A little foot in a box
The discovery of Little Foot is the result of an incredible sequence of lucky events and astute observations, along with the tenacity of the paleoanthropologists of the Institute for Human Evolution of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
A box of fossils
The usual working environment of Professor Ronald J. Clarke at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
© Laurent Bruxelles
The Sterkfontein caves have served paleoanthropologists (specialists of pre-human fossils) very well ever since the discovery by Robert Broom, in 1947, of the complete skull of ‘Mrs Ples’, attributed to the Australopithecus africanus species. Thousands of animal and hominid fossil bones have since been found there, embedded in the stony matrix. Ronald Clarke, the discoverer of the famous trails of Australopithecine footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania, is a paleoanthropologist at the Institute for Human Evolution of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. On September 6, 1994, he decided to sort through a box of animal fossils collected in 1992 in one of the Sterkfontein caves by his mentor Philipp Tobias, and Alun Hughes. When he spread the fossils across a table, Ron Clarke recognized, to his great surprise, a hominid astragalus bone.
Foot bones
In the end, it was four bones from the left foot of a hominid, plus a fifth rather damaged bone, that Ron Clarke discovered that day. The unknown hominid was quickly nicknamed Little Foot, in reference to the legend of Big Foot that was very popular at the time… Things were left this way until 1997 when, on May 15, Ron Clarke opened a new box of fossils in the anatomy department of the University of Johannesburg and discovered some new hominid bones: four from a left foot and a fragment of a left tibia. He immediately concluded that they belonged to Little Foot, especially since he identified the fifth bone discovered in 1994 as a piece of a right tibia. If we had this many bones of the foot and the leg of a hominid, might the rest of the skeleton still be in the cave, waiting to be discovered ?
Mission (nearly) impossible
Ron Clarke sent his two assistants, Stephen Motsumi and Nkwane Molefe, back down into cave with a cast of the tibia, hoping they would find the rest of the fossil onto which it would fit. For nearly 36 hours, deep in the Silberberg Grotto, one of the branches of the vast network of galleries of Sterkfontein cave, the two technicians searched the floor and walls of the cave, which was filled with the debris of the miner’s dynamiting. Working in the dark with only flashlights, the task given to them by Ron Clarke seemed impossible… And then, 25 meters down, on a small dusty ledge, they spotted a piece of bone that miraculously fit perfectly onto the cast of the tibia. What an incredible stroke of luck !
A fossil set in concrete
A new adventure then began. Working deep underground with tiny dental tools, it took thirteen years to extract the fragile fossils from the gripping matrix of breccia (a sort of natural concrete). Needless to say, this task required patience, meticulous care and tenacity on the part of the technicians. The skeleton of Little Foot was finally brought to the surface in 2010. It is the most complete pre-human fossil ever discovered. It is now preserved in a protected room at the University of the Witwatersrand.