Researchers in South Africa recently found a fossilized skull from a young Homo Naledi that is 250,000 years old.
Letimela was the name they gave their child. “the lost one,”When she died, she was between four- and six years of age. This was in the Middle Pleistocene period, which began 335 000 years ago.
This discovery was made 30 miles from Johannesburg in a cave where Homo Naledi remains were also found.
Paleontologists now say that they are trying to find out the exact location of the skull, as it was located in a different cave than the place where its body might have been.
“This little skull is sitting there alone,”Professor Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand spoke. “There’s no mandible. There are no parts of her body.”
“That maybe leaves one of the greatest mysteries that this whole thing is going to say, and I don’t have answers to that. I can’t have answers to that of why a child’s skull has made its way into those deep, dark recesses because it has not been washed in there, as I’ve said, it didn’t crawl in there. The body would be there.”
Researchers are now pondering the possibility of a skull indicating how this species interacted with its dead. They may need to continue digging for the answer.
