Top 10 Discoveries of 2015

Archaeology’s editors reveal the year’s most compelling finds.

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This year’s Top 10 Discoveries reach us from vastly different  cultures and across eons. Some raise new questions about what  it means to be human and what separates us from our species’  relatives. Others bring us face to face with individual people,  their travels, their faith, their hold on power. Several, covering  matters as diverse as slavery and the origins of art, come to us  via newly applied scientific methods. Taken together, this year’s discoveries present an array of insights into endeavors, large and  small, spanning millions of years.

A New Human Relative

 Johannesburg, South Africa

Scientists have long searched for the transitional species between apelike australopithecines, such as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis), and early humans, such as Homo habilis. And now, deep in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, they may have unearthed it.

When amateur cavers told Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, that they had located hominin remains in the nearby cave system, he knew he could not make it in to retrieve them himself. The passageway was extremely narrow, just seven inches wide at one point. So Berger put out a call on Facebook for diminutive, non-claustrophobic scientists and recruited a team of six women who fit the criteria. Marina Elliott, an archaeologist from Simon Fraser University in Canada, was the first to enter the chamber. “I was stunned,” she says. “I shone my headlight around and picked up flashes of bone all over the place.” Elliott and her colleagues retrieved more than 1,500 specimens, from at least fifteen different individuals. A larger team of scientists, led by Berger, determined that the remains belong to a previously unknown species, which they named Homo naledi after its resting place—