In 2013, Lee Berger and his team uncovered hundreds of hominin bones in an almost inaccessible chamber of the Rising Star Cave system near Johannesburg. The "Dinaledi Chamber" could be reached only through a narrow squeeze; the team had to recruit small-framed excavators by international callout. The remains of at least 15 individuals defined a new species: Homo naledi.

The puzzle was immediate. Naledi's anatomy is a complex mosaic: hands and feet close to ours, smaller teeth, narrow pelvis — but a brain of only 465–610 cm³, in the Australopithecus range. More surprising was the dating, established in 2017: the fossils are 335,000 to 236,000 years old. These small-brained humans were contemporaries of the earliest Homo sapiens in Africa.

The most contested claim is how the bones got there. With no easy alternative, the Berger team proposed that Naledi deliberately placed its dead in the deep chamber — a simple burial behaviour. If true, it would mean symbolic-like behaviour was not the monopoly of large-brained humans. Other researchers argue for water transport, predator accumulation, or other processes; they hold that the evidence for intentional deposition is not yet decisive. The debate continues.