An elder of Womankind?
According to the researchers, there is a good chance that Little Foot is… a girl ! Does her old age thus give us some clues as to the origins of the human lineage ? How does the discovery of a very old Australopithecine contribute to our knowledge of the origins of the human lineage ?
Australopithecus prometheus
Ron Clarke posing with the skull of Little Foot after its extraction from the Silberberg Grotto. A “Little Foot” that may well shed light on the history of Humankind.
© Laurent Bruxelles, Inrap
Little Foot lived long before the first humans, who appeared around 2.5 million years ago. He, or rather, she – because Little Foot is probably a girl – belongs to the large pre-human family of Australopithecines. Various anatomical arguments indicate that at least two Australopithecine species coexisted at around 3 million years ago in southern Africa, in particular at the site of Sterkfontein. While the presence of Australopithecus africanus (Mrs Ples) was clearly attested, the second species was much less so. However, while studying Little Foot, Ron Clarke that she belonged to this second species, called Australopithecus prometheus (thus named by Raymond Dart in 1948 based on the fossils from Makapansgat in South Africa). The fact that the Little Foot skeleton is nearly complete will enable a more informed response to a crucial question: which of these two Australopithecine species in the ancestor of the first Humans?
A specialist’s perspective
José Braga is an anthropobiologist at the Université Paul-Sabatier of Toulouse. He studies Kromdraai Cave in South Africa and participated in the three-dimensional modelling of the Little Foot fossil. In this video, he discusses the implications of this discovery and the dating of this Australopithecine for our understanding of the origins of the genus Homo.