Convoluted human evolution: H. naledi ; recent (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, May 09, 2017, 15:25 (2756 days ago) @ David Turell

This branch has been dated, and the burial sites are not more than 300,000 years old, which means hey existed at the same time as when H. sapiens appeared:

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/homo-naledi-likely-existed-alongside-early-human...

"Johannesburg - A year and a half after fossils belonging to the Homo naledi species were discovered, scientists and researchers can now reveal that it is highly likely that the species lived alongside Homo sapiens (early humans).

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"Homo naledi was alive sometime between 335 000 and 236 000 years ago. This places this population of primitive small-brained hominis at a time and place that is likely alongside Homo sapiens.

“'This is the first time that it has been demonstrated that another species of homonin survived alongside the first humans in Africa,” Berger said.

"Although the Homo naledi fossils shared some primitive features with some of the earliest known members of the Homo genus who lived nearly 2 million years ago, the remains also shared some features with modern humans, he said.

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"The dates were determined through six independent methods by at least 19 scientists from laboratories and institutions across the world.

"This meant that Homo naledi may have survived for as long as two million years alongside other species of hominins in Africa, the period which paleoanthropologists like Berger describe as the ‘late Middle Pleistocene’.

"Researchers and scientists had previously thought that only Homo sapiens existed on the African continent during that period because the period was characterised by the rise of "modern human behaviour".

"That kind of behaviour was previously attributed to the rise of modern humans and was thought to represent the origins of complex modern human activities such as burial of the dead, self-adornment and complex tools.

“'We can no longer assume that we know which species made which tools, or even assume that it was modern humans that were the innovators of some of these critical technological and behavioural breakthroughs in the archaeological record of Africa."

Comment: What is significant to me is this finding parallels the Hobbit survival in Asia. Primitive hominin forms had the capacity of survival into modern times. Why did one set of branches modernize into Neanderthals and H. sapiens and the others in the bush of types remain more or less static? Was one type preferred by God?