Abstract
Immature remains are critical for understanding maturational processes in hominin species as well as for interpreting changes in ontogenetic development in hominin evolution. The study of these subjects is hindered by the fact that associated juvenile remains are extremely rare in the hominin fossil record. Here we describe an assemblage of immature remains of Homo naledi recovered from the 2013–2014 excavation season. From this assemblage, we attribute 16 postcranial elements and a partial mandible with some dentition to a single juvenile Homo naledi individual. The find includes postcranial elements never before discovered as immature elements in the sub-equatorial early hominin fossil record, and contributes new data to the field of hominin ontogeny.
Highlights
Our knowledge of maturational processes and life history stages in human evolution is hindered by how extremely rare immature remains are in the hominin fossil record
The conditions inside the Dinaledi Chamber have yielded an unprecedented number of Homo naledi fossils
The number of immature remains in the Dinaledi assemblage offers the possibility to expand our knowledge of stages of maturational processes in H. naledi
Summary
Our knowledge of maturational processes and life history stages in human evolution is hindered by how extremely rare immature remains are in the hominin fossil record. Further complicating our understanding is that hominin fossil remains rarely combine teeth, cranial and associated postcranial bones, and only a handful of such partial skeletons represent immature individuals. Apart from recent modern humans and Neanderthals (e.g., [1]), only three hominin species are represented by immature partial skeletons at this time: Australopithecus afarensis [2, 3], Australopithecus sediba [4,5] and Homo erectus [6,7,8,9] Augmenting this limited dataset is of great significance in trying to understand the evolution of human growth and development.
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