Fun little speculation

Just an idea for a discussion I had.

Homo Naledi was a different species of hominid than Homo Sapiens (humans) that lived roughly 300,000 years ago in Africa. There is some evidence to suggest that they may have had funerary practices (they may have buried their dead ritualistically). This suggests a capability for grief, and grief is experienced by those who loved. They used tools as well. This species could have been intelligent and very different from us. Now imagine they evolved over time differently from us and preferred to stay away from us as homo sapiens was bigger and more aggressive. In Passport to Magonia, Jacque Vallee describes a small, dark, and hairy species that interacts with humans here and there throughout history. That could fit the description of Homo Naledi. I was relistening to a podcast featuring Lue Elizondo recently and he said, “would we even recognize evidence of ‘them’ in the archeological record if we did see it?” That made me think, is there evidence that we’ve collected as humans throughout history but we just didn’t know that it was evidence? Just want to reassert that this is a little speculation