Homo naledi may have used fire to cook and navigate 230,000 years ago

The person is Alison George.

Despite having a brain one third the size of ours, a primitive human species called Homo naledi used fires to cook and navigate in the dark underground caves.

There's a lot of evidence. Lee Berger is an associate professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. There is a huge lump of charcoal, thousands of burned bones, and giant hearths.

Modern humans and Neanderthals had been thought to be the sole domain of large-brained species, but this find could change that.

The Rising Star cave system in South Africa was the site of the first discovery of H. naledi. There was a lot of bones on the surface. They were declared to be a new species.

We now know that H. naledi was around 40 kilogrammes. It had a mix of primitive and modern features, with ape-like shoulders, a small brain, and a resemblance to something millions of years old.

It could have co-existed with Homo sapiens, which evolved in Africa 300,000 years ago, according to the dating of its fossils.

There were still questions about how H. naledi was able to navigate through the dark underground passages at Rising Star.

Only 47 people have been able to access the Dinaledi chamber in the past 10 years. In August this year, Berger lost 25 kilograms of weight in order to enter the labyrinth.

It isn't a place made for people like me. He says he is the largest person he has ever been in. He was aware that he could not squeeze out again. He said he almost died on the way out.

It paid off. There were blackened areas on the rock when Berger looked up. He says that the entire roof of the chamber is burned.

At the same time that Berger was observing the soot, his colleague Keneiloe Molopyane, also at the University of the Witwatersrand, found a small fire next to a large one. Berger found a stack of burnt rocks in the Lesedi chamber.

Many researchers thought it was impossible for a small-brained hominin to make fire in a cave system. Although we have evidence that ancient humans living in what is now Uganda could control fire as far back as 1.5 million years ago, this capacity is usually associated with larger-brained Homo erectus.

Body disposal in one space and cooking of animals in adjacent spaces seem to have been done by H. naledi. The ability to make and use fire finally shows us how Homo naledi ventured so deep into dangerous spaces, and explains how they may have moved their dead kin into such spaces. A complex naledi culture could become visible to us.

The decision to announce the fire discovery in a talk on 1 December before the formal scientific analysis is published has proved controversial.

Chris said that it was impossible to evaluate Lee Berger's claims properly without seeing the full evidence. This is not the way to conduct science or progress scientific debate about potentially very important discoveries.

The discovery that H. naledi may have been able to control fire may give insight into how they treated their dead.

He says that if Homo naledi were shown to have mastered fire and used it to gain access to the most remote areas of the Rising Star karst system, this could have very important implications for the interpretation of mortuary practices. In the case of mortuary practices, the participation of several members of the group in collaborative and shared actions is possible because of the control of an artificial light source.

The fire use discovery has implications that are even more revolutionary. If these small-brained humans with many primitive features were capable of the complex cognitive required to make and control fire, then we would see the emergence of a cultural pathway.

The revolution in archaeology and human evolution is covered in Our Human Story.