Brain structure and function in Homo naledi

Endocasts are casts of the internal surface of skull bones created by the brain and surrounding tissues. These fossil phantoms provide the most direct evidence of the brains of extinct organisms, and are one of the many puzzle pieces that help paleoneurologists reconstruct brain evolution. The recent discovery of a small-brained, recently-extinct human species, Homo naledi, creates a timely opportunity to review what endocasts can and cannot tell us about ancient brains. We first review published evidence about the brain and behavior of H. naledi, including the suggestion that the species may have practiced mortuary behaviors over 230,000 years ago. We next use geometric morphometric methods to reconstruct and the most complete H. naledi endocast and compare it to those of modern humans and Pleistocene hominins. Our results corroborate previous evidence that the brain of H. naledi presents a unique combination of ancestral and modern human-like characteristics, specifically displaying a derived frontal lobe while retaining ancestral sizes, morphology, and cerebro-cerebellar proportions. Finally, we discuss these results in the context of recent paleoanthropological data, advances in neuroimaging, and theoretical frameworks linking brain morphology, structure, and function.