A Hominins timeline to help put things in perspective:

  7-6 million years ago: Possible divergence of the lineage leading to humans from the lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos (our closest living relatives).
  Ardipithecus kadabba (~5.8-5.2 million years ago)
  Ardipithecus ramidus (~4.4 million years ago)
  Australopithecus anamensis (~4.2-3.9 million years ago)
  Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) (~3.9-2.9 million years ago)
  Kenyanthropus platyops (~3.5 million years ago)
  Australopithecus africanus (~3.3-2.1 million years ago)
  Paranthropus aethiopicus (~2.7-2.3 million years ago)
  Australopithecus garhi (~2.5 million years ago)
  Paranthropus robustus (~2-1.2 million years ago)
  Homo habilis (~2.1-1.5 million years ago)
  Homo rudolfensis (~1.9 million years ago)
  Homo ergaster/Homo erectus (~1.9 million years ago - ~143,000 years ago)
  Paranthropus boisei (~1.7-1.1 million years ago)
  Homo heidelbergensis (~700,000-300,000 years ago)
  Homo naledi (~335,000-236,000 years ago)
  Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals) (~400,000-40,000 years ago)
  Denisovans (around 300,000-50,000 years ago)
  Homo sapiens (modern humans) (~300,000 years ago to present)

Lee Berger's announcement video on the find - it's long-ish, but it's very very interesting if you're into this stuff.

https://youtu.be/fFbgQhY4Yxw

Something very evocative is the resemblance to Neanderthal cave engravings (@16:45 in the video) - that same theme of cross hatching, with multiple length verticals. As Lee points out, ascribing meaning to these things is going to be pretty much impossible, but it's very evocative. Could it be a family portrait? A warning? The 300k BC version of a Biohazard sigil? A Homo Sapiens band, hunting them into the depths of the earth? Who knows.

The news is that homo naledi did these things at the same time as humans despite a much smaller brain size, contradicting the social brain hypothesis somewhat. Their cranial capacity was 465-610 cubic cm compared to about 1,300 for humans [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_naledi

Edit: this was a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36345824 and dang moved it (??)

I wonder how society would behave if those homonids were still around today.

A lot of society norms are based on our intelligence levels being remarkably approximately equal across all of our species. What if there existed a bunch of beings on Earth that were somewhere in-between a human and a monkey in intelligence, cognitive, and language abilities?

Would they go to school and be a part of the economy and job market, but with some kind of "no hominid left behind" program? Or would they be pets and get free food and rent in return for being cute? Or would they have their own hamlets and kingdoms and fight with our high-tech cities and countries?

If we look at the origins of major groups of animals, the first dinosaurs or at earliest stages of bird evolution, we see often see multiple related groups evolving convergently due to similar pressures. My favorite example of this is that powered flight may have been acquired three or more times in closely related but distinct groups of theropod dinosaurs.

When we think of the other branches of the Human family tree, we often think of them as sort of diverging from our ancestors and then freezing unchanged. However, it would not at all be surprising if the pressures which so aggressively favored increased intelligence in our ancestors also applied to all our "cousins".

What is interesting is how thoroughly Homo sapiens sapiens displaced all other hominids.

It seemed in the past, intelligence was more of a gentle curve. Now, you have Homo sapiens sapiens with planes, rockets, global communications, rockets, satellites, and then every other species. The most sophisticated modern non-human primate doesn’t seem to rise to the level of intelligence and sophistication ago even early hominids.

Are we only calling Homo Sapiens human? Some how I got the idea that all of Homo was human.

Maybe that's how they got edges on their tools?

Can they just be doodles? Sometimes I just draw crosshatch lines and stuff especially when I was in college.

What kind of language did they have? The signs could be just signpost for a location "look for the rocks with the straight incisions"...but they would need some way to comunicate that to each others.

It seems likely to me that meaning-making, like consciousness, is on a sliding scale across all life. So trying to find the first homonids that "had it" seems futile.

Cool! No expert, but I love this kind of stuff. Some form of early territoriality? Those marks don't look distinguished enough to be symbolic.

Lots of cross-hatch patterns!

Could be some kind of map

The big secret:

“Homo sapiens” are hybrid combinations of different species that have long disappeared. “Non human hominids” are frequently groups that mixed with Homo sapiens. Large variances in human populations come from different hybrid compositions

In light of recent news, this is an extremely misleading choice of title, given that the orginal was "241,000 to 335,000 Years Old Rock Engravings Made by Homo naledi in the Rising Star Cave system, South Africa".

It's not news that non- homo sapien sapiens had things like art, music, an mortuary practices.

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