begin quote from:
It's
hard to stir up controversy when you've been dead for tens of thousands
of years, but 15 protohumans did just that in 2015, after their fossils
were found in …
An extinct human species, the Homo naledi, shared space with modern humans as well as other hominins between …
The remains of Homo naledi were first uncovered in 2016 John Hawks
It's
hard to stir up controversy when you've been dead for tens of thousands
of years, but 15 protohumans did just that in 2015, after their fossils
were found in Johannesburg. They were hard to place on the human
evolutionary ladder, with a jumble of relatively modern skeletal
features but a brain as small as a gorilla's. Many questions arose over
their estimated age--a matter that was at last resolved on May 9, when
it was revealed that they are roughly 236,00 years old.
That
matters a lot, because it means that the prehumans might have been
living right alongside early modern humans, or Homo sapiens. Taken
together with what we already know about Neanderthals and Homo sapiens'
coexisting, it essentially debunks the old idea that modern humans
evolved from a single line of prehumans. Instead, there were competing
human models on the road together, with only one equipped to win.
The
fossils that made the latest news belong to a protohuman species called
Homo naledi and were uncovered in a cave by paleoanthropologist Lee
Berger. He initially pegged their age at approximately 2 million years,
but that was just an educated guess; Berger's latest research used
isotopic dating--a far more accurate tool--to place his finds at the
less-than-a-quarter-million-year mark.
Nevertheless,
Berger believes Homo naledi may be part of a more ancient line, one
that could have emerged 2 million years ago but winked out--or was wiped
out--when modern humans arose. We are a competitive, resource-gobbling
species today, and the new research helps confirm that, for better or
for worse, we always have been. 
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