ARCHEOLOGY: Primitive Humanlike Species Lived More Recently Than Expected.

Homo naledi is primitive in some ways, with a small brain and other physical features reminiscent of our early ancestors. But it also walked upright, and had hands that may have been capable of making tools.

This perplexing combination of features raised questions about when the animal walked the Earth. But in new research published Tuesday in eLife, scientists have come to the conclusion that it lived between 335,000 and 236,000 years ago. That’s only about a tenth of the age some experts previously predicted.

It suggests that this humanlike creature may have lived alongside early humans, or Homo sapiens. “It’s a much more complex picture of human evolution that is rising,” lead author Paul Dirks of James Cook University and the University of Witwatersrand tells The Two-Way.

And:

Homo naledi’s age and other recent discoveries complicate previous ideas of how humans evolved. “Traditionally, not all that long ago, human evolution was pretty much viewed as a linear sort of progression towards larger-brained animals,” Dirks says.

But the finding that this creature is young enough to have lived alongside early humans means “the whole evolutionary process may have happened slightly differently than a simply linear process,” he says. “There may have been a number of different species evolving side by side.”

Findings like these have me wondering if early man didn’t kill off the the very same branches they evolved from and with.