The discovery in South Africa of an inaccessible subterranean chamber filled with the broken bones of ancient human relatives — nobody yet knows quite how ancient — is exciting news indeed, and not only for specialists in paleoanthropology.  As I emphasize in my recent book “The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack, and Other Cautionary Tales From Human Evolution,” the way in which we view the process by which we became the very unusual creatures we human beings are deeply affects both our view of ourselves, and our ideas about what we can become.

No one yet knows where the newly discovered Homo naledi fits in the complicated story of hominids on Earth