In 2023, a team of researchers led by renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, a National Geographic Explorer in Residence, published a set of articles and produced a Netflix documentary that made some extraordinary claims. They said they’d found proof that an archaic human species known as Homo naledi, which Berger and his colleagues had only discovered a decade earlier, had deliberately buried their dead inside the Rising Star cave system in South Africa in approximately 250,000 BC. Furthermore, they said that markings found on the cave walls near the ancient hominin’s skeletal remains had been left by Homo naledi artists, and likely had some kind of symbolic meaning. These claims created an immediate controversy, since in addition to living between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago Homo naledi had apparently been quite small and had brains that were only one-third the size of modern humans. So naturally, researchers set out to test these new ideas about the surprisingly advanced intelligence of this archaic human species, which represent a huge departure from the current consensus. Read moreSection: NewsEvolution & Human OriginsRead Later