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Rising Star Cave, South Africa (CNN)When an amateur caver and university geologist arrived at Lee Berger's house one night in late 2013 with a fragment of a fossil jawbone in hand, they broke out the beers and called National Geographic. Berger, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, had unearthed some major finds before. But he knew he had something big on his hands. What he didn't know at the time is that it would shake up our understanding of the progress of human evolution and even pose new questions about our identity. Two years...

September 10, 2015 JOHANNESBURG—The discovery of a new species of human relative was announced today (Sept. 10) by the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), the National Geographic Society and the South African Department of Science and Technology/National Research Foundation (DST/NRF). Besides shedding light on the origins and diversity of our genus, the new species, Homo naledi, appears to have intentionally deposited bodies of its dead in a remote cave chamber, a behaviour previously thought limited to humans. The finds are described in two papers published in the scientific journal eLife and reported in the cover story of the October...