated with modern humans,” says Hawks, “so they resist any claims of culture earlier unless they have some sort of extraordinary evidence.”...

“This is our first contact with a—and I think it’s important to repeat this—a non-human species. Their brains are not human brains,” says Berger. And he’s deeply concerned about how humanity navigates that first contact.

...no other hominin species, meaning none of the Australopithecines and not even Homo erectus, have presented us with such clear evidence that they tended to their dead and etched art or symbols on the cave walls nearby. In other words, Homo naledi might have thought and felt in ways that we have to recognize as on a level with our own cognition...

...He hopes the protein study will prompt anthropologists and Homo sapiens in general to seriously think about the ethics of digging up the graves of an intelligent and cultured but non-human species.

“It certainly will mean we have to stop digging hominins like dinosaurs,”...