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The authors study the context of the skeletal remains of three individuals and associated sediment samples to conclude that the hominin species Homo naledi intentionally buried their dead.

Some authors have argued that mortuary behavior is unlikely for H. naledi, due to its small brain size . The evidence demonstrates that this complex cultural behavior was not a simple function of brain size.

While we cannot at this time exclude H. naledi as part of the ancestral makeup of humans, its overall morphology suggests that its common ancestors with today’s humans and Neandertals go back a million years or more .

This raises the possibility that burial or other mortuary behavior may have arisen much earlier than present evidence for them, or that such behaviors evolved convergently in minds different from our own.

Understanding such behaviors will require comparative study of all hominin lineages in which they occur.