Shaking the family tree

11 September 2015 - 02:53
By Shaun Smillie and Katharine Child

Long ago a group of our ancestors made their way into a dark cave carrying their dead. What took these creatures, with brains the size of apes', to the dark chamber 90m from the entrance of the cave might have been an understanding of the finality of death, or even a belief in an afterlife.This is the controversial theory scientists have put forward to explain why a hard-to-reach chamber deep in the Rising Star cave, in Gauteng's Cradle of Humankind, is filled exclusively with Homo naledi remai...

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