| 912 | Alexander III becomes emperor of the Byzantine Empire. | |
| 1573 | Henry of Anjou becomes the first elected king of Poland. | |
| 1689 | French and English navies battle at Bantry Bay. | |
| 1690 | In the first major engagement of King William’s War, British troops from Massachusetts seize Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) from the French. | |
| 1745 | French forces defeat an Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian army at Fontenoy. | |
| 1792 | The Columbia River is discovered by Captain Robert Gray. | |
| 1812 | British Prime Minster Spencer Perceval is shot by a bankrupt banker in the lobby of the House of Commons. | |
| 1857 | Indian mutineers seize Delhi. | |
| 1858 | Minnesota is admitted as the 32nd U.S. state. | |
| 1860 | Giuseppe Garibaldi lands at Marsala, Sicily. | |
| 1862 | Confederates scuttle the CSS Virginia off Norfolk, Virginia. | |
| 1864 | Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart is mortally wounded at Yellow Tavern. | |
| 1960 | Israeli soldiers capture Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires. | |
| 1967 | The Siege of Khe Sanh ends with the base is still in American hands. |
If these dates hold, it could mean that while our own species was evolving from other, large-brained ancestors, a little-brained shadow lineage was lingering on from a much earlier period, perhaps two million years ago or more. The proposed age range for the fossils also overlaps with the early Middle Stone Age, fueling a provocative, though unproven, possibility: that the stone-tool record in South Africa from that time wasn’t just the handiwork of anatomically modern humans.Read about the latest research on Homo naledi at National Geographic News.
“How do you know that these sites that are called [examples of] the rise of modern human behavior aren’t being made by Homo naledi?” says Berger, who is also a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. “You can imagine how disruptive that could be.”
